The landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars is still fresh in people’s memories, privately owned companies are taking people and supplies into orbit, and NASA continues to work on the “most powerful rocket” ever built. But as the world’s governments and private businesses look to the sky for opportunities, the SXSW panel entitled “Who on Earth Should Rule Space” makes it clear that laws working with space are not evolving as fast as the technology we get there.
“People like to think of space as the Wild Wild West – there’s nothing out there, there are open borders, we can do whatever we want,” said Michelle Henlon, president of For All Moonkind, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving mankind’s cultural heritage. Space. “Unfortunately or fortunately, that’s not true at all.”
Hanlon was referring to the Outer Space Treaty, which was developed in 1966 and ratified by more than 60 countries in early 1967. Given this treaty two years before mankind landed on the moon, it is surprising that the document is heavy on broad principles, but sheds light on specifications. In his biggest hits: outer space will be free to explore and used by all states, states should avoid harmful pollution of space, celestial bodies will be used only for peaceful purposes, and most importantly, the claim that outer space is not a matter of sovereignty by bound governments To claim.
The treaty took a long time to establish a set of values of height as we see how we reach and use outer space, but things have changed dramatically in the last dra 54 years. “We’re seeing this moment in human history where we’re thinking ‘Oh, we want to do a lot in space, but we can’t own anything.’ “So we really need to think about how we would envision property in space, mining rights in space.”
The idea of mining asteroids and other celestial bodies for their resources peaked in the mid-2010s when companies such as Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources regularly made headlines. (As of 2001, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Alphabet / Google, has managed to raise 75 million in funding for empty mining efforts.) Enthusiasm has waned these days. The interim president of A&M University, Dr. John Junkins told the panel that mineral “and material processing in space would one day” and that a legal framework was needed to allow those activities.
“The moon is a tremendous tool, and it will be mined before it becomes an asteroid,” he added.
It is one thing to determine the rights and structure of the property, and it will be some time before it is completely dismantled. The implementation of these rights – and the rights defined by the Outer Space Treaty – is a separate question, and has not been fully addressed, despite the fact that it should be guaranteed.
Junkins recalled a day in 2007 when China destroyed one of its meteorological satellites with a missile, leaving behind a dangerous cloud of hard-to-track orbiting debris. A deliberate act like this seems to boast the OST’s stance on the “contamination” of outer space, but China has never faced serious repercussions for what Junkins called a “monumental environmental space crime.”
Strictly speaking, China is not alone though: the United States and Russia have left their share of the debris in Earth orbit, Dr. Junkins suggested, adding that about 0 percent of the space junk by mass belongs to the current Soviet Union. That leads to a difficult question mark of accountability, which is the VP of regulatory and governmental affairs of the relevant space. Karen Shenwork did not think it would be remedied unless some catalytic moment would push the issue.
“By launching something into space, you can’t leave ownership of it,” he said. “And when you leave it behind in space, when you leave it, you don’t leave it. So that’s an interesting point … you can maintain that aspect of responsibility, which, by the way, is not strict responsibility in space; It is the only strict responsibility on earth. So in space you have to prove who is to blame and then fight between you. And good luck really proves who is to blame in space! We’ll do it well, I think if we have to, but we really need encouragement for this. “
Attempts have been made to more fully codify the set of rules for approaching space, including Artemis Accords signed by the United States, Australia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, Ukraine, United Kingdom. And the United Arab Emirates, in 2020. Ten countries is a start, but many important space-regions, including China, India and Russia, have become part of the U.S. Did not purchase a stake in the agreement designed by. It is difficult to say exactly what it is that the international community has agreed to for a set of guidelines for the use of outer space. But one thing is clear: with technology to get us and to keep us in a more progressive space day by day, these are issues that we cannot afford to pontiff.
