Private Companies Will Be Mining Asteroids

However, the Space Act is highly critiqued all over the world since it infringes several worldwide treaties.

The new USA space law fills a legal vacuum for private property ownership, at least to the satisfaction of US observers.

A new law in the US allows space firms to sell resources mined in space, but it might be breaking an worldwide treaty from the ’60s.

Some asteroids are believed to contain as much as $20 trillion in minerals, so the land rush (space rush?) will happen at some point.

SpaceX or Virgin Galactic are crucial actors on the USA space exploration scene.

While the law will make it legal for companies to own what they mine, it stops short of legalizing the ownership of entire planets or asteroids.

Other attorneys disagree, by stating that asteroids don’t qualify as “celestial bodies”, and that mining the resources does not mean they’re staking claim or ownership.

The Space Act of 2015’s been kicking around since May when the House of Representatives first introduced it, and it passed the Senate with a single amendment.

IAA, an independent nongovernmental organization recognized by the United Nations, fosters the development of astronautics for peaceful purposes, recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves in areas related to astronautics and provides a program through which the membership can contribute to global endeavors and cooperation in the advancement of aerospace activities. According to this body, the right to extract and use resources from celestial bodies “is affirmed by State practice and by the US State Department in Congressional testimony and written correspondence”. And here, the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act may contravene worldwide space law. We can assume that the list of states that have access to outer space – now a dozen or so – will grow.

“That means that the pristine conditions of the cradle of nature from which our own Earth was born may become irrevocably altered forever – making it harder to trace how we came into being”, he declared. Similarly, if we started contaminating celestial bodies with microbes from Earth, it could ruin our chances of ever finding alien life there. Mining water from asteroids, the Moon or Mars, for example, will help ensure that human exploration will expand beyond low Earth orbit. Free market principles also apply to the operations of the International Space Station.

Planetary Resources” investors have raised concerns in the past about potential conflict between the company’s aim and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which among other things include that “states shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies’.

Meanwhile, the Moon Agreement (1979) has in effect forbidden states to conduct commercial mining on planets and asteroids until there is an global regime for such exploitation. Planetary Resources is another such example of a space startup focused on space resource mining.