Wayne Crews, one of my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has some thoughts at Forbes about how best to regulate the new private spaceflight industry.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of my CEI colleagues, Iain Murray has a new book out, titled Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You
I see he continues to promote the myth that the OST prohibits space commerce on the Moon and elsewhere. At that point his creditability went to zero.
The OST, whether it truly applies or not, would scare away investors – who would invest if the profits were to possibly be confiscated by the UN? Better just to exercise Article 16 (withdraw from the treaty).
Ed,
And just how would the UN confiscate those profits? Under what legal authority?
The Russians sold their Moon Dust at Southerby’s to a commercial buyer about a decade ago. No one asked them for their profits. No one would have had ANY legal grounds to do so.
Unless you have the misfortune to be a citizen of a country like Australia, a nation that actually ratified the Moon Treaty, there are no limits or restrictions to making profits from lunar, NEO or other deep space ventures.
And if you have to explain that to every possible investor they’re already half scared off.
Well you could thank the Space Frontier Foundation and the space libertarians for that. They have this crazy model that space is the “Wild West” only with rockets instead of horses and so they think you need the same legal regime, including the equivalent of a “home stead” act. I know I just got some junk email yesterday about the space “legal crisis” and need for “multi-world” property rights. They seem bent on messing up a good thing by promoting their uninformed views of the space legal environment and in doing so scaring off space investors just as they have with their ‘NASA Conspiracy” theories – i.e. NASA secretly destroyed my new space firm.…
So called space libertarians don’t seem to realize how perfect the current legal environment is for business. NO nation is allowed to own any Celestial Body, so you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to mine them or develop them. There are no environment regulations to follow, no royalty payments. Nothing except the constraints that YOUR own government places on space activities. As I noted if you have the misfortune to be in a Moon Treaty nation like Australia you may have problems, but there are 200 other governments to choose from to use as the legal authority for your space activities. So just select the right one and you are free to do as you wish. You don’t want to pay income tax on your space activities? Then just select a nation without a corporate income tax for your firm.
BTW that is why Art Dula, the lawyer who arranged the Russian moon dust sale, is working to make the Isle of Man a flag of convenience for space. And I am able to think of many other nations that would be suitable flag states for space settlement and economic development.
Oh yea, and that claim jumper myth, that since there are no property rights anyone may jump “your claim” is also nonsense since the OST clearly prohibits interference with any on going activities on a Celestial Body. So if someone messes with you mining area or settlement you have the OST to hit them with. Not to mention the Liability Convention. So it’s the best of all possible worlds legally for space development. Unless the space libertarians mess it up with their crazy demand for property right rules.