How …. interesting … to see that arguments for the legality of exploiting space resources have not advanced one nano-inch since the 1960’s.
Of course, the major difficullty is that mining the moon is not imminent; the lawyers will have fun kicking arguments back and forth until someone actually starts scooping up lunar soil — and when that happens, the law will suddenly have to deal with established facts (the scooping might be done by Indian astronauts working for an Indian space agency, for example, rather than Americans working for a Boeing subsidiary, and the political impacts on populations around he world would play out quite differently).
OTOH, I see lots of grounds for hanging the space lawyers and the politicians behind them, for engaging in sheer lawyerly winner-take-all thinking. We COULD have made an international agreement years and years ago, offering let’s say, that any entity engaged in exploiting lunar resources would pay 33 % of any profit earned to some international agency which would disburse those profits to third world nations (defined by dollars-per-capita or some other convenient statistic) on some agreed equitable basis.
We could have done this, we could have made a fair offer which would satisfy the people of poorer nations while still offering the prospect of whacking profits to first world corporations which engaged in the risky business of in-space industrialization. And we haven’t done so because …. making such deals isn’t what money-making corporations want to do, making such deals isn’t what countries who have such money-making corporations want to do, and making such deals isn’t what lawyers who work in such countries can possibly conceive of.
Needless to say, IANAL.
If the Moon will be worth $1T in 100 years with some assumptions that require some good things to happen with launch costs, tourism and exploration, venture capital discounts that at 26%/yr (10x in 10 years). It’s worth $100 today. No, property rights can wait until development is near term. An info market about how soon that is might be worth more.
He3 is funny. Uranium is really cheap.
Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress had a good point, how much of the moon is there to mine? With a robust mining effort there may be a short timespan of mining maybe 50 years. The value of the moon maybe as a stepping stone to the solar system to avoid the gravity well that is the Earth and any other planet. Mining rights should be geared towards that end.
How …. interesting … to see that arguments for the legality of exploiting space resources have not advanced one nano-inch since the 1960’s.
Of course, the major difficullty is that mining the moon is not imminent; the lawyers will have fun kicking arguments back and forth until someone actually starts scooping up lunar soil — and when that happens, the law will suddenly have to deal with established facts (the scooping might be done by Indian astronauts working for an Indian space agency, for example, rather than Americans working for a Boeing subsidiary, and the political impacts on populations around he world would play out quite differently).
OTOH, I see lots of grounds for hanging the space lawyers and the politicians behind them, for engaging in sheer lawyerly winner-take-all thinking. We COULD have made an international agreement years and years ago, offering let’s say, that any entity engaged in exploiting lunar resources would pay 33 % of any profit earned to some international agency which would disburse those profits to third world nations (defined by dollars-per-capita or some other convenient statistic) on some agreed equitable basis.
We could have done this, we could have made a fair offer which would satisfy the people of poorer nations while still offering the prospect of whacking profits to first world corporations which engaged in the risky business of in-space industrialization. And we haven’t done so because …. making such deals isn’t what money-making corporations want to do, making such deals isn’t what countries who have such money-making corporations want to do, and making such deals isn’t what lawyers who work in such countries can possibly conceive of.
Needless to say, IANAL.
If the Moon will be worth $1T in 100 years with some assumptions that require some good things to happen with launch costs, tourism and exploration, venture capital discounts that at 26%/yr (10x in 10 years). It’s worth $100 today. No, property rights can wait until development is near term. An info market about how soon that is might be worth more.
He3 is funny. Uranium is really cheap.
Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress had a good point, how much of the moon is there to mine? With a robust mining effort there may be a short timespan of mining maybe 50 years. The value of the moon maybe as a stepping stone to the solar system to avoid the gravity well that is the Earth and any other planet. Mining rights should be geared towards that end.