An article on the legal state of asteroid mining. This isn’t true, though: “Much like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the United States has not signed the Moon Agreement but by custom it adheres to the treaty — at least until Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which explicitly rejects the idea that such agreements are binding to the USA.”
Meanwhile, Michael Listner writes that we must return to the moon to preserve the rule of law in space. Well, that’s certainly a reason, but not the only (or even best) one.
I did a Twitter thread.
Marina Koren watched the movie (she was probably a little kid in Russia when it first came out) for the first time.
I keep hearing the phrase “the new normal.” I think I’ll write about why we haven’t had a normal for a couple centuries. With technological change, we’ve always had societal change.
NASA’s love is gone.
They’d gotten too cocky; it lasted far too long.
Clark Lindsey has his weekly roundup.
The White House just released an executive order that in effect repudiates the Moon Agreement. I’ve been urging them to do this for months. This could be a prelude to start to pressure Canberra to withdraw from it.
It also encourages the development of multilateral agreements, which I’ve also been promoting.
[Update a while later]
Glenn Reynolds has the full press release.
One of the significant things about this, that many won’t realize, is that it effectively bypasses COPUOS.
[Update Tuesday morning]
Here‘s Jeff Foust’s story.
[Update Wednesday morning]
Here’s the story from Mike Wall. I don’t think this is right, though:
The new executive order makes things even more official, stressing that the United States does not view space as a “global commons” and sees a clear path to off-Earth mining, without the need for further international treaty-level agreements.
It specifically says that it is seeking bilateral and/or multilateral agreements. What it doesn’t think is necessary is doing this through the UN, or COPUOS.
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
TASS: “Privatizing” space is “unacceptable.”
Putin’s trying to eat his cake and have it, too. He wants us to abide by the Moon Agreement without Russia actually acceding to it. This sort of nonsense is one of the reasons I’d been pushing for what the White House did.
[Update a while later]
Here’s some nonsense from the Grauniad.
[Saturday-morning update]
A piece from Popular Mechanics. This isn’t quite right, though: “…the ESA plan describes an interest in regolith, which is lunar soil rich in specific elements.”
Regolith per se is not soil; soil implies a biome, or at least fertilizer. also, it does not need to be rich in any particular element or elements to be regolith. Regolith is simply dust or rocks on a planetary surface. The entire lunar surface is covered with it, and nothing else, other than our few artifacts in a few locations.
[Bumped]
Clark Lindsey has the latest roundup, including the most recent Chinese launch failure, the second within a month.
It was using Clinton-era flight computers. This is a common problem in aerospace. New avionics can’t necessarily be trusted for mission-critical tasks. The Shuttle computers were basically IBM-360s, all the way into the 90s.