The Christian Science Monitor has an article up on space law (pointer from Michael Wallis). Most of it is the usual stuff that many readers will be familiar with, and they miss the most important contemporary development in law and space, namely HR3752, which will make major changes in how spaceflight is regulated in the USA.

There’s the usual fluff like this:

“Outer space is a province of all mankind,” says Sylvia Ospina, a member of the board of directors at the International Institute of Space Law. “There is not, and should not be, any privatization of outer space. It is a common thing that should belong to all.”

Which is unfortunately a view that has significant traction even within spacefaring nations. I’m quite sympathetic to concerns that a land grab by spacefaring nations would leave huge chunks of the solar system in the hands of a few countries, effectively excluding most of mankind from the opportunities available offworld. The solution is simply to require actual working of resources in order to stake a claim, not to declare everything to be owned by the UN. In effect whichever body makes the laws regarding extraterrestrial resources is laying claim to the bodies in question, but there’s a substantial difference between a claim which only becomes active when a body is being worked and a claim which effectively forbids working a body without explicit permission.

It’s important for the long term future that we work out a method of assigning ownership and jurisdiction for extraterrestrial bodies that is widely accepted as fair. The alternative is to plant the seeds of future conflicts like the range wars which marred Americas westward expansion.

A lot of space geeks look forward to a future in which the high frontier contains libertarian utopias and so forth. Chances are good that some of the earliest settlers offworld will be going with the explicit intention of founding new societies with new ways of living together. This requires ownership of the resources on which the new colonies are founded. The flipside of this is that it is virtually certain that some of the new societies will have much more in common with Jim Jones’ People’s Temple than they will with Heinlein’s visions of the high frontier. You and I may be comfortable with that, but the folks back home are unlikely to be willing to sit back and do nothing as images are beamed back from the lunar farside of human rights violations on a grand scale. If there isn’t already a regulatory framework in place which has international credibility before that happens, there will be one after, and it will not be favorable to the free frontier mentality.

No law at all on the high frontier is not a realistic option. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can work to make sure that what law there is stems from rational understanding of economics and human nature. The two main things to watch out for are statist overreaching (with homilies about “the common heritage of all mankind”) and corporate entrenchment in the regulations so that only megacorporations can plausibly be players. This second possibility is much more worrisome to me than the first, since I think most people are blind to the ways in which large corporations game the regulations to exclude competitors and create comfortable oligopolies for themselves. One example of how this could be done is simply by requiring a single large up-front lump sum payment to get into the game. The Dinocorps can afford to pay, but the little guy cannot. This sort of thing is relatively straightforward to arrange under the guise of either environmental protection or worker safety.

As many speculated, the Da Vinci team announced today that they are in the race, with a first attempt on October 2nd. They claim to have gotten funding from a sponsorship by an on-line gambling site. I’ll bet that this sponsorship wouldn’t have been forthcoming absent Burt’s successful flight in June. More evidence of the diminishing giggle factor.

If they can really pull it off, it will make for much more excitement. There’s plenty of overlap on the dates, so if Burt gets his first flight off without a hitch, it may come down to turnaround time.

[Thanks to Andrew Gray for the tip, over at sci.space.policy]

[Update at 2:15 PM PDT]

Clark Lindsey has a lot more links, and points out that Burt is hinting that he’ll be a passenger on one of the flights.

Here’s the press release from the casino.

Over on Nature online there’s an article on inducing hibernation in humans, with applications to space travel. Long story short, it’s at least a decade away, and there are lots of unknowns. The first thing that springs to mind for me when I think about this is that before hibernation is applied to something like a Mars mission they’ll have to send some poor sap up to ISS and leave him passed out cold up there for 9 months, just to be sure there’s no unforeseen problems due to hibernation in microgravity. In practice the experimental subject would probably have to spend at least a couple of weeks up there prior to hibernating and also a month or so after coming out, so it wouldn’t be as bad as just flying up, going to sleep and then coming straight back. Still, being a mission specialist whose task is a nine month nap is a little shy of the image of the Right Stuff.

Burt Rutan says that NASA will be eating his dust.

“Thirty years ago, if you had asked NASA — and people did in those days — ‘How long would it be before I could buy tickets to space?’ the answer was, ‘About 30 years,’ ” Rutan told reporters in June.

“If you ask today, you’ll get about the same answer, ’30 years.’ I think that’s unfortunate. There’s been no progress at all made toward affordable space travel.”