Space Law

[Deepwater6]

http://www.space.com/22605-nasa-asteroid-capture-mission-legal-issues.html

 

Leave it to the sharks to make things complicated. There are some areas on Earth where we have the ability to extract resources, but cannot by law. When we have the technology and attempt it in space it will be interesting to see how the world reacts.

 

I suppose the Apollo crews were guilty trespassing and jay-walking too.

[CraigD]

I don’t see any plausible legal barriers to NASA’s in-planning ARU mission, a scientific exploration mission, or any similar mining enterprises that may be undertaken in the future.

 

The Space.com article linked above, and all the well-reasoned discussions on the subject I can recall, consider primarily the impact of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty on space missions. The OST, though, is primarily an agreement between the national governments that have agreed to it (primarily the US, former USSR, and UK) to 3 things:

• No nuclear weapons or similarly destructive WMDs in space
  
• No nation can claim sovereignty over any territory beyond earth
  
• Government must authorize and supervise private spaceflight, and be ultimately responsible for damages they cause (eg: from big pieces falling to Earth).
  

There’s nothing in the OST that explicitly, or I think reasonable by implication, prohibits studying or mining asteroids or larger ET bodies.

 

The main way that the OST might result in a government prohibiting such an activity is if it poses a significant risk of damage to people or property. With asteroid capture missions like the ARU, or more so similar missions involving parking larger asteroid near Earth, this risk would primarily be from colliding pieces, or, worse case, the main body of the object, with the Earth.

 

I suppose the Apollo crews were guilty trespassing and jay-walking too.

Nah ... Keeping Apollo on good diplomatic terms with the USSR was a large part of why the OST was created, and that nobody owned the owned, and no nation exerted legal hegemony over the Moon, one of its key guarantees.