Nearly 40 years after the U.S. flag was planted on the moon, a global rush to the final frontier has some pondering
property rights out there.
India, Japan
and China
are now circling the moon with their respective spacecraft – to be joined next
year by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Then there's the Google
Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded
team to send a robot to the moon, travel some 1,640 feet (500 meters) and
transmit video, images and data back to Earth.
The legal profession sees a brief in
the making.
Extraterrestrial real estate
Laws tend to build on precedent.
Since there's little precedent for lunar
laws, some look to the sea for suggestions. That is, the use of ocean floor
minerals beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. Such valuable resources
are designated by some as a Common Heritage of mankind, not subject to national
appropriation.
Could the Common Heritage concept
work as the basis for a Moon Treaty?
Virgiliu Pop is a research
specialist at the Romanian Space Agency. He has for years been keeping a legal
eye on the area of space property rights, and his new book, "Who Owns the
Moon? - Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resources Ownership" (Springer,
2008) was published this month.
Pop has been delving into what has
shaped the law of extraterrestrial real estate, and the norms which express
this law. And in his view, the norms and rules regarding property rights in the
celestial realm are rather limited, even failing to define basic concepts such
as what is a celestial body.
Pop favors property rights over
group hugs.
"Despite the noble ideals of
equity and care for the have-nots, the Common Heritage paradigm of the Moon
Treaty has more faults than merits," Pop told SPACE.com.
"A refutation of the Common
Heritage principle does not mean, however, that the developing world will, or
should, be left behind in the space era," he said. "China, India and Brazil are living proofs that a developing country can, through its own effort,
join the spacefaring club. Instead of freeloading on the efforts of the older spacefarers,
the have-nots should pool their meager financial resources into a common space
agency or into regional ones, and proceed at exploiting the riches of outer
space for themselves."
Frontier paradigm
The Frontier Paradigm, on the other
hand, has proven its worth on our planet, Pop adds, and it most likely will do
so in the extraterrestrial realms.
"Homesteading is likely to
transform the lunar desert in the same manner as it transformed the 19th
Century United States," he said. "Space is indeed a new frontier
calling for individualism rather than collectivism, and its challenges need to
be addressed with a legal regime favorable to property rights."
Much remains to be discussed and
perhaps decided upon by various nations, of course, as space law evolves over
time.
"Property rights are a useful
engine and, in all likelihood, a precondition for pushing forward the
development of the extraterrestrial realms," he said. "Securing property
rights would be more beneficial to humankind, compared to the alternative of
keeping the extraterrestrial realms undeveloped."
Sphere of the concrete
Pop feels that the new trends in the
privatization of space endeavors and the planned return of humans to the moon will
shift the subject of property rights in outer space "from the field of
Byzantine discussions into the sphere of the concrete."
Beyond the moon, Pop also ponders in
his book whether asteroids and comets are immovable land-like territorial
extensions that cannot be legally appropriated. Or, are they "floating
movable goods," capable of being captured and reduced into private
ownership?
Pop offers up a suggested rallying
cry for spacefarers: "Countries of the world unite – you have nothing to
lose but the chains of gravity...the skies are open."
Leonard David has been reporting on
the space industry for more than four decades. He is past editor-in-chief of
the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written
for SPACE.com since 1999.
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