(Exert from Space Resources Quarterly)
January 27, 2027
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' Outer Space Treaty, leaders around the world have ratified the most comprehensive, and possibly complicated, legal document for treating the common resources of humanity. With today's vote, there is now a line in the sand to the legality of the dozens of proposed space-based ventures to the moon and beyond. For our readers, the most significant near term change is how land and resource rights on the lunar surface will be handled. I sat down with Eryn Lambert to get her perspective on how the new Outer Space Treaty will be implemented.
"What would your summary of the new Outer Space Treaty be?"
"The really short answer would be that the new treaty lets businesses and governments know who they need to talk to do something on a celestial body. Anything from landing a probe, to setting up a research station, mine will now require some interaction with the UNOOSA (United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs)."
"When you say that someone needs to interact with the UNOOSA, would that be like an American pilot registering their flight plan with the FAA?"
"It's certainly a bit more complicated than that, and it really depends on what you're hoping to do, for example, if I'm a small research organization and I want to send a rover to Mars' moon Phobos not much has really changed from the old treaty, I still need to register my mission with my government who would share that information with the UN. What is different is that organizations can now register their mission directly with the UNOOSA. When you start talking about bases and resource extraction, that's where things have really changed."
"What are the changes to resource extraction rules?"
"Before the new treaty was signed there really weren't any real international laws or treaties on how resource rights were defined. I mean several nations did pass the Moon Treaty in the '80s, the fact that no one on the security council ratified the thing makes it pretty toothless. The new treaty creates very clear guidelines for the Moon and mapped near-Earth asteroids. For the Moon, the surface has been divided into billions of individual plots of land. Each plot of land will be associated with one or more countries if you want to extract resources from that plot you will need to make an agreement with representatives from those nations."
"Wow that does sound complicated"
"We've barely started. Lunar land plots are not actually considered a nation's territory, this would violate the original Outer Space Treaty, each plot will instead be a legal entity, referred to as a Tile with its own unique charter for how long the Tile will exist and who its shareholders are. At the end of the Tiles designated period, any funds paid into the Tile will be distributed to the shareholders. When a tile reaches its expiration date the Tile will be broken apart a new set of Tiles will be generated to cover the Lunar surface. Currently, there are 4 major classes of Tile, 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, and 1000 years. One thousand year Tiles will cover the near side of the Lunar Surface and a 1 km radius around any historic landing site predating the new Treaty. Tiles are intended to help ensure that every nation can directly earn revenue from extraction, to that end there are contract minimums for any and all Tiles. This was intended to avoid a race to the bottom..."
Welcome to the present
I hope you enjoyed this rather different post, while the article was on the headier end of the spectrum I think it is a helpful part of the equation for thinking about the future in terms beyond just what kind of hardware will people use, but what legal framework we will use.
The Outer Space Treaty and Moon treaty are both real and right now we don't have a global agreement on how the benefits of space exploration will actually help everyone. I mean, yes the UN OOSA does have a website on how using space will help to benefit humanity, but right now it's along the lines of using satellites to help us use terrestrial resources better (a great thing to do, just that's not the only thing we can do in space)
What this article advocates, and for the moment (Sept 2019) matches what I think should be done.
Basically, I think we should create a collection of trusts that are responsible for the Moon, asteroids, etc.. these trusts would charge companies that want to extract resources from these objects. The last two lines about a minimum cost for mining rights is based on a personal belief that if such rules are not codified some nations with corrupt leadership will simply accept a bribe and officially charge nothing for resource extraction, defeating the purpose of having a global charter on resource extraction.
The fees raised from the resource rights would then be used to fund programs in various nations here on Earth. Now there are several ways we can distribute the money and at that point, I'm not even remotely qualified to give a firm answer on how the money gets distributed.
Here are some possibilities that I could see being used to distribute money raised from Tile leases
1) Giving the money equally to all citizens of the nations that have shares in a leased Tile
2) Mandating that all funds from Tile leases be invested into sovereign wealth funds, where the money is only distributed after several years of growth
3) Designating Tile funds for development projects
4) Replacing taxes
Etc...
There is also the question of how many Tiles a country gets. Personally, I think the number of tiles given to a country would ideally be some calculation based on what percentage of the global population your country has, how economically developed your economy is, possibly environmental considerations and other things.
Ex. The US is pretty wealthy as such our 4ish% of the world's population, would grant us less than 4% of the lunar tile rights. The current environmental policies of the US Federal government would further decrease the number of tiles that we would be eligible for.
For a country like India where per capita income is far lower, the number of tiles would likely be greater relative to their population.
I acknowledge that this idea is complicated and what the world agrees to is unlikely to match what is outlined here. I do hope that whatever legislation for space-based resource extraction does develop does strive to ensure that all of humanity benefits from our solar system's resources.
possible thoughts on asteroid rights
For near-Earth asteroids, there are dozens of classifications and sub-categories, but broad strokes, every mapped asteroid is now under the jurisdiction of at least 2 countries. If you want to mine that asteroid you need to meet with representatives of the nations that own that asteroid. Right now there are two options, you can negotiate with the nations who claim the asteroid or you can choose to pay the minimum extraction rate, where you pay into a shared account held by
so long as the asteroid is smaller than a cubic kilometer
January 27, 2027
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' Outer Space Treaty, leaders around the world have ratified the most comprehensive, and possibly complicated, legal document for treating the common resources of humanity. With today's vote, there is now a line in the sand to the legality of the dozens of proposed space-based ventures to the moon and beyond. For our readers, the most significant near term change is how land and resource rights on the lunar surface will be handled. I sat down with Eryn Lambert to get her perspective on how the new Outer Space Treaty will be implemented.
"What would your summary of the new Outer Space Treaty be?"
"The really short answer would be that the new treaty lets businesses and governments know who they need to talk to do something on a celestial body. Anything from landing a probe, to setting up a research station, mine will now require some interaction with the UNOOSA (United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs)."
"When you say that someone needs to interact with the UNOOSA, would that be like an American pilot registering their flight plan with the FAA?"
"It's certainly a bit more complicated than that, and it really depends on what you're hoping to do, for example, if I'm a small research organization and I want to send a rover to Mars' moon Phobos not much has really changed from the old treaty, I still need to register my mission with my government who would share that information with the UN. What is different is that organizations can now register their mission directly with the UNOOSA. When you start talking about bases and resource extraction, that's where things have really changed."
"What are the changes to resource extraction rules?"
"Before the new treaty was signed there really weren't any real international laws or treaties on how resource rights were defined. I mean several nations did pass the Moon Treaty in the '80s, the fact that no one on the security council ratified the thing makes it pretty toothless. The new treaty creates very clear guidelines for the Moon and mapped near-Earth asteroids. For the Moon, the surface has been divided into billions of individual plots of land. Each plot of land will be associated with one or more countries if you want to extract resources from that plot you will need to make an agreement with representatives from those nations."
"Wow that does sound complicated"
"We've barely started. Lunar land plots are not actually considered a nation's territory, this would violate the original Outer Space Treaty, each plot will instead be a legal entity, referred to as a Tile with its own unique charter for how long the Tile will exist and who its shareholders are. At the end of the Tiles designated period, any funds paid into the Tile will be distributed to the shareholders. When a tile reaches its expiration date the Tile will be broken apart a new set of Tiles will be generated to cover the Lunar surface. Currently, there are 4 major classes of Tile, 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, and 1000 years. One thousand year Tiles will cover the near side of the Lunar Surface and a 1 km radius around any historic landing site predating the new Treaty. Tiles are intended to help ensure that every nation can directly earn revenue from extraction, to that end there are contract minimums for any and all Tiles. This was intended to avoid a race to the bottom..."
Welcome to the present
I hope you enjoyed this rather different post, while the article was on the headier end of the spectrum I think it is a helpful part of the equation for thinking about the future in terms beyond just what kind of hardware will people use, but what legal framework we will use.
The Outer Space Treaty and Moon treaty are both real and right now we don't have a global agreement on how the benefits of space exploration will actually help everyone. I mean, yes the UN OOSA does have a website on how using space will help to benefit humanity, but right now it's along the lines of using satellites to help us use terrestrial resources better (a great thing to do, just that's not the only thing we can do in space)
What this article advocates, and for the moment (Sept 2019) matches what I think should be done.
Basically, I think we should create a collection of trusts that are responsible for the Moon, asteroids, etc.. these trusts would charge companies that want to extract resources from these objects. The last two lines about a minimum cost for mining rights is based on a personal belief that if such rules are not codified some nations with corrupt leadership will simply accept a bribe and officially charge nothing for resource extraction, defeating the purpose of having a global charter on resource extraction.
The fees raised from the resource rights would then be used to fund programs in various nations here on Earth. Now there are several ways we can distribute the money and at that point, I'm not even remotely qualified to give a firm answer on how the money gets distributed.
Here are some possibilities that I could see being used to distribute money raised from Tile leases
1) Giving the money equally to all citizens of the nations that have shares in a leased Tile
2) Mandating that all funds from Tile leases be invested into sovereign wealth funds, where the money is only distributed after several years of growth
3) Designating Tile funds for development projects
4) Replacing taxes
Etc...
There is also the question of how many Tiles a country gets. Personally, I think the number of tiles given to a country would ideally be some calculation based on what percentage of the global population your country has, how economically developed your economy is, possibly environmental considerations and other things.
Ex. The US is pretty wealthy as such our 4ish% of the world's population, would grant us less than 4% of the lunar tile rights. The current environmental policies of the US Federal government would further decrease the number of tiles that we would be eligible for.
For a country like India where per capita income is far lower, the number of tiles would likely be greater relative to their population.
I acknowledge that this idea is complicated and what the world agrees to is unlikely to match what is outlined here. I do hope that whatever legislation for space-based resource extraction does develop does strive to ensure that all of humanity benefits from our solar system's resources.
possible thoughts on asteroid rights
For near-Earth asteroids, there are dozens of classifications and sub-categories, but broad strokes, every mapped asteroid is now under the jurisdiction of at least 2 countries. If you want to mine that asteroid you need to meet with representatives of the nations that own that asteroid. Right now there are two options, you can negotiate with the nations who claim the asteroid or you can choose to pay the minimum extraction rate, where you pay into a shared account held by
so long as the asteroid is smaller than a cubic kilometer
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