Asteroid Futures: The United States of America, Space Mining, and Sovereignty in Space 2.0

Introduction

Space 2.0 refers to the emerging era of twenty-first century space exploration in which not only national governments but commercial entities, such as Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos, founder) and SpaceX (Elon Musk, founder) hope to establish a viable space economy that encompasses activities ranging from space tourism to rocket launches and even astro-burials, asteroid mining, and the colonization of Mars. Other major players seeking to monetize outer space include China, which plans to launch a space-mining robot into space via Origin Space, a Beijing-based private company, and India, which in 2019 established a private institution, Newspace India Limited (NIL), to institutionalize the country’s focus on the commercial space sector. Space 2.0 is, essentially, a rebooted space race that retains the geopolitical features of the initial Cold War era contest—particularly in the national security concerns and positioning of major players such as the United States, Russia, India, and China—but which has expanded to include private companies, new niche players such as Luxembourg and New Zealand, public-private partnerships, and venture capitalists. Yet as space technology and the celestial futures it underwrites advance rapidly into orbit, one issue, national sovereignty, and its relationship to property rights in outer space, remains vexingly Earth-bound and intractable.

This chapter evaluates the issue of sovereignty in space as it pertains to both the emerging industry of asteroid mining and the pivotal role of the United States in shaping the new rules of the road for an extra-terrestrial economy. Multiple sources suggest that the ability to mine the asteroid belt will be a necessary component of both geopolitical advantage and economic competitiveness in this century. The investment firm Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2040 the global space economy could be worth one trillion USD (Morgan Stanley 2020). The nascent asteroid mining industry, worth an estimated $720 million USD in 2017, could reach $3.8 billion USD by 2025 (Allied Market Research 2019). The scope and scale of the profits to be made in space portends a new gold rush in which the risk of loss will be very high but significant rewards are likely to accrue to the first movers, the innovative, and the lucky.

Here on Earth, the fundamental legal and ethical problem is how to reconcile rapid expansion of the extra-terrestrial economy with the established international norms of the Outer Space Treaty-1967. The OST remains the key treaty governing the use of space, with over a hundred signatories, including the United States, Russia, and China. It emerged at a unique moment in the twentieth century, only two years before Neil Armstrong would step onto the Moon from the Apollo 11 spacecraft, and at a time wherein an emerging global environmental consciousness dovetailed with both the new politics of an enlarged United Nations (as previous colonies gained independence and then membership status) and international concern to prevent outer space from becoming another front in the nuclearized stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union. The OST, while concise, contains several textual gaps that allow for skillful parsing of its actual intent when applied to an era of commercial space exploration. Proponents of asteroid mining often argue that the extraction of space resources by a commercial entity does not constitute a claim of national sovereignty any more than removing fish from the deep sea, with due respect for environmental law and catch quotas, would violate the Law of the Sea Convention (1958). Opponents of asteroid mining, and those who urge that the United Nations, not nation-states, continue to be the site for resolving space law and disputes, counter with serious reservations about the potential rapid depletion of space resources (Nature Astronomy 2019) and/or the economic inequities that could confront countries that are not technologically or economically capable of outer space exploration and mining. With both space technology and space entrepreneurialism rapidly advancing, the window of opportunity for regulatory bodies to establish a multinational framework for asteroid mining is closing.