Could Legal 'Loophole' Lead to Land Claims on Other Worlds?

FYI,

"Could Legal 'Loophole' Lead to Land Claims on Other Worlds?"
MSNBC

: For 45 years, an international treaty has barred countries from
: laying claim to the moon and other celestial bodies but some
: policy analysts say private ventures might be able to stake their
: claims, and they want Congress to create a legal framework that
: takes advantage of the "loophole."

: The concept was unveiled last week by Rand Simberg, an adjunct
: scholar at the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute,
: and it aims to take advantage of the same market incentives that
: drove the settlement of the American frontier. The way Simberg sees
: it, the lack of property rights in space "partially explains why we
: have not developed the next and, in a sense, last frontier space."

: The inability to claim sovereignty over other worlds goes back to
: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. A hundred countries, including the
: United States and all the other spacefaring nations, are parties to
: that treaty.

: Yet another treaty, drawn up in 1979, bars private ownership of
: extraterrestrial property in the solar system but that pact,
: known as the Moon Treaty, has not been ratified by any of the
: world's spacefaring nations. The differences between the two
: treaties suggest that it's possible to have private ownership
: without national sovereignty, and that's the loophole that Simberg
: wants to take advantage of.

: Multibillion-dollar incentive?

: Backers of the proposed legislation, known as the Space Settlement
: Prize Act, say it could create, "at no cost to taxpayers, a
: multibillion-dollar incentive for private companies to finance and
: build permanent settlements on the moon and/or Mars."

: The proposal would set up a process for the U.S. government to
: recognize ownership of extraterrestrial territory if a private
: venture establishes a permanently inhabited settlement on another
: world. For example, the first venture to establish a moonbase could
: lay claim to up to 600,000 square miles of the lunar surface.
: Having the first Mars base would entitle the operators to up to
: 3.6 million square miles of the Red Planet. Putting a permanent
: base on an asteroid could be rewarded by with up to 1 million
: square miles of surface area, depending on how big the asteroid was.

: The owners would have to guarantee that anyone could buy a ticket
: to travel to the territory. Each succeeding settlement group would
: be allotted 15 percent less land than their predecessor. And if two
: potential claimants couldn't resolve a land dispute, U.S. courts
: could step in.

: But doesn't that sound like sovereignty?

: "In some sense, it gives the imprimatur of the U.S. government,"
: Simberg said. "But it doesn't make it a sovereignty question. It's
: a recognition, not an appropriation." He said the first commercial
: moon colonies could well be headquartered in different countries.
: In that case, the United States would be recognizing the property
: rights of non-U.S. ventures on another world.

: What would the U.S. do?

: Simberg emphasized that the federal government wouldn't be
: obligated to take any action to defend extraterrestrial property
: owners. "How the U.S. government would respond to future claims and
: conflicts of claims on the moon would be entirely a political
: decision," he said.

: Some legal experts say the loophole doesn't really exist. They
: point to a section of the Outer Space Treaty that holds national
: governments responsible for the space settlement activities of
: their citizens, and say that would preclude any effort to uphold
: property claims.

: "Even if the United States withdrew from the treaty in order to
: implement such land grants, what would stop the Chinese from
: adopting domestic legislation that went further?" Berin Szoka and
: James Dunstan asked in an essay published by Wired. "What if the
: first time a Chinese probe lands on the moon, the moon could be
: claimed by the 'Great Wall Company,' owned by the People's
: Liberation Army? The United States would then be left to argue that
: our law should be followed, but the Chinese law shouldn't. That's
: precisely the kind of territorial jockeying the Outer Space Treaty
: was intended to prevent."

: Simberg said a lunar land grab would almost certainly not play out
: that way. If Chinese leaders really wanted to take over the moon
: a scenario that billionaire Robert Bigelow laid out last year
: all they'd have to do is withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty and
: do what they will. "They wouldn't try to play this legislative
: game," Simberg said.

: Why go to the trouble?

: The bigger question is, why would anyone go to the trouble of
: claiming the moon, or Mars, or an asteroid? Right now, there's
: nothing out there that's worth the hundreds of billions of dollars
: it would take for a commercial venture to set up its own space
: program and establish a beachhead beyond Earth. But Simberg and his
: colleagues say that situation could change if the cost of
: spaceflight goes down and the perceived value of extraterrestrial
: resources (helium-3? rare earth elements?) goes up.

: Simberg acknowledged that he's thinking about the long-term future
: of beyond-Earth settlement rather than short-term campaign issues.
: "Nothing like this is going to pass this year," he said. What he'd
: love to see is a new international process that takes the place of
: the Outer Space Treaty and provides a jump-start for private-sector
: space colonies.

: "The treaty's outdated," he said. "It just doesn't work. I don't
: think anyone back then could conceive of a private launch system
: based on the Isle of Man, launching somebody into orbit who would
: then be transferred to L1 [an Earth-moon transfer point] on a tug
: that was run out of Dubai, and then to a lander operated by
: somebody in Australia."

Mark Reiff