US Legalizes Mining In Space: Now For the Hard Part

Talk about your property rights.

As to whether any other nation will recognize the legality of the American law, let alone whether anyone can actually lasso an asteroid, to say nothing of extracting precious metals from it and then get them back to earth, well there is a market for 'outtasite' returns.JL

Paul Stimers comments in the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. government made it legal for Americans to mine an asteroid—provided they can catch one. Several companies are preparing to give this a go, pursuing already-identified asteroids that contain precious metals, such as platinum, worth trillions of dollars.
This might sound like science fiction, but it isn’t: Just before Thanksgiving the U.S. government made it legal for Americans to mine an asteroid—provided they can catch one. Several companies, believe it or not, are preparing to give this a go, pursuing already-identified asteroids that contain precious metals, such as platinum, worth trillions of dollars.
Although the prospects for commercial spaceflight have been skyrocketing, the law governing it had not been updated in more than a decade. That is what makes the bipartisan U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which President Obama signed Nov. 25, so important. The act is a full-scale overhaul that streamlines regulatory processes, promotes safety, and will allow commercial spaceflight companies to reach new milestones.
One provision of the law, however, has gotten most of the headlines. It says, quite simply, that if an American company retrieves minerals, metals or resources from an asteroid or other location in space, it owns them as far as the U.S. is concerned. That single sentence, which applies to all nonliving matter in the cosmos, appears to be the most sweeping legislative recognition of property rights in human history.
With this new law Congress has taken a Lockean approach. In his “Second Treatise of Government,” John Locke argued that God gave the world to humanity in common, but that each person owns himself and his labor. Therefore, when he puts labor into an object through work, he can develop a property right in the object. Similarly, the U.S. recognizes that the cosmos belongs to everyone. But under the new law resources can be retrieved from their location in space and subsequently developed. It is the work of doing this that creates the property right.
Contrast that with the 1979 Moon Agreement, an attempt by 16 non-spacefaring nations—including Australia, Mexico and Pakistan—to define the heavens as inherently public. The agreement bans private ownership of any lunar property. It requires “equitable sharing” of any developed lunar resources, and promises that the needs of developing countries “shall be given special consideration.”
The U.S. did not join the Moon Agreement. It is, however, party to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, along with 102 other countries. This treaty states that “outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use,” but that they may not be “subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.” In other words, if you build a colony on the moon, the U.S. can’t admit it as the 51st state. Space is extraterritorial limbo.
That said, because it does not prohibit other kinds of property rights the Outer Space Treaty is generally regarded as authorizing the economic use of space. Congress’s new law complies fully with the treaty, in that it covers resources “obtained” and not “in situ.” But lest any doubt arise, lawmakers included a further provision: “By the enactment of this Act, the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body.”
With a strong, clear statement that the U.S. will recognize property rights in space, Congress has given a boost to a growing industry. Planetary Resources, a company that I advise, has already launched the first in a series of technology demonstration satellites and plans to send its first prospecting probe to an asteroid by the end of the decade. Private investors can now back it and other ventures, secure that they will own whatever metals and minerals they can extract and bring home.
Property rights spur hard work and innovation—in Locke’s day, in ours and in the age of commercial spaceflight to come.