[ExI] Space Mining Should Be a Global Project—But It’s Not Starting Off That Way

[Adrian Tymes]

>
> Aaron Boley and Michael Byers at the University of British Columbia trace
> back the start of this push to the 2015 Commercial Space Launch
> Competitiveness Act
> <https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2262/text>,
> which gave US citizens and companies the right to own and sell space
> resources under US law. In April this year, President Trump doubled down
> with an executive order affirming the right to commercial space mining and
> explicitly rejecting the idea that space is a “global commons,” flying in
> the face of established international norms
>
 Yeah, the problem is, those "established international norms" amounted to
saying that anyone who mined anything beyond Earth had to share it with
everyone - leading to no end of claims from non-spacefaring nations ("it's
in space therefore it's ours too"), and zero reward for going to all the
effort of setting up the mine.  This guaranteed that nobody would mine said
resources.

Better that some people get to benefit than that literally nobody gets to
benefit.  Besides, China's announced plans ignore those norms too:
everything China mines on the Moon, China owns.  At least the US is setting
up something where others can participate, rather than just letting China
claim the Moon by occupation (which is illegal, but in the same sense as
what they've been doing in the South China Sea - and it's happening anyway).
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