Stephen Smith has an analysis. While it’s nice that they slightly mitigated the idiotic language about using SLS/Orion for ISS missions in 2010, the most significant aspect of the bill, to me, is the extension of the learning period. I don’t think the language about mining is all that significant, legally. It simply makes explicit what’s always been customary law since the moon samples.
8 thoughts on “The New Commercial Space Bill”
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If the SLS ever does fly, would it be a good idea to give it as many missions as possible, just lifting stuff up there? Instead of trying to get someone to build enough billion-dollar satellites or such, is there a way to just lift seventy tons of water, or jet fuel, and leave them up there for when someone can use them? Don’t many plans for Mars missions and stuff require such preparation anyhow?
Is it possible to run the SLS more often, if they had enough payloads?
That would be a ridiculously expensive way to deliver bulk commodities. SLS flight rate is constrained by manufacturing capacity at Michoud.
…explicit what’s always been customary law…
The point of making it explicit is it makes funds available. Had they gone all the way with property ownership, they would have opened funding that would pay for the entire solar system.
The difference between chattel rights and property rights? One includes the other but w/o rocket equation costs. That’s huge and why congress blew it.
Once possession occurs, congress will have to play catch up again.
Literally trillions of dollars will become available (just on mars alone.)
How do the Apollo lunar samples create customary international law and what legal precept do they create?
Maybe not customary, but they (and the Soviet samples) have established the precedent that lunar (and presumably other body) material can be exchanged for tokens of value (i.e., ownership). According to Dunstan, anyway.
Dunstan puts too much value on those precedents.
May be. It would be nice to get it adjudicated if legal uncertainty remains.