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Legal questions linger as governments and companies keep pushing into space:
The Perseverance rover's landing on Mars is still fresh in people's memories, privately owned companies are ferrying people and supplies into orbit, and NASA continues to work on "the most powerful rocket" it has ever built. But as world governments and private enterprises continue to eye the skies for opportunities, a SXSW panel called "Who on Earth should govern Space" makes clear that the laws dealing with space aren't evolving as fast as the technology that gets us there.
"People like to think of space as the Wild Wild West — nothing out there, there's open frontier, we can do whatever we want," said Michelle Hanlon, president of For All Moonkind, a non-profit devoted to preserving mankind's cultural heritage in space. "Unfortunately or fortunately, that's not true at all."
Hanlon was referring to the Outer Space Treaty, which was developed in 1966 and ratified by over 60 countries in early 1967. Considering the treaty was put into effect a full two years before mankind landed on the moon, it's little surprise that the document is heavy on broad principles, but light on specifics. Among its greatest hits: outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all states; states should avoid harmful contamination of space; celestial bodies shall only be used for peaceful purposes; and, perhaps most importantly, the assertion that outer space isn't subject to claims of sovereignty by Earth-bound governments.
[...] There have been efforts to more fully codify a set of rules to govern the way we approach space, including most recently the Artemis Accords signed by the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates in 2020. Ten countries are a start, but a slew of significant space-faring states — including China, India and Russia — have not bought into the largely US-brokered accord. It's hard to say exactly what (if anything) it will take for the international community to agree to a comprehensive set of guidelines for the use of outer space. But one thing is clear: With the technology to get us and keep us in space growing more advanced by the day, these are issues we can't afford to keep punting.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday March 23 2021, @04:59PM
Air should be no problem - lunar regolith is roughly 40% oxygen by mass, and the magma refinery Sadoway developed for NASA should be quite effective at extracting it, while producing steel, aluminum, magnesium, etc. as byproducts. Oxygen, aka rocket fuel (80% of Starship's propellant by mass), will probably be the most profitable export the moon will have for quite some time. Hydrogen and carbon are likely to be the stumbling blocks for self-sufficiency, as there does not appear to be a lot of convenient sources, at least near the surface. Though really, with efficient recycling that's not much of a problem for self-sufficiency, only for growth.
Ironically, fossil fuels may end up being the Moon's biggest import from Earth - not for the energy (though they'd no doubt use that too), but as an efficient way to transport carbon and hydrogen. Combine with oxygen and you've got all the water and CO2 your greenhouses could want.
Then again - there's lots of hydrocarbons floating around in the asteroid belt, which is much closer than Earth in terms of delta-V. Delivery times are a bit long, but that only matters if your supply chain has been disrupted.