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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: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 23 2021, @05:25PM
> One thing that occurs to me is that those rocks also work against Mars and the moon. Not just Earth.
True, but they'd also work almost as well against asteroid colonies. The Earth is at a massive disadvantage in kinetic warfare because of our 11.2km/s escape velocity - which means any incoming projectile gains (11,200m/s)^2 = 125MJ/kg of kinetic energy before impact - about 30x the energy density of TNT.
Mars has an escape velocity of 5km/s, so only adds 25MJ/kg. Still 6x the density of TNT, but a much smaller force multiplier.
And the Moon's escape velocity is only 2.4km/s, so only 5.8MJ/kg, or 1.4x TNT.
In practice though, offworld colonies are going to be *extremely* vulnerable - all you have to do is break things up a bit and everybody suffocates. Whereas on Earth you can level half a city and the biggest problem is going to be the morale of the survivors and the cost to rebuild infrastructure.