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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, @06:14PM (2 children)
The big advantage of a Mars colony is they could very rapidly become mostly self-sufficient, mass-wise at least. They've got plenty of raw materials to make air, water, and food. And glass, iron, etc. aren't much more difficult - in fact iron working will likely be much simpler than on Earth since they don't have to deal with ambient oxygen for the bulk production phases. Stuff may be mostly hand made for quite some time - but power-hammers, lathes, and even roller-mills are actually relatively simple machines easily made from raw iron, and it'll be a long time before mass-production of large equipment is necessary.
Once they've got a basic industrial base established, what they'll need from Earth is mostly low-mass, "high tech" stuff - and the needs for that are likely to drop rapidly. Solar panel production is likely to be one of the first high-tech industries they'd want to develop as energy will be a major limiting factor, and once they have that they're most of the way towards making their own microprocessors and other electronics as well. Perhaps not nearly as fast as we can make on Earth - but there's very few situations where fast CPUs are actually a necessity rather than a luxury. Especially with recent advances in harnessing massive parallelism to compensate for our inability to make faster CPU cores.
Plastics might be the major challenge early on - important stuff for gaskets, space suits, etc., and non-trivial to synthesize from water and CO2, or even bio-sources. I imagine those highly recyclable monomer-based plastics would be far more valuable on Mars. Modern medical supplies would be nice too, though strictly speaking not actually a necessity - we survived for millions of years without them here. I imagine herbal medicine will be quite popular, while often not as effective as the modern industrial variety, it can still do a lot of good, and would be far cheaper than importing medicines from Earth.
The Moon in contrast will probably be hobbled by a shortage of both carbon and hydrogen, unless they find rich underground deposits. So they'll likely be stuck importing large masses of fossil fuels from Earth as ecological feedstock to fuel their growth. And since the shipping costs are almost as high as to Mars, and likely to dwarf the cost of the supplies themselves, they'll likely have much greater import expenses than Mars.
Industrially, the Moon will be very similar to Mars - with the exception that they'll likely have rapidly growing export demand for orbital development. Oxygen will likely be their first major export, mostly for use as rocket fuel (it's 80% of Starship propellant by mass). It's plentiful in the lunar regolith (about 40% by mass), and easily extracted using the same magma refineries that will no doubt be popular on Mars (as developed by Sadoway for NASA), producing large quantities of steel, aluminum, etc. as byproducts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 24 2021, @02:12AM (1 child)
Mars isn’t hot like Venus but it’s still hell.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 24 2021, @02:29AM
Absolutely. And like I said - Mars has plenty, and the moon - well they'd probably need to import hydrocarbons from Earth (since hydrogen is really important too)
Oh, and while carbon steel certainly has its uses, you don't actually require carbon for steel, other alloying elements can take its place - e.g. in Interstitial-free Steel and Maraging Steel carbon is considered an impurity. And even among carbon steels many varieties contain well under 1% carbon.
Normally a LOT of carbon gets used in processing iron ore into usable iron, but there are now alternatives (such as Sadoway's electrochemical refinery that I mentioned), though they're currently more expensive. Of course, if you had to import coal from Earth that would turn the economics hard on its head.