Blue

Origin and a handful of other companies, including SpaceX from fellow billionaire Elon Musk, want

to make the business of space profitable. But there's more than just launch trajectories and food rations to work out. Companies and entrepreneurs want to make money in space, and in order to be able to do that, they need to have the rule of law. Andrew Palmer is The Economist's executive editor. They want to be able to settle disputes. They want property rights. They want certainty.

And

that's what law gives you. And what

existing law is out there? So

there's some, but it's international, which means there are all the usual problems of enforcement. But it's also patchy. The big piece of law dates from 1967. It's called the Outer Space Treaty. And it says that space is the province of all mankind. It says that there cannot be appropriation. It says that countries cannot claim sovereignty. But it hasn't been built on since the era of the 60s, the Cold War, when states were basically the only actors up there. And that sets up some interesting gaps when you think about a world in which companies are up there trying to do their thing. So

where does this gap in the law become really pointed? Two

areas. Well, the first and most pressing is space debris. So there's a lot of fragments of stuff, basically, space junk floating around the Earth, about 500,000 bits of junk of a certain size that can be tracked by NASA. And all that stuff can cause collisions. It can damage satellites. And so you need laws to make sure that things go into the right orbit, they don't crash into each other. Everybody is pressing and needs to get sorted now. There's another area which people worry about, which isn't quite so urgent because it's not yet a live issue, and that's resource extraction. So taking things off asteroids, taking things off the moon, for example, water on the moon, useful for drinking, if you wanted to have a moon base, useful for generating fuel, but you've got to be able to get it out of ice, which sits in these shadowed craters on

the moon. You suggest that this isn't the most urgent of the space law issues, but people are already thinking pretty hard about resource extraction of various sorts. Yeah,

I mean, there have been companies set up that have generated quite a lot of buzz, like planetary resources, deep space industries. Those are two of the names that got quite a lot of attention. No one quite knows when, if at all, they're going to succeed. It's really hard to do this, right? So technologically, it's really hard. Financially, it needs a lot of capital. So those initial kind of wave of companies, they're not really going anywhere at the moment, certainly not to near-Earth asteroids. But the moon is close. States are heading there. People like Jeff Bezos, who runs Amazon, but also has a rocketry venture on the side, he wants to get there soon. So we know that people are going to go there. And we know that people think of the moon as an environment where you can test living in space for long periods of time. And that's where things like water and the extraction of water from ice become more important. But if it's written

in these foundational texts that no one can claim sovereignty, then how do you set up an ice mine? So

that's the question. You couldn't say, right, this bit of the moon is America's or Britain's. But you can interpret the law to say, I can extract some resources, and I have property rights over resources. But people look to Earth as an analogy. So think about the high seas, for example. No nation owns the high seas, but you can go there, and you can fish, and you can claim property rights over that fish. Then there's another interpretation which says it's illegal. And there's another interpretation which says we could probably do it, but you need a really strict regime to be able to do it. And that analogy is more like the seabed where on earth there is a kind of whole regime set up to look at exploring places, to hand out licenses, to be really strict about environmental concerns. So it's a much, much more directive kind of process. And so why not just do that? That sounds

like a useful analogy.

Yeah. So you have to get people to agree to do it. That's the real issue. So there was an attempt to do this. There was a treaty called the Moon Agreement, which came into force in 1984. But not enough countries have signed up to it, basically. There's only 18 at the moment. And notably, countries that have an ability to send things up into space, they're not really interested in restricting themselves. What they want to do is just get up there and start mining stuff, if that's what they can do. So places like the states, for example, they've just legislated domestically to say you can do it. So this all sounds quite messy so far. It is. And you can imagine a scenario where you had two different countries that are in conflict on Earth, let's say America and China, send probes up to the moon and hit on the same bit of the moon that they want to start looking for ice. But there are no rules to determine where you go first, who has precedence. What governs that is the big question.

What is the way to do this so as not to have to fight this out in courts or, you know, resolve space

clashes? So really what you want are some rules of the road. So you might be able to have an agreement that says, okay, here's how you make a claim to be able to start to extract resources from a certain place on the moon. And this is how we define a safety zone, and so on and so forth. And you could probably get enough countries to agree that, that you stop the worst kind of direct

conflicts. But you think we've got some time to work out the details beyond that? We've

got a bit of time, but lots of people are looking at the moon and outer space and time will close in on us we have to sort it out andrew

thank you very much for your time thank

you jason

In 1960s Brazil, Lossa Nova was the sound of modernity.