The Space Settlement Initiative

The settlement of space would benefit all of humanity by opening a new frontier, energizing our society, providing room and resources for the growth of the human race without despoiling the Earth, and creating a lifeboat for humanity that could survive even a planet-wide catastrophe.

Unfortunately, it seems clear that, as things stand now, space settlement will not happen soon enough for any of us to see it. But that could be changed! The legislation proposed on this web site would:

save NASA and the taxpayers the cost of developing affordable space transport by allowing private enterprise to assume the burden of settling space



make it possible for ordinary people to purchase tickets and visit the Moon as tourists, scientists, or entrepreneurs



create vast wealth from what is now utterly worthless



Efforts to develop space settlements have almost stopped, primarily because no one has a sufficient reason to spend the billions of dollars needed to develop safe, reliable, affordable transport between the Earth and the Moon. Neither Congress nor the taxpayers wants the government stuck with that expense. Private venture capital will support such expensive and risky research and development ONLY if success could mean a multi-billion dollar profit. Today, there is no profit potential in developing space transport, but we have the power to change that.

We have the power to create a "pot of gold" waiting on the Moon, to attract and reward whatever companies can be the first to assemble and risk enough capital and talent to establish an airline-like, Earth-Moon "space line" and lunar settlement. How? By making it possible for a settlement to claim and own -- and re-sell to those back home on Earth -- the product that has always rewarded those who paid for human expansion: land ownership

Lunar and Martian real estate is currently worthless. But that real estate will acquire enormous value after there is a settlement, regular commercial access, and a system of space property rights. Lunar or Martian property ownership could then be bought and sold back on earth, raising billions of dollars. This is a plan to be sure that money is used as an incentive and reward for those who invest in a way to get there and stay there.

Whether you love him or hate him, President Donald Trump made his fortune in real estate - buying undervalued land, building on it, or just holding it, until it's value went up, often for a huge profit. This plan would use that kind of real estate speculation to fund the settlement of the Moon and Mars.

When asked how he was going to fund his proposed Martian settlement, Elon Musk could only make a joke from The Simpsons about "stealing underwear." Funding space settlement the same way President Trump built his fortune would be a much better alternative!

Hopefully the Trump administration might therefore be sympathetic to this market-based space settlement incentive and take steps to encourage its passage.

In the mid 1960's, President Johnson saw he was going to be forced to take money from the space race to fund the Vietnam War. He feared that, if that let the Russians win the race to the Moon, they might claim ownership of the Moon. So he proposed, negotiated, and the U.S. Senate ratified, what became known as the 1967 "Outer Space Treaty." Among other things, this treaty prohibits any claims of national sovereignty on the Moon or Mars, etc. Therefore no nation can claim or "grant" land in outer space.

But, quite deliberately, the treaty says nothing against private property. Therefore, without claiming sovereignty, the U.S. could recognize land claims made by private companies, regardless of nationality, that establish human settlements on the Moon or Mars. The U.S. wouldn't be "granting" or giving the land to anyone. It isn't the U.S.'s to give. The settlement itself says "because we are the first to actually occupy this unowned land, WE claim ownership of it" - and the U.S. just "recognizes" - accepts, acquiesces to, decides not to contest - the settlement's claim of private ownership.

The proposed legislation would commit the U.S. to granting that recognition if those who have established settlements meet specified conditions, such as offering to sell passage on their ships to anyone willing to pay a fair price. Entrepreneurs could use that promise of U.S. recognition to help raise the venture capital to develop the ships needed to make the claim.

The dollar value of a Lunar land claim will only become big enough to be profitable when people can actually get to the land. So Lunar land deeds, recognized by the U.S. under this plan, can be offered for sale only after there is a transport system going back and forth often enough to support a settlement and the land is actually accessible. It will finally be understood to be land in the sky, not pie in the sky.

It would take a really large land claim to be worth that huge investment, of course, but there is an amazingly large amount of land out there waiting to be claimed. For example, a claim of 600,000 square miles, about the size of Alaska (just under 1,600,000 square km.) would be only around 4% of the Moon's surface, but would be worth almost 100 billion dollars at only $260 an acre (4047 square meters). At $500 an acre it would be worth $192 billion. Of course the price of the land, especially the best land, might be much more by then.

It will be offered for sale after months of worldwide press coverage produced by the race to be the first to settle the Moon. There will be land buyers with business purposes for buying and using land, but there will be a much bigger speculative and investment market. Many people who will never leave Earth will buy Lunar land. Some in hopes of making a profit, others just to be part of the excitement or to leave an acre to their grandchildren, or put their name on a crater.

The profits on land sales which take place in the U.S. will, of course, be subject to U.S. taxes, so the Budget Office will score this legislation as a revenue producer, not a cost to the U.S. It sounds strange because we haven't done it yet, but there is growing sentiment for extending private property and the benefits of free enterprise to space.

Before copyright and patent laws, no one could own songs, stories or ideas. The passage of those laws, creating intellectual property, made whole industries possible and added greatly to the world's wealth from things that had previously been valueless. Creating lunar property could be the incentive to open the space frontier to everyone, thus benefiting all of humanity.

If an incentive plan like this had been enacted in the 1990's, when it was first proposed, there would be human beings living on the Moon and maybe Mars today. But there were too many obstacles that needed to be overcome, one by one, over time.

First was getting people to finally realize that the government wouldn't pay to settle space. It was hard to accept that times had changed since the government had paid for the Apollo program. It took years of steady budget cutting to convince people the taxpayers simply wouldn't be willing to pay for a Lunar space settlement.

Then there was the strangeness of the concept of private companies launching their own rockets into space. Some people dismissed the notion out of hand. Some in NASA and the U.S. State Department were actively hostile to having anyone but government employees in space. But again times changed and, finally, the current administration of NASA is now supportive of commercial space companies, at least for transport to the International Space Station.

Then there was the guy who effectively blocked acceptance of this initiative because he demanded the right to claim space property without having to actually go there. Of course, the courts eventually threw out his claim to ownership of an asteroid, but in the process he set the cause of space property rights back years. He couldn't understand that actually inhabiting the land was absolutely necessary to have the world accept those property rights, - not to mention that the purpose of enacting property rights was to encourage settlement.

Most damaging of all were the overzealous self-professed "space lawyers" who insist on a super restrictive interpretation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. They use a torturous chain of reasoning to claim it bans a private settlement from owning the land that the settlement inhabits. Some of them go so far as to say that, under their interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty, no one could even claim ownership of a moon rock they'd gone there and picked up. Those "space lawyers" objected, but their position was clearly rejected by Congress and the President with the passage of the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 (Title IV of H.R. 2262 - U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act).

The Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 says, "A United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States."

It only covers "resources", not full private property ownership per se, but it's getting close. The "space lawyers" are absolutely right when they say it starts us down the slippery slope toward eventually recognizing full property rights.

Interestingly, the wording of the The Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act's disclaimer of extraterritorial sovereignty, in Section 403, is very similar to the disclaimer of sovereignty that we proposed decades ago in The Space Settlement Prize Act's findings 14 and 15.

We originally hoped The Space Settlement Initiative would be enacted in time to jump start a private race to space settlement. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet. Now it appears that it probably won't be enacted until someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos thinks they are getting close enough to push for the creation of the necessary prize.

They'll have to, because the fact remains that property rights are the still one and only thing that can possibly produce a profit potential sufficient to justify the huge investment needed to establish an entrepreneurial space settlement.

No matter when it finally gets enacted, space settlement will happen only when private property rights recognition has come into force - and settlement will happen when those rights have been established.

Would you support such innovative legislation? If so, please tell others about www.SpaceSettlement.org. Better yet, tell your Congressman and Senator about this idea. If you live in another country, why not suggest such legislation to your own government?

I want to thank the Space Colonization Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Moon Society/Artemis Society, among others, for their endorsement of the Space Settlement Initiative. Such endorsements are very helpful. Finally, I want to thank Dave Brett very much for creating and maintaining this web site.

Alan Wasser

February, 2016

