Private companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries are already planning space missions to extract resources from asteroids by the mid 2020s. Despite how sci-fi that future may seem, there are actually very few technological barriers keeping us from extracting resources from extraterrestrial rocks hurtling through the void. Instead, there's something else. It's a nebulous issue with no obvious solution: the law.

Before we deal with the sticky legality, it's important to understand how much sense asteroid mining really makes. "The economic arguments for mining asteroids are overwhelming," says Peter Marquez, the former director of space policy for President Obama and current vice president of Planetary Resources told Popular Mechanics in an interview. "On Earth we sit at the bottom of a gravity well, and it takes enormous energy and expense to pull anything out into space. About 10,000 dollars per pound to break free of Earth's gravity. That's 10,000 dollars for a can of Coke," he says.

"The economic arguments for mining asteroids are overwhelming."

Asteroids, meanwhile, are rich with a variety of heavy resources any space mission might need, resources that aren't burdened by so much pesky gravity. Bypassing the need to thrust all that equipment into space could drastically cut the cost of space missions. Take water for example.

"Humans need it to drink, we could use it for radiation shielding, and we could split water into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel," Marquez points out. It's a valuable but heavy resource, and one found in quantity if you just snag an asteroid. "One near-earth asteroid has enough water on it to have fueled all 135 space shuttle missions."

And that is just the tip of the literal space-iceberg. "Asteroids are also rich with the right quantities of iron, cobalt, and nickel to make factory grade steel. And in space you could easily make some of heavy steel objects you need for space missions, like the dumb, heavy trusses that are all over the international space station," Marquez says. "And keep in mind, you'd be making these things for significantly less than 10,000 dollars a pound." These resources aren't necessarily free for the taking, nor are they necessarily protected. The grey area in between is battlefield on which the coming legal fights will unfold.

These resources aren't necessarily free for the taking, nor are they necessarily protected.

The last major treaty governing the ownership and exploration of space was the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Signed by 104 nations—including every current nation with a space agency at the time—the treaty disallows nations from laying claim to "celestial resources," treating the cosmos beyond Earth's atmosphere like a vast ocean of international waters.

Yet despite this worldwide agreement, President Obama signed the SPACE Act into law last year, the universal appeal of extraterrestrial resources helping to push the legislation through an otherwise historically deadlocked congress. The act itself is simple. It aims to solidify the rights of American private citizens and companies to engage in the commercial exploration of space by offering American citizens and companies legal rights to claim space resources, like comets and asteroids, as their own. Legislation that, at a glance, appears to fly directly in the face of that 1967 treaty.

Unless you deal in technicalities. As Marquez points out, the 1967 treaty doesn't specifically disallow individual citizens or companies from owning "celestial resources" outside of Earth—it only prohibits nations from claiming things. So there's no reason you shouldn't be legally allowed to grab and claim asteroids, according to the letter of the law. But drawing a technical distinction like that isn't an immediate legal cure-all, as Sarah Jane Fox—a legal scholar at Coventry University in the U.K.—argues in a recent essay in the law journal Resources Policy and expanded on in a chat with Popular Mechanics.

It all comes back to a matter of jurisdiction. By the current standards of international law, a country can't just go and create laws that function outside its own borders. As far as the U.N. is concerned, U.S. law is as binding in space as it is in international waters, or in Russia, or in Peru, which is to say "not binding at all." It's an umbrella precedent that basically invalidates the entire SPACE act, regardless of the technicalities. If this sounds like a lot of quibbling over semantics, that's because it is.

If this sounds like a lot of quibbling over semantics, that's because it is.

Still, Fox thinks a lack of existing international legal framework is unlikely to keep citizens and companies using this semantic cover while laying claim to space resources once they can take physical control of them. But it does make any sort of international dispute a nightmare waiting to happen, and a nightmare that almost certainly will happen.

You don't even have to leave the atmosphere to find examples. Fox points the kerfuffle with the Chinese over the sovereignty of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. An exacerbating factor to this international dispute, according to Fox, is that there is no universally accepted framework for our oceans—the U.N. has the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but the United States has never signed it.

But it's not a perfect comparison. Taking the issue to space makes things simpler in some ways, and more complicated in others. Asteroids are abundant in a way that unclaimed terrestrial land is not, so there are probably more than enough asteroids to go around. But asteroids are also movable in ways that terrestrial land is not. If a mining company manages to lasso an asteroid and bring it closer to Earth to mine, can other companies swoop in and take the resources too? Can a country own the infrastructure on an asteroid even if it can't own the asteroid itself? What if you wrap an entire asteroid in the United States' flag? What can the U.N. really do about any of this anyway?

Fox's advice to would-be asteroid miners in this time of endless hypotheticals? "If there's no international law stopping you, there's no real obstacles," she says. The SPACE Act itself may not hold ground in an international court, the underlying principle—that grabbing these resources as a private citizen is not not legal—is still fundamentally sound. For now at least. "It's a fascinating time," she says.

And it's in no danger of getting boring.

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