TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – The US House of Representatives took a firm stance on commercial space exploration when it passed the Space Resources Exploration and Utilisation Act of 2015 (SPACE Act) in May, providing an opportunity for companies to get off the ground and embrace a new era of space pioneering.

“I think that the SPACE Act is a watershed event in the nascent industrial resource space mining industry. This Act encourages an essential commercial industry to begin,” space law pioneer Gregory Nemitz tells Mining Weekly.




His company, Orbital Development, is at the forefront of the critical issue of property rights in space. Since March 2000, the firm has managed the Eros project, designed to bring the issue of space property law into a US Federal Court for a definitive decision on the new legal subject.

Nemitz had staked a claim for the asteroid Eros in 2000. When the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) sent a satellite to investigate the asteroid, Nemitz responded, issuing Nasa with a $20 parking and storage fine. Nemitz filed suit for default after Nasa refused to pay; however, the lawsuit was dismissed, since Nemitz could not prove ownership of the asteroid.




Nemitz explains that the US government’s lawyers, before responding to his actual complaint against Nasa, filed a motion known as a FRCP 12b (6) – failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.

This had nothing to do with the property claim for 433 Eros. It was a legal manoeuvre to sidestep or quash adjudication of the action on its merits, he states.

What the lawsuit did accomplish was to bring awareness to the aerospace industry that space property rights must exist for the industrialisation of space resources to succeed.

“I did not succeed at my goal of forcing a definitive court decision about space property law. What did occur in the aftermath of the lawsuit was that most major aerospace conferences began to hold space property rights panels, discussions and tracks to fully explore how space property rights should be implemented.

“The companies and individuals who worked to make the Act a reality should be graciously thanked and applauded for accomplishing their goal. It is truly a first step in ascending our unalienable right to property ownership into space,” Nemitz says.

Another case, in Canada, even laid claim to the planets in our solar system, as well as four of Jupiter’s moons, but was ultimately rejected with contempt.

Into the Void

At present, there is no official method available to have raw resource claims or claims for possession of natural objects in space recognised. The SPACE Act only pertains to the ownership of already extracted resources, and not ownership of the property from which those resources were extracted.

According to space technology pioneer Planetary Resources cofounder and cochairperson Peter Diamandis, the ability to have clear laws and regulations to extract and own resources for the benefit of industry would allow investors and companies to build the infrastructure that would provide an abundance of resources in the US and the rest of the world.

The space exploration industry has the ability to expand humanity’s resource base.

Essentially, the SPACE Act guarantees that space miners will have an ‘exclusion zone’ around their mining activities and that they will be legally recognised as the lawful owners of the resources they extract and bring to market.

Nemitz notes that much of the Act is in effect a restatement of some of the base principles agreed to by the national signatories to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. He points out that the SPACE Act still does not implement a legal regime to recognise actual ownership of the property being mined. All mines on earth have transferable ownership rights that are recognised by governments.

“So, there is still more critical action to do on this legal frontier. Officially recognised property ownership is required to mortgage a mining property for the billions in funding that are needed to implement infrastructure development for resource extraction,” he says.

Nemitz also warns that the Act, in its current form, provides only limited protection from ‘claim jumpers’ through its exclusion zone provisions, which may work to dissuade interlopers from interfering with a mining company’s activities.

“If the mining company should fail to keep a permanent presence or activity at their mining location, their exclusion zone protection may fail, and an interloper could mine that location and have full legal title to the resources it extracts and brings to market,” he explains.

Off-Planet Industry

Planetary Resources successfully deployed its first spacecraft into orbit from the International Space Station in July, marking one of many milestones that bring its mission of prospecting and mining asteroids closer to fruition.

The Arkyd 3 Reflight spacecraft’s 90-day mission is to validate core technologies to be incorporated into future asteroid-prospecting spacecraft. The vertical integration of its technology development has enabled it to create the most sophisticated yet cost-effective test demonstration spacecraft ever built.

The company has also been awarded two contracts by Nasa, to advance the innovative designs of a compact hyperspectral imager and a three-dimensional- (3D-) printed integrated structure and propulsion system.

“These technologies will play major roles in Planetary Resources’ mission to detect and identify commercially viable near-earth asteroids,” Planetary president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki tells Mining Weekly.

The next demonstrator, the Arkyd 6 (A6), will be launched later this year and test the attitude control, power, communication and avionics systems. Backed by high-profile financiers and leveraging the A6’s increased payload capacity, Planetary will incorporate a midwave infrared imaging system, able to precisely measure temperature differences of the objects it observes, as well as acquire key data related to the presence of water and water-bearing minerals.

The system will first test targeted areas of our own planet before being deployed to near-earth asteroids on future missions.

Water and Energy

A water molecule’s structure is extremely simple, yet the resource is critical for human activity. However, in space, it takes on two very important uses. A ton of water in space can protect equipment against cosmic radiation in the same way as the atmosphere and magnetosphere does to the earth.

“What’s most exciting, and this is where mining in space sounds more like the oil and gas industries, is that water is a molecule composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and in space, oxygen and hydrogen are rocket fuel. Using the energy from the sun, we can break the water molecule into oxidiser and fuel. We don’t want to ship water and fuel from earth to space for tens of millions of dollars, using expensive rockets.

“This is the way that Planetary hopes to establish a beachhead in the environment near the earth and use the resources of space to move into that frontier, just as we have used the resources of earth to develop every corner of the planet that we now live and operate on,” he says.

Lewicki has been intimately involved with the life cycle of Nasa’s Mars exploration rovers and the Phoenix Mars lander. He performed system-engineering development and participated in assembly, test and launch operations for both Mars missions. The recipient of two Nasa Exceptional Achievement medals, Lewicki has an asteroid named in his honour: 13609 Lewicki.

“We are pioneering a new architecture of spacecraft. We were taking a cue from mobile computing and cloud computing, as well as distributed systems to where we have a vehicle much more inspired by biology than traditional mainframe computers,” he tells Mining Weekly.

“This is brand new for aerospace and space exploration in an industry usually very conservative and slow to adapt new technologies,” he says.

Lewicki explains that the company develops its spacecraft a lot like programmers develop software, in that there are lots of releases and updates. “The Arkyd 3 is a part of that and everything we learn from the spacecraft will be employed in our next spacecraft, the A6, which is already in development and scheduled to launch in December,” he says.

In Lewicki’s vision, man’s tendency to mine materials close to where he uses them will drive the transition to space mining, so that we do not need to ship those resources into space.

Space Exploitation

In later phases of space exploration, construction materials, such as iron, nickel and cobalt, which are plentiful in near-earth asteroids, could provide the keys to building space structures. These can be built using new manufacturing techniques exploiting 3D printing that not only uses local space materials, but can also make the structures more appropriate for their environment, because one does not need to fold them up and send them to space on a rocket ride, Lewicki says.

Planetary plans to remotely control its robotic-prospecting technology from the comfort of earth-bound offices. In time, the company hopes to be able to provide reports on asteroid targets similar to that of the Canadian National Instrument 43-101 on earth.

He explains that with asteroids, it is not a question of the distance. One rather thinks about the energy required to reach them. He points to Nasa’s recent New Horizons spacecraft rendezvous with Pluto, stressing that one tends to forget that the spacecraft received its last rocket boost ten years ago.

“Because space is a vacuum, there is no friction, making it all about velocity,” he says.

The company’s robotic equipment would make trips to the asteroid targets that could span from a few weeks to more than eight months. “It’s more like planning a bus schedule. It’s about knowing when to leave and when to arrive at them. There are thousands of near-earth asteroids,” he says.

“It is rocket science, but it’s a well-known science. We’re actually making money today and will make money at every step along the way as we build the capability to prospect and mine asteroids,” he concludes.