The EconomistJuly 20th 2019 International 512 But the problems are becoming more com-
plex. First, launch capabilities are spread-
ing. Last year an American startup called
Swarm Technologies paid a footling
$900,000 fine for sending four tiny satel-
lites into orbit on an Indian rocket, having
been denied permission to do so by the us
Federal Communications Commission.
Second, the number of objects in the
heavens is about to rocket. The un’s Office
for Outer Space Affairs says about 8,650 ob-
jects have been launched into space since
Sputnik went up in 1957. SpaceX, a rocketry
firm, alone has plans to launch more than
12,000 in a constellation of small satellites
known as Starlink. Other constellations are
planned. Space tourism may well add to the
amount of traffic to be managed.
These constellations are needed be-
cause the satellites will be in low-Earth or-
bit (leo). The bulk of satellite communica-
tions today comes through objects in a
geostationary orbit, some 36,000km above
the Earth. At that altitude a satellite takes a
day to travel around the planet, seeming to
hover in the same place. At a lower orbit,
lots of satellites are needed to maintain
coverage of a specific area; constellations
will criss-cross each other as they whizz
around the world.
Floating in a most peculiar way
The rules are clear for objects that stay in
the same location, says Ruth Pritchard-Kel-
ly of OneWeb, an operator which has six
leosatellites in orbit already and plans
eventually to launch at a rate of 30 a month
until its constellation is complete. “But
there are an infinite number of ways for an
object to be non-geostationary. We have to
come up with rules on how to share space.”
An ituconference in Egypt in October and
November will try to do just that.
Liability rules also need refreshing. A
1972 regime assigns liability for damage
caused by a space object based on who
launched it. That made more sense in an
era when governments launched their own
objects from their own territory. Take the
collision in 2009 between a defunct Rus-
sian military satellite called Kosmos-2251
and an operational commercial satellite
called Iridium 33. Iridium 33 was owned by
an American firm but it was launched from
a Russian-owned spaceport. Had there
been a claim for compensation, Iridium
would have had to call in the State Depart-
ment to approach the Russian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. The Russians could have
argued that, since Iridium 33 launched
from Russia, it was in effect Russian and
this was an internal affair.
Iridium, which ended up not making a
claim, would have faced another argu-
ment, too: that responsibility for a colli-
sion lies with the party which had the last
opportunity to avoid it. Working that out is
not always easy, and becomes well-nighimpossible if both objects are defunct. “If
you have two drivers on a road with no traf-
fic lights, no steering wheels and no
brakes, who’s at fault if they crash?” asks
Dara Panahy of Milbank, a law firm.
In these circumstances, mitigating the
risk of future collisions is not enough; it is
also necessary to be able to remove debris
from space. A range of technologies, from
harpoons to tethers to nets, are being de-
veloped to do that. But the practice would
require a change in the rules. International
law states, for example, that an object be-
longs in perpetuity to the country that
launched it. James Vedda of the Centre for
Space Policy and Strategy, a research group,
argues for an equivalent of a maritime-sal-
vage regime, so that it is possible either to
recover an object without permission or to
get such permission very quickly.
Compared with the problem of space
debris, the legal questions raised by space
mining are less urgent. The technological
and financial hurdles to success are im-
mense: companies like Planetary Re-
sources and Deep Space Industries, formed
in a blaze of publicity to prospect for min-
erals on asteroids, have already stumbled.
But the ambition remains, focused clearly
on Earth’s nearest neighbour.
“If we can utilise resources to keep a
community on the Moon,” says Michelle
Hanlon of the Air and Space Law Pro-
gramme at the University of Mississippi
School of Law, “that is our best way to find
out how to keep humans in space for the
long term.” At his presentation in May, Mr
Bezos envisaged using ice in the shadowed
craters of the Moon to generate fuel, and
targeted a lunar landing by Blue Origin by- nasaplans a space station in lunar
orbit, from where astronauts would oper-
ate robotic probes on the surface that could
harvest minerals. China and India both
have lunar programmes and, doubtless,
similar thoughts.
Some question whether resource ex-
traction would be legal. The Outer Space
Treaty prohibits national appropriation in
space. To the question “who owns the
Moon?”, the unambiguous answer is “no
one”. In practice, however, the question is
not so much whether mining can happen,
but in what circumstances.
International lawyers point to two, ad-
mittedly imperfect, analogies on Earth as
ways to think about space mining. One is
the high seas: no nation has sovereignty
but you don’t need international permis-
sion to extract resources (ie, fish). The oth-
er template is provided by seabed mining,
an activity subject to strict licensing and
regulation by an organisation called the In-
ternational Seabed Authority (isa).Planet Earth is blue
An attempt to set up a space equivalent of
the seabed-mining regime has already
been tried, however, and failed to gain trac-
tion. The Moon Agreement came into force
in 1984. It calls for an international regime
to administer any exploitation of lunar re-
sources. But the agreement has only been
ratified by 18 countries. “Spacefaring states
like voluntary standards and non-space-
farers like the idea of international obliga-
tions,” says Patrick Slomski of Clyde & Co, a
law firm. These divergent interests weaken
the chances either of the Moon Agreement
gaining fresh momentum or of a big, new
international space treaty.
Instead, the high-seas model is the one
that looks likely to prevail. Both America
and Luxembourg, which has long punched
above its weight in the satellite and aero-
space industries, have passed legislation
that explicitly allow firms incorporated on
their territories to carry out space mining;
the United Arab Emirates is about to follow
suit. Proponents of the high-seas approach
like the fact that it allows commercial firms
to act fast. But unbridled competition for
resources is also a recipe for trouble. If a
Chinese miner and an American one were
to set up shop next door to each other on
the lunar surface, say, domestic laws would
be no help in resolving any conflict that
might result.
That argues for co-ordination and com-
mon standards. The award of licences by
national authorities could be notified to an
international body modelled on the itu’s
radio-frequency regime for satellites.
Rules could usefully be set for the duration
of mining licences, for the placement of
buffer zones around mining sites and for
dispute-resolution processes.
Ms Hanlon, who also runs an ngocalled
For All Moonkind, suggests an even nar-
rower goal: an agreement on common lu-
nar landing-pads in order to protect histor-
ic sites such as the landing area of Apollo 11
in 1969. “We are not going to agree a treaty
in the next five years, but we can take baby
steps,” she says. Mr Bezos would approve of
that. His talk ended with a picture of him
alone at a desk in the early days of Amazon
and the caption “Big things start small”. 7The stars look very different todaySource: NASA Orbital Debris Programme OfficeNumber of objects in Earth orbit
Byobjecttype,’0001957 70 80 90 2000 10 1805101520Rocketbodies SpacecraftFragmentation debris Mission-related debrisIridium-Kosmoscollision
Chinese anti-satellite missile test