Space Exploration At What Price?
What protections exist for the Moon as private industry rushes to mine our ancient satellite?
No matter where in the world we are, when we look at the full Moon we see something that has remained unchanged since our ancestors first gazed at it. Unlike Earth’s surface, in constant flux due to the effects of the atmosphere, changing weather patterns, shifting continents and moving water, the Moon’s features have remained mostly the same for more than four billion years.
Since 2019’s anniversary hullabaloo celebrating 50 years since Neil Armstrong took his “small step” onto the Moon and left a boot-print behind on that ancient landscape, the voices calling for a new golden age of space activities have grown louder, fuelled by the recent discovery of water-ice on the Moon.
The presence of lunar water-ice was initially theorised after a 1998 NASA mission, but in 2019, NASA confirmed there are significant ice deposits on the Moon. Water means the possibility of human habitation, and it can also be split into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. A permanent Moon base would be the first step in any plans to extract resources or launch missions elsewhere, especially to Mars.
All the major spacefaring nations now have designs on the Moon. In January 2019, China landed the first probe on the Moon’s far side. The US, India, Russia, Europe, South Korea and Japan will send up robotic spacecraft in the next few years, and some are gearing up for crewed Moon missions: NASA’s Artemis programme is ambitiously aiming for 2024; the European Space Agency and China National Space Administration say they’ll establish a joint Moon Village sometime in the 2020s, and China also plans to build its own lunar base by 2030.
Added to the mix, for the first time, are private companies, following a move by Western space agencies to form public-private partnerships to commercialise space activities and reduce costs. NASA has authorised nine US companies to bid on commercial payload deliveries to the Moon over the next decade. Japanese company ispace wants to mine the Moon and establish a settlement named Moon Valley as a base from which to mine asteroid belts. An American company called OffWorld plans to establish robotic mining and manufacturing workforces both “on and offworld”.
Morgan Stanley analysts have estimated the global space industry – currently worth around US$350 billion – will be worth more than US$1 trillion by 2040. Goldman Sachs Research has predicted the world’s first trillionaire will make their fortune mining asteroids.
Untold riches
These new space-mining corporations are keen to get in early on what they see as an emerging market of untold riches. Water-ice is not the Moon’s only potentially lucrative resource. It’s believed there are also rare-earth metals such as yttrium, samarium and lanthanum, all used in modern electronics, as well as platinum-group metals, and possible future energy sources like Helium-3. The current buzz phrase is ‘in situ resource utilisation’, which means rather than bringing lunar resources back to Earth they would instead be used on the Moon to enable settlement and onward journeys, including forays to resource-rich asteroid belts.
Silicon Valley tech titans have funded several space start- ups. In May 2019, spaceflight company Blue Origin (owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) unveiled its lunar lander. Another company, Moon Express, has attracted major investment from Paypal co-creator and Trump backer Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. And, of course, there’s Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.
“Water is the oil of the solar system,” Moon Express’s website reads, “and the Moon will become a gas
station in the sky”. Space commerce boosters often describe space as the new Wild West, enthusiastically comparing the Moon boom to gold rushes of times past, with little awareness that this is not the most inspiring analogy for those aware of the social and environmental harm – and economic inequalities – caused by resource grabs on Earth.
The trouble is, when it comes to mining the Moon, the pro-mining camp likes to claim that they are the ones who will save the Earth.
On Moon Express’s website, they say their mission is to return to the Moon, “Earth’s 8th continent, a new frontier,” and unlock “its mysteries and resources for the benefit of humanity”. The website claims that “expanding Earth’s economic and social sphere to the Moon is our first step in securing our future,” so that “a new generation will look up and see lights on the Moon, and know that they are part of a multi-world species.”
Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, promotes his space tourism company by saying, “We can truly bring positive change to life on Earth”, while Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin believes we must go to space so we don’t go to war with each other on Earth over dwindling resources.
It’s powerful, rousing stuff. Life on Earth has certainly been enhanced by space innovations, including GPS, weather forecasting and wifi. There would be genuine advantages
from other space dreams, such as continuous solar power beamed from on high. One large metallic asteroid supposedly holds enough quantities of certain metals to sustain human use on Earth for millions of years.
Those who propose mining space resources describe them as ‘near infinite’, and say once we’re released from the prison of resource scarcity, world peace will automatically ensue. In a 2014 New Republic article, Rachel Riederer called out these would-be space miners for believing that a sky “full of infinite riches and abundance” would create peace on Earth. “Why wouldn’t riches from the heavens cause conflicts and problems?” she writes. “Their vulgar terrestrial cousins always have.”
It does seem dangerously naive to believe that, when space exploration ramps up, we’ll be our best selves out there. Margaret Weitekamp, curator of space history at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, observes there has “always been this sense that space is aspirational, perfecting, different. But it’s an extension of who we are on the ground, run through this lens of great expense and great danger.”
American climate change activist Bill McKibben thinks it doesn’t make sense to spend time or money on space. “The least hospitable square inch of Earth is ten times more hospitable than the most hospitable corner of the rest of the galaxy,” McKibben says. “That we’re going elsewhere in order to have a pristine Earth is absurd. It’s more likely that the ... idea of an exit gives us permission to wreck this place.” Other commentators counter that investing in space science and technologies does not equate to giving up on Earth, and that those innovations could well improve life as we know it in ways we can’t predict.
Until now, however, there’s been hardly any consideration of the space environment as something worth protecting. This is partly due to the unknown environmental effects of mass space tourism, rocket launches or Moon mining. It’s also the result, writes Australian space archaeologist Alice Gorman, author of Dr Spacejunk vs the Universe, of the general tendency to see space “as a resource to be exploited [rather] than an environment to be managed”. She has called for the establishment of “international environmental impact assessments” to be required for “all proposed space projects”.
“POLLUTION OF THE LUNAR ATMOSPHERE IS A REAL POSSIBILITY”
There’s already evidence that rocket plumes may deplete ozone, and vaporised space debris could affect the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere. Hydrazine fuel, often released unburned in the early stages of lift-off, is known to cause diseases in people living near rocket launch sites.
Possible pollution
Worse, nuclear power is once more being touted as the only viable option for Moon missions. NASA and the US Department of Energy recently tested a nuclear fission reactor prototype, called KRUSTY (the Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology), as a power source for long-duration lunar missions, heralding a new era of supposedly “safe” and “efficient” nuclear-powered space exploration. Over the past half century the Soviets have sent more than 40 nuclear reactors into space.
Historically, many prospective space ‘colonists’ have been untroubled by the risk of contaminating the Moon’s environment. Marshall T. Savage, a space settlement fanatic who penned a book about “colonising the galaxy in eight easy steps”, wrote in a 1995 Space Governance article: “We can’t really mess up the Moon, either by mining it or building nuclear power plants. We can ruthlessly strip mine the surface of the Moon for centuries and it will be hard to tell we’ve even been there. The same is true of atomic power. We could wage unlimited nuclear warfare on the surface of the Moon, and be hard pressed after the dust had settled to tell anything had happened.”
But he’s wrong: we can mess up the Moon. Its ‘surface boundary exosphere’ – now recognised as a very fragile, thin atmosphere – is vulnerable to being altered. NASA has acknowledged that “irreversible pollution of the lunar atmosphere is a real possibility”. Philip Metzger, an American planetary scientist, says that with “many, many landings on the Moon, eventually you’ll put so much [exhaust] gas into that environment that the atmosphere is no longer a collision-less atmosphere”, in which the constituent gas molecules never collide with one another. “Then it becomes a layered atmosphere. Once that happens, suddenly it takes a very long time for all that gas to escape back to space, hundreds of years.”
One environmental risk all stakeholders agree on is that posed by space debris. There’s already about 5000 satellites in orbit around Earth, of which roughly 2000 are operational, plus hundreds of millions of tiny pieces of debris. Ninety-five per cent of the stuff in low-Earth orbit is classified as ‘space junk’. More space debris makes accessing space costlier in terms of loss of equipment (and possibly of human life). There’s also the risk of the Kessler effect: a cascade of collisions,
Companies plan to launch large numbers of satellites into very low orbits, which are the most valuable slots
to the point where the most useful orbital slots become permanently clogged.
“We are in the process of messing up space, and most people don’t realise it because we can’t see it the way we can see fish kills, algal blooms or acid rain,” Michael Krepon, an expert on nuclear and space issues, said in 2015. Maybe we’ll understand only when it’s too late, “when we can’t get our satellite television and our telecommunications ... when we get knocked back to the 1950s”.
The current clashes over space are rooted in the nitty-gritty of international space law. There are five multilateral UN treaties governing space, most importantly the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), which has been ratified by 109 states, including all major spacefaring nations. It defines outer space as a global commons, the province of all humanity, free to be used and explored “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries”, “on a basis of equality” and only for “peaceful purposes”.
Article II of the OST has become the major sticking point in the new space race. It forbids “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”. No nation can make a territorial claim on the Moon or on any other celestial bodies, such as asteroids.
While the OST contains no explicit ban of appropriation by private enterprise, Steven Freeland, a professor specialising in space law at Western Sydney University and Australia’s representative to the UN Committee
on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), says discussions at the time of the OST negotiations clearly show the states parties, including the US, were “of the opinion that Article II prohibited both public and private appropriation”.
Yet this perceived legal uncertainty is the loophole that commercial companies are now exploiting. They’ve actively lobbied for an interpretation of OST Article II in the domestic space law of certain countries, to allow for private ownership of resources extracted from the Moon or other celestial bodies. They argue that, because the OST declares all humans are free to “use” space, companies can exercise this right by mining anywhere they like. They won’t claim ownership of the land itself, but will claim ownership of the resources they mine there.
They’ve already had a major win in this regard. The space industry lobby in the US put pressure on members of Congress to reinterpret the US’s obligations under international space law, to become more ‘business friendly’. The outcome was the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness
Act, signed into law by President Obama. Since then, companies owned by US citizens have been given the right to claim ownership of – and sell – any resources they mine off-Earth.
Further emboldened by the Trump administration, the “commercial [space] industry is becoming far more aggressive in how it lobbies for its own interests” in the US, Freeland says. There have been Acts proposed in recent years to enable a corporate space culture of “permissionless innovation”, with little regulatory oversight. In a 2017 speech, President Trump’s space law adviser Scott Pace said, “It bears repeating: outer space is not a ‘global commons’, not the ‘common heritage of mankind’, not ‘ res communis’ [area of territory that is not subject to legal title of any state], nor is it a public good.”
Even if you accept the US government’s interpretation of Article II – that space resources, but not the territory on which they’re located, can be owned – what happens if someone mines an asteroid out of existence, which is an act of outright appropriation?
Should the public trust that companies mining in space wi ll do the right thing? We’re still uncovering the full extent of terrestrial mining companies’ cover-ups. For instance, inhouse scientists at Exxon – now Exxon-Mobil, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world – knew long ago that burning fossil fuels was responsible for global warming, but they actively buried those findings and discredited climate change science for decades.
We live in a world where ‘meta-national’ companies can accrue and exercise more wealth and power than
traditional nation-states. Silicon Valley is believed to be becoming more powerful than not only Wall Street but also the US government. Branson and other space billionaires like to reassure the masses they’re “democratising” space: just as plane travel started out for the wealthy and gradually became cheaper, so too will space travel. Yet this conveniently overlooks the fact that railroads, airlines and now space industries have all been heavily subsidised by taxpayers. “When we take a step back and notice that private corporations are often even less accountable than governments, then it seems mistaken to say these decisions have been democratised,” Ryan Jenkins, an emerging sciences ethicist at California Polytechnic State University, says. “They’ve merely been privatised.”
Lenient supervision
In 2017, Luxembourg – already a corporate tax haven, complicit in international investor tax avoidance and evasion – followed the US’s lead and passed a space-resources law that allows companies to claim resources they extract from space as private property. Guardian journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian recounted a chilling comment from an American space executive: “We just want to work with a government who won’t get in the way.” Companies anywhere in the world can stake resource claims in space under this new law; their only requirement is an office in Luxembourg.
This sets a murky precedent of ‘regulatory forum-shopping’, where companies choose to incorporate in states where they’ll be most leniently supervised. In 2018, a Silicon Valley start-up called Swarm Technologies illegally launched four miniature satel l ites known as CubeSats into space from India. They’d been refused launch permission in the US due to safety concerns over whether the satellites could be tracked once in orbit. Fined US$900,000 by the US Federal Communications Commission, the company was subsequently given permission to start communicating with its satellites, and launched more CubeSats as part of a payload on a SpaceX rocket that November. In January 2019, the company raised $25 million in venture capital.
Space start-ups that are prepared – unlike Swarm Technologies – to play
WHAT HAPPENS IF SOMEONE MINES AN ASTEROID OUT OF EXISTENCE?
by the rules are nonetheless still proposing to launch their own swarms of hundreds or thousands of satellites into very low orbits around Earth. SpaceX has already launched over 1000 internet-beaming Starlink satellites, aiming to have a constellation of at least 30,000 in orbit eventually. The UK’s Royal Astronomical Society said these satellites will “compromise astronomical research” due to light pollution, and questioned why there’d been no proper consultation with the scientific community before launch.
What protections exist for the Moon? After the Moon landing in 1969, there was a growing sense in the international community that the Outer Space Treaty did not go far enough towards establishing rules of lunar engagement.
A new treaty was proposed, which came to be called the Moon Agreement. This received unanimous approval from the UN General Assembly, and opened for signature in 1979. In stark contrast to the 1967 OST, however, the Moon Agreement has only 18 states parties to the treaty, of which one is Australia (India and France have signed but not ratified the treaty). None of the spacefaring nations with a crewed space programme would sign it.
The Moon Agreement reaffirms many of the same general principles as the OST: that the Moon is the “province of all mankind”, to be used and explored only for peaceful purposes.
But in Article 11, the Moon Agreement states the Moon and its natural resources are the “common heritage of mankind”, which means something quite different to “province of mankind”, explains Joanne Gabrynowicz, editor-in-chief emerita of the Journal
of Space Law. The term province of mankind affirms that space is for the use and exploration of all humans ( gender-biased language notwithstanding). Common heritage of man
kind is a term yet to be clearly defined, but suggests the Moon is the repository of many varied forms of human heritage, not just economic but also historical, religious, cosmological, cultural and scientific – all of which must be taken into account when deciding what can be done there. “This was the first source of controversy in the Moon Agreement,” says Gabrynowicz.
The next controversy was that, while in theory the Moon Agreement allows for the use and exploration of the Moon, the conditions on this use (and any proposed mineral extraction) are stringent.
The Moon Agreement calls for the states parties to establish a more detailed international governance regime once the exploitation of the natural resources of the moon is “about to become feasible”. Consideration must be given to environmental risks. Most significantly, there must be mandatory and “equitable sharing ... in the benefits derived from those resources, whereby the interests and needs of the developing countries ... shall be given special consideration”.
In spite of the rhetoric of all humans being comrades on Spaceship Earth, when it came down to it, the wealthy, spacefaring nations were not prepared to contemplate the possibility of sharing the financial or other benefits of space-resource prospecting with poorer nations.
Treaties
Australia’s ratifying of the Moon Agreement wasn’t so much to do with divvying up space resources, but to support the principles of non-nuclear proliferation. The Moon Agreement put in place stronger prohibitions against nuclear weapons in space and on the Moon than the OST, and Australia’s representatives to the UN understood these were security and arms control treaties more than space treaties.
Kerrie Dougherty, former curator of space history at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, says it’s often forgotten that Australia held the chair of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space’s Scientific and Technical Subcommittee for more than 30 years, and was “therefore influential in the development of many aspects of the space regime that is governed by the various UN treaties”. Now that the Australian Space Agency has been established, she believes the country is in a strong position to play mediator once again.
Since the establishment of the Australian Space Agency in 2018, those who strongly support the growth of local space commerce have been hinting – rather loudly – that Australia should consider withdrawing from the Moon Agreement.
“The train is moving very quickly for the space industry here, and we’re concerned that developing a regime through the UN is not going to be a fast process,” William Barrett, of the Space Industry Association of Australia, said at a discussion of the Moon Agreement hosted by his association. “People in industry want to know: can I protect my assets? And I’m not sure how long they’re prepared to wait for an answer on that.”
However, when Alexandra Seneta, the Australian Space Agency’s executive director of regulation and international obligations, was asked at the same event if Australia might consider withdrawing from the Moon Agreement, she responded emphatically. “No. These treaties are black-letter international law. We are committed to multilateralism, not unilateralism, when it comes to space.” Along with Steven Freeland, Seneta represents Australia at meetings of UN COPUOS. The Moon Agreement, in her view, “expresses the desire to prevent the Moon from becoming an area of international conflict”.
Many of the most passionate advocates for privatising space believe it will transform what has been mostly a military domain, governed by secrecy, into a place of free trade.
Others believe, just as passionately, that allowing commercial operators to undermine the principles of non-appropriation encoded within international space law is a sure-fire way to hasten global conflict in space. Nikki Coleman, an Australian space and military ethicist, returned from the UN Institute for Disarmament Research’s Space Security Conference in Geneva in 2019 feeling concerned at “the glacial pace at which we make and change laws regarding space” compared with the “breakneck pace at which commercial groups are now entering space”.
In 1997, the US Space Command (disbanded in 2002 but re-established in 2019 under President Trump, with responsibilities for space-warfighting) laid out their future for space in their ‘ Vision for 2020’: “Historically,
“SPACE FORCES WILL ... PROTECT MILITARY AND COMMERCIAL INTERESTS”
military forces have evolved to protect national interests and investment – both military and economic ...
“Likewise, space forces will emerge to protect military and commercial national interests and investment in the space medium.”
There is no separating “the militarisation, weaponisation and privatisation of space,” says Bruce Gagnon, an American activist who has rallied for social justice and peace in space for almost 30 years, and in 1992 founded the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. “It’s a seamless web.”
Many people within the wider Australian space community believe, like Dougherty, that Australia should use its position as a party to the Moon Agreement to play a leadership role in restarting a crucially important global conversation about space governance and security.
Annie Handmer, a scholar of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, has studied both the Antarctic Treaty System and the outer space treaties. She believes Australia’s track record using science diplomacy in Antarctica is something it should draw from as a global leader in space diplomacy.
In centuries past, the Moon was thought to be two-faced, to have a dual personality. It could be welcoming and serene, or the harbinger of lunacy and mayhem. The Earth has two faces to show to the Moon, too. Which one will we choose when the time comes?