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Reuters

Can anyone claim mining rights on Mars, or on asteroids?
Business leaders and legal experts say the question has become more than philosophical as a growing number of firms, often backed by capital and technology from Silicon Valley, have set their sights on the resources of outer space asteroids and the Red Planet.
In order to avoid conflicts between competing companies and countries over outer space resources, more work needs to be done on Earth to determine who owns commodities taken from celestial bodies, analysts said.
“There is a huge debate on whether companies can simply travel to space and extract its resources,” said Barry Kellman, a law professor who studies space governance at DePaul University in Chicago.
“There is no way to answer the question until someone does it,” Kellman said.
US-based Planetary Resources, a firm backed by Google founder Larry Page and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, expects to be mining asteroids for water in the next 10 to 15 years.
The company will launch its first robotic probe mission to scout asteroids for resource deposits in 2020, said Planetary Resources’ Chief Executive Chris Lewicki.
“If you obtain a resource and bring it with you, it becomes your property,” Lewicki said, citing recently passed space laws in the US and Luxembourg that offer a legal framework to ensure that private operators can be confident about their rights over resources they extract in space.
“You can sell, keep or deliver (space resources) peacefully,” Lewicki said.
If you obtain a resource and bring it with you, it becomes your property
Planetary Resources’ Chief Executive Chris Lewicki
The firm plans to extract oxygen and hydrogen – the components of water – from asteroids to sell.
Lewicki is not planning on bringing those water resources back to Earth; he wants to market them in space, creating a “service station” for other exploration missions.
Hydrogen and oxygen, kept at a docking station orbiting around Earth, would be used to fuel other space ships.
Moving those fuels from Earth into outer space is expensive, he said, and having energy accessible to ships will make voyaging easier.
One modest sized asteroid, about as big as a football field, “has enough oxygen and hydrogen to fuel every launch in the history of space (travel),” Lewicki said.
“We are seeing a boom – that might be a bad choice of words – in access to space.”
Other analysts are not sure if companies can just fly up and start harvesting cosmic water, legally speaking.
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is the main international standard for what companies and countries are allowed to do when they aren’t on earth, said Jacob Haqq-Misra, director of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, a Seattle-based research group.
The treaty says that space is the “provenance of all mankind”. Countries cannot claim “national appropriation” or sovereignty over the Moon or other celestial bodies “by occupation or by other means”, the treaty says.
This clause could prove tricky for private firms who want to mine on asteroids or Mars, said Haqq-Misra, including Planetary Resources and SpaceX, the private rocket ship company run by tech billionaire Elon Musk.
“If SpaceX, a US corporation, was to claim asteroid profits as its own, there is some ambiguity as to whether that constitutes national appropriation,” Haqq-Misra said.
SpaceX declined to comment.
While the 1967 treaty is considered the global standard for sharing space, individual countries have recently passed laws allowing for property rights in the great beyond.
Luxembourg this month brought into force laws allowing private firms to own resources extracted from outer space in a move hailed by the nascent space mining industry.
Planetary Resources, for example, maintains an office in the small European country better known for its finance industry than space exploration.
The US in 2015 introduced similar legislation for private space resource ownership but it only applies to firms majority owned by Americans.
Nasa, the US government’s space agency, maintains a “neutral position with regard to mining of minerals on Mars”, a spokesman said.
“If companies request assistance or want partnerships related to mining on Mars, we help to the best of our ability,” Nasa spokesman Guy Webster said in an email without providing specifics on space resource ownership.


Who owns Mars? Mining puts spotlight on out-of-this-world property claims

The Gale Crater on Mars. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says space is the provenance of all mankind - but space-mining companies aren’t so sure. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS/Abaca Press

A trip to Mars with Space X could cost the same as buying a house in the U.S.

Elon Musk. Photo: Asa Mathat/D: All Things Digital

China to build first Mars simulation base

Desert in Haixi prefecture in Qinghai province where the Mars village will be built. Photo: Alamy

This artist's rendering provided to China's Xinhua News Agency on Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016 by the lunar probe and space project center of Chinese State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, shows a concept design for a Mars rover and lander. According to Chinese state media, China plans to launch an orbiter that will deploy a lander and rover onto the surface of Mars in 2020. (Xinhua via AP)

Boeing says it will beat SpaceX to Mars

Illustrations of Boeing and NASA's Space Launch System (left) versus SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket (right). Photo: Boeing/NASA; SpaceX

Elon Musk outlines vision for life on Mars with droids, glass domes, and huge rockets

Elon Musk, chief executive officer for Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), speaks during the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico. Photo: Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg

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