Asteroid Economies: Capital, Property Rights and the Commercial Logic of International Space Law

ABSTRACT

The rapid commercialisation of outer space has placed the question of space resource extraction at the centre of an increasingly contentious international legal debate. While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty establishes that no State may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, it leaves conspicuously unsettled the question of whether private actors may extract and own the resources found therein. This lacuna has prompted a small but growing cohort of States, led by the United States, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, and Australia, to enact domestic legislation permitting their nationals to acquire property rights in extracted space resources. The resulting patchwork of national frameworks sits in uneasy tension with the principle of the common heritage of mankind articulated in the 1979 Moon Agreement, which commands the equitable sharing of benefits derived from lunar and celestial resources. Against this backdrop, the article examines the economic incentives driving the space mining industry, which some analysts project will generate revenues exceeding USD 1 trillion by 2040, and assesses how existing and emergent legal architectures respond to those incentives. The article argues that a coherent international regime must reconcile the legitimate commercial expectations of investor-States and private enterprises. It further contends that bilateral and mini-lateral instruments, while offering pragmatic short-term solutions, risk entrenching inequality among spacefaring and non-spacefaring nations unless anchored to multilaterally negotiated benchmarks administered through a reformed Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.