why asteroid mining could restart the cold war

Despite several startups eager to set out into deep space and mine asteroids just like in a sci-fi movie but with fewer people and more robots, the sad fact is that extracting resources from the objects over our heads is technically illegal. No matter how much you’d like to and how much a few people insist, you cannot own land on the Moon, or Mars, or any other celestial body in any legitimate capacity. But as noted many times before on this blog, its virtually an inevitability that one day, this restriction in the Outer Space Treaty will fall and our extraterrestrial colonies won’t be shy about wanting to self-govern, although probably not as quickly as some people imagine that would happen. Realizing this, in a rare act of forward thinking, Congress has been working on an exemption allowing individuals and private companies to claim territory on asteroids and other worlds if they can legitimately travel there on their own: the Space Act of 2015. But sadly, while it sits in committee, there are legal scholars who doubt that it would actually work.

Here’s the big problem. One of the reasons why the treaty specified that no one could lay claim on extraterrestrial bodies has little to do with the egalitarian altruism nations felt towards space. It was actually a preemptive maneuver against military installations in orbit and beyond, which both the United States and the USSR were actively considering during the Cold War. They were basically trying to deny each other higher ground for massive nuclear launches that would open the door to movie-worthy scenarios like secretly launching a government to a lunar base, trying to fight a nuclear war on Earth, then allow the planet to recover before returning and rebuilding the nation. Allowing private entities to be exempt from this restriction raises the specter of some shady spies and military contractors doing clandestine preparations for an attack, or setting up the infrastructure for orbital and deep space force projection, so Russia and China will balk.

Without their public approval, there’s the legal argument that the United States is violating a key provision of the treaty, which also governs the rules for nuclear testing used for a saber-rattling exercise in just how much the superpowers and their proxies were committed to the strategy of mutually assured destruction. And you probably won’t be surprised to hear that was a lot, to the point of possibly building doomsday machines. Should the Outer Space Treaty’s future become in doubt, there’s a non-trivial chance that the Cold War will come roaring back, albeit it would be a three-way contest between the major space-faring global powers who haven’t much liked one another for generations now. Figuring out how to get everyone on board is crucial because we all now know that we simply cannot keep the treaty the way it is for humanity to actually start to colonize space, but that we also cannot just openly challenge the status quo without potentially dire geopolitical consequences waiting for us on the other side of that legal gauntlet.

Sadly, it seems that human space exploration began as a military affair and would run as such until the Moon landing, and will now begin to creep back into a military-driven mode as nations able to claim extraterrestrial territory and resources seek to enforce that claim with weapons at the ready, relying on intimidation and the same MAD tactics they have for the past 70 years as they expand into the solar system. But that said, there is the remote possibility that seeing how much there is for the taking, the U.S., Russia, and China will let greed win over pride and bitter memories, and make trade agreements to invest in each others’ space mining companies. This seems like a very optimistic scenario, I know, but this is pretty much the only way I see any sort of cooperation on amending the Outer Space Treaty happening in the foreseeable future. For a large enough sum of cash, even the most complicated frenemy relationship could find a way to peacefully avoid flash points. And we just might get our wish to expand into space just like most futurists half a century ago dreamed we finally would, as a very welcome byproduct…