Comments on: Jake Garn and the “crusade for Mars”

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 14:48:22 +0000

Unfortunatley I see the 1967 Treaty as an opening for corporations to exploit space. They, and the very rich, are the only ones who could technically get there. By the time an average joe could get to a ny place, it would be owned by the “Microsofts” of that time. I could also see company having employee’s sign waivers, much as they do today about Intellectual Porperty, where an employee signs the rights to wherever they are to the company that got them there.

By: Arthur Smith

Arthur Smith — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 21:25:14 +0000

Bill, not my plan – it’s Alan Wasser’s, but I think it’s a good one. They have a first draft of legal wording here:

http://www.spacesettlement.org/law/

but this has never been introduced as law, as far as I am aware.

By: Michael Turner

Michael Turner — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 16:10:41 +0000

Oops, sorry for the double-posting, I got confused … or more confused than usual, I should say.

By: Michael Turner

Michael Turner — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 16:09:53 +0000

First stake in the ground on an asteroid gives you the whole asteroid? Eh?

What if you land some factory/mining probe with enough exploitation equipment to use only, say, .01% of Ceres. And somebody else lands enough equipment on the other side to exploit .01% of Ceres not long after. What if your equipment fails (oops, not exactly what I meant, but anyway), and the other party’s works?

I started an SF story last year (never finished) with lunar exploitation based on an odd legal premise: that those staking lunar mineral-rights claims had to actually walk the perimeter of their claim, in space suits but otherwise on the surface, exposed to radiation. Of course, it was just a flimsy pretext for putting more characters -indeed, a whole frontier-society subculture – on the Moon. And it would require a definition of “space suit” that precluded any mobile apparatus that allowed you to rove the entire circumference of the Moon, self-sufficiently. Still, it got me to wondering: just how do you make a claim purely robotically? Robots might get very small, very fast – they already have.

We have to acknowledge, I think, that property rights are an evolved, long-thought-out institution, not axiomatic. Space is unprecedented, an encounter with legal unknowns. Making a claim remotely, with equipment – what’s the precedent for that? Analogies may not work.

By: Michael Turner

Michael Turner — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 16:03:12 +0000

First stake in the ground on an asteroid gives you the whole asteroid? Eh?

By: Bill White

Bill White — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 14:56:30 +0000

Jake Garn wrote a book “Why I Believe” I wonder if that book influences his interest in space.

By: Harold LaValley

Harold LaValley — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 12:56:00 +0000

In the broadest of sense a crusade is almost always about land, resources, people and finally of religion.
Should we or why would we go to mars is asked in the article.
Simply because it is there we must go. It is a challenge, an adventure, a chance for riches and of fame or of glory.
Garns establishing of a mission launch site on the moon only makes sense if all the materials to create the rockets that one would go in are processed from the moons resources. A permanent base also only makes sense if there is a reason to stay. Is the study of the moon for scientific reasons enough or must there be something else?

By: Jeff Foust

Jeff Foust — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 00:44:25 +0000

FYI, I have posted a separate entry on the article that triggered this discussion: http://www.spacepolitics.com/archives/000226.html You may want to move your discussion there in the event anyone still wants to talk about Jake Garn…

By: Bill White

Bill White — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 23:05:11 +0000

Arthur,

I am curious. Are there drafts of sample legislation to carry out your plan?

With law, the devil is always in the details.

Has a fully detailed proposed Congressional bill been drafted by anyone you are aware of?

By: Arthur Smith

Arthur Smith — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 21:54:03 +0000

The Space Settlement Initiative – http://www.spacesettlement.org/ or click on my name – tries to answer some of these property rights questions in a context that claims to be compatible with our treaty obligations. Debatable, but it’s withstood quite a bit of criticism. I’ve thought about it off and on for a few years now, and generally think it might be exactly what we need.

But others with legitimate points do disagree on the legal grounds here – Wayne White for example has written a series of interesting papers proposing a specific sort of “pseudo” property right based on usage/improvement (at least if I remember correctly)…