The previous U.S. government had done that, too, buy choosing Constellation. It’s more likely to happen under the current government than it was under the previous one, and relatively soon, even if not by the government.

“The CURRENT US government has ruled out the possibility that Americans will SOON revisit the Moon.” Do you prefer that wording? It is more accurate, I concede, but it doesn’t much alter my argument that discussions of extraterrestrial property rights aren’t “pressing.”

May I hope that you will concede my argument that a) property rights are important and b) we should blow the Moon Treaty and sections of the OST to smithereens if necessary to establish those rights, but c) unilateral declarations aren’t the way to get there.

Oh well. You got further into a worthy fight than I have, and while I’d have preferred that you throw a few more lefts than rights, I appreciate that you’re fighting for me and many others, and I thank you for the blows you struck, and wish you well in coming matches.

Nonsense.

Seriously. CEI, of which Rand Simberg is an “Adjunct Scholar” (i.e., generally unpaid), is a minor league libertarian think tank. It doesn’t have a lot of clout in Washington, D.C. — don’t take my prejudiced word about this, go bounce around from topic to topic at Wikipedia for an hour or so. It doesn’t much concern itself with science and technology except for the obligatory libertarian rejection of global warming. This is probably its very first space-related paper in its 28 years of existence. Strike One.

This is not a pressing issue. No earthly nation has sent human beings to any moon or planet other than our own for over 40 years. No nation has claimed ownership of any moon or planet since the possibility can be argued to have risen, in 1957. A formal widely recognized agreement known as the Outer Space, signed by all spacefaring nations in 1967, rules out such ownership; no nation in 45 years has made a formal objection to the treaty, has proposed revisions intended to benefit profit-making organizations, or has rescinded its agreement. No nation on earth in 2012 has firm plans for sending astronauts to the Moon or to any other planet or any other moon or any other celestial object within the next several decades; only several nations have publicly considered in even the vaguest way manned flights to other celestial bodies at any time whatsoever. The US government has specifically ruled out the possibility that Americans will revisit the moon. Simberg’s paper isn’t applicable to the real world. Strike Two.

There are about 350 nations on earth. Many of them have reviewed and generally agreed with the principles expressed in something called The Moon Treaty, or The Moon Agreement, a U.N. proposed treaty that was formulated in the mid 1980’s. About 13 of them have gone so far as to sign the treaty and make it binding law in their country. The most recent nation to do so was Turkey, just a few weeks ago. This is not ancient history, in other words. The Moon Treaty in several ways is a logical outgrowth of the UN’s Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and its several follow-up agreements — on all of which the US is a full signatory. (Arguably the OST is more general, since it applies to all bodies in space. It bans ownership of any such body by any earthly nation. The MT bans ownership of extrerrestrial resouces by nations or companies or indivduals — only multinational organizations are pure enough to qualify.) Simberg’s paper deals with none of this, and suggests that the US government act unilateraly to impose some sort of quasi-ownership of extraterrestrial resources on private individuals or enterprises. Such a policy isn’t going to be acceptible, period. Other countries will object, the USA will have no legal counter, and we can’t even be sure the US government will even attempt to counter (do you suppose a future conservative Republican administration would feel duty-bound to defend a Sierra Club claim for half the moon’s surface to protec the lunar environment from exploitation by unscrupulous miners of Helium-3?) . Strike Three.

You don’t buy this? You think one of my “srikes” was just a foul tip? Let me offer a wildly different conception of things: The logical owners of lunar resources are people living on the moon — in particular, people who are born and live and raise children and eventually die on the moon. Such people don’t exist yet, but most of us would like to believe that they will exist, and most of us — upon reflection — would probably agree that the life of such people would be better of if they owned thie natural resources of their world, and even that the likelihood that such people might exist was tied to retaining such resources. I.e., you want to see real human beings living in real lunar cities? Then you let the water found on the moon and the platinum found on the moon and the Helium-3 found on the moon and the gold found on the moon belong to people who chose to live on the moon. Make the moon as poor and empty as the Gobi desert, and you’ll get a moon as well inhabited as the Gobi.

Simberg proposes a scheme which, in the end, will benefit earth-based capitalists more than lunar colonists and their descendents. (To be fair, I don’t think that’s his intent. But.) To me, that’s Strike Four.

———

But I’m old and sour. You go off and have a life of your own, Egad, and experience will make you knowledgeable about all sorts of stuff, and someday you too will be in your sixties, just another annoying opinionated old bastard, and I trust you and your fellows will have more understanding, more wisdom, and more charity — and better lives all round –than the tw*ts you replace on the internet.

I share your optimism.

@ DBN

I think there will be a market for knowledge and services for Moon related stuff (both government and private companies), but I think it will be quite a while until we can lower the costs enough for lunar resources to be competitive. Although I hope I’m wrong…

Somewhat relevant to the discussion… an admission by one of the leading Google Lunar X-Prize teams that their business model isn’t cutting it and they’re doing a rethink:

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/teams/rocket-city-space-pioneers/blog/rethinking-business-model

(1) Technology continues to advance around the world; computers get faster, materials more durable, robots more versatile. Some of these improvements will affect future spacecraft.
(2) We’ll be in better shape to evaluate COTS and Commercial Crew by the end of the year. The news might well be good.
(3) The financial health of the US government will surely improve over the coming decade, and with that a reduction of the pressure on NASA and other science-related agencies.
(4) There are other nations with active or potential manned space programs. People are still interested in spaceflight, if unwilling to pay much for it. At some point — maybe 30 or 40 years hence — we might see an India-China Moon Race, or a European Mars expedition.
(5) Global warming might be a forcing factor. I.e., it’s regarded as a serious issue outside the US, which suggests other nations will continue to build satellites for climate study, which will keep their space capabilities on track.
(6) And at the very least, I’d guess American spaceflight becomes a well-studied academic discipline by mid century. There’ll be journals — or gated web sites — where professors and bureaucrats from around the world post papers discussing OMBs role in cancelling this space telescope program or that, to what extent multiple contractors worked well togther or conspired against each other in the days of Apollo, looking to see how guidance concepts moved from Hughes to Lockheed to NASA to Rockwell, examining the successes and failures of declassified military programs, etc.

So if we can’t do anything else, we can always serve humanity as A Great Bad Example. Well, it’s more contribution than most nations make,

“and after that setting up an initial moon base might have cost about the same as was spent instead on Shuttle R&D and operations.”

I doubt it, but we’ll never know. Suffice it to say that doing things 1,000 times further away from LEO would have required a lot more support than what the Shuttle program consumed.

“The Brits (and the French most of the time, ditto the Dutch) had a very different plan. They sent out colonists.”

A good point, but an even better distinction between colonizing the America’s and colonizing just about anything in space. When the colonists were dropped off in the America’s, they could live off the land. As of right now, everything we need in space has to come from Earth, and though we’ll likely learn to make things in space eventually, the infrastructure to do that is a long ways away.

“And some of those newfangled states ended up not just as customers and shipping agents but as bonafide actors in human affairs.”

Let’s hope the same for space, but I have a hard time imagining when we’ll be able to support enough people in space that would want to split off to form their own nation – or that could survive in space without ties to Mother Earth.

Maybe I’m too damn practical, but from a logistics standpoint, I don’t see where the money is coming from to do any lunar dreams in the near future. Not Congress, and since there is no known assets in space that can be brought back to Earth to be monetized, no money-making/for-profit enterprises.

It’s too big of a jump right now to go directly to the Moon without a logistic system in place to support it. I don’t know why people don’t see that, but maybe they have become complacent being able to get their FedEx packages delivered anywhere in the world within 24 hours, and they think that NASA can do the same in space…

BTW we could also use better property rights for extraction industries, both the unmanned kind and the kind with humans on site, in international waters: that and in GEO are where we are going to learn the lessons about property rights on such frontiers.