Of course, the proponents will not want to call this set of institutions “ownership” of the asteroid. But that would be a distinction without a difference.

For all practical purposes it reserves the wealth of space for those who already have a great deal of wealth, and bars everybody else from acquiring a benefit except insofar as they buy that benefit from the very wealthy.

While it may be possible for somebody to make a $100 million investment to make $100 billion in revenue, the ability to make this substantial rate of return is restricted to those who already have $100 million.

Real space law encompasses traditional areas of law like contract, tort, criminal, insurance, intellectual property and real property. The last is the holy grail that advocates focus on the most while ignoring the rest of the body of space law.

Yes, or whomever the astronaut works for. This is what happened with the Apollo samples. Apollo astronauts picked them up, the USG took ownership of the samples, the USG loaned the samples out, and the USG subsequently sued individuals and organizations who failed to return said samples to USG possession.

That’s not true. The Outer Space Treaty forbids national sovereigns from appropriating celestial bodies, but expressly allows nations to “use” space. The official position of the United States as delineated in UNCOPUOS debates is that the Outer Space Treaty (and even the Moon Treaty) permits any nation or corporation to mine and otherwise use the resources of outer space. Labor attaches ownership to the ores or other extracted resources, even while the bodies “in place” remain the inheritance of all mankind.

Picking things up is a way of mining. It is also labour. So if the astronaut picks up the rock he owns it.

The Moon Treaty is a failed treaty (only 16 signatories and none with substantive space programs) and the U.S. never joined, regardless. It doesn’t constrain Posey’s draft in the least, and he and his staff would be stupid to let it. (But maybe that was their erroneous line of thought.)

“The law introduces two major principles. First if an American picks up a rock on an asteroid (or Mars) under US law he now owns that rock. The Outer Space Treaty would have allowed communist style automatic government ownership of that rock.”

That’s not true. The Outer Space Treaty forbids national sovereigns from appropriating celestial bodies, but expressly allows nations to “use” space. The official position of the United States as delineated in UNCOPUOS debates is that the Outer Space Treaty (and even the Moon Treaty) permits any nation or corporation to mine and otherwise use the resources of outer space. Labor attaches ownership to the ores or other extracted resources, even while the bodies “in place” remain the inheritance of all mankind.

Posey’s draft adds nothing to these long-standing principles, and would confuse them by unevenly applying these principles to certain celestial bodies (asteroids) and not others.

“The second principle is that companies are not allowed to interfere with each others operations. They now have a court in which to sue each other.”

The probability of Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, the only two nascent companies pursuing NEO resources, both getting to the point decades from now where they are extracting resources is vanishingly small. The probability that they would both extract resources from the same location on the same NEO at the same time is ridiculously tiny. Of all the space-related issues that the U.S. Congress needs to pay attention to, this is not one.

Aside from giving Posey’s staff something to write about in his next newsletter, there’s no need for this legislation. If passed, it would do more harm than good.

If Posey was actually serious about NEO resources, then a good first step would be to authorize a small, COTS-like program for small robotic NEO probes and/or in-situ NEO data, and ensure that the appropriators fund it. This is the market that Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries need now, not a court decades from now for competing claims to resources that these companies haven’t even identified, nevertheless reached, extracted, or returned.

But starting such a program is a lot harder than writing confused, empty, non-relevant, go-nowhere legislative drafts.

Whose to say that they do.