The new space race is under way, but unlike the original two-state heat of the 1960s, today’s space race is a veritable tournament, with Europe, India, China and Japan competing with Russia and the US to colonise pieces of our extraterrestrial world for profit. Add to them an increasing number of private space ventures, and space is starting to look like a potential Wild West.
Space opened for business in 2015, when the US passed the SPACE Act, which allows entities to “possess, own, transport, use, and sell” any “space resource obtained” – notably excluding any potential living resources. Now, given the number of planned private missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond, disputes are practically inevitable. Companies such as Astrobotic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin in the US, PTScientists in Berlin and iSpace in Japan have imminent lunar missions launching as soon as next year, planning to set up lunar communications and infrastructures.
Governmental partnerships with these private companies, such as Nasa’s long reliance on Blue Origin and SpaceX to shuttle cargo to the ISS, only complicate matters further. The public/private partnerships have been great for extraterrestrial entrepreneurship and national budgets, but have increasingly made states dependent on private companies to get to space, potentially setting private interests against national or international goals.
All of this new activity will require governance. But, unlike the way we manage land and sea, we do not have good international protocols and parameters in place in space. The UN’s Outer Space Treaty from 1967 is woefully out of date for commercial interests, and given the failure even to ratify the UN Moon Treaty in 1979, interests have already spun well away from international political co-operation.
Current international policy around space, set by the the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs, has been patchwork at best, focusing primarily on establishing jurisdiction for potential criminal disputes or for patent and IP development. Those rules have yet to be put to the test between the partner states of the ISS.
In today’s increasingly volatile international climate, we’re unlikely to see compromises and deals struck that can adequately guide our new space-speculation activities. Add to that the US’s proposal to create a “space force”, and we’re set on a trajectory for 2019 to produce the first international incident in space.
There are various situations in which this could occur, from rival claims to lunar acreage from the private companies currently racing to set up outposts on the Moon, to conflicts over asteroid mining, if missions such the US’s OSIRIS-REx or Japan’s Hayabusa2 return with potentially lucrative samples, to more mundane failures of communication and co-ordination as our immediate orbit becomes increasingly congested.
And, as space missions become less about exploration and more about commercial potential, they could become vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Without any rules in place, however, the probability for international conflict from an extraterrestrial incident is quickly escalating. It may be minor at first, but even this ripple would have dramatic repercussions. How well we deal with that incident on Earth, will determine how our future unfolds in space.
Ben Lamm is a US-based technology entrepreneur and investor and CEO of Hypergiant
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
