Space treaty’s ambiguities may impede entrepreneurs who are looking far out
From Launch Complex 17 here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, many of NASA’s robotic planetary missions blasted off. Soon, the two huge towers that once cradled Delta 2 rockets will be torn down. A new tenant － Moon Express, a tiny company with far-out ambitions － is moving in.
Next year, the company, with just 30 employees, aims to be the first private entity to put a small robotic lander on the moon. It is investing at least $1.85 million to renovate decades-old buildings here. The company is transforming a parking lot into a miniature moonscape and will set up an engineering laboratory, a mission operations room and a test stand for spacecraft engine firings.
Its second spacecraft aims to land in 2019 near the moon’s south pole. A third, larger spacecraft in 2020 is to gather samples and then bring them back to Earth, the first haul of moon rocks since the end of the Apollo missions 45 years ago.
But these plans almost came to a halt a couple of years ago － not because of technical challenges or financial shortfalls, but because of an international agreement known as the Outer Space Treaty, which will have its 50th anniversary this year.
The treaty spells out what countries are and are not allowed to do in space. Its crowning achievement was stopping the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union from expanding into space.
But the agreement may now be getting in the way of entrepreneurs with plans to push farther and faster into space than national agencies like NASA.
“Before it was something really, really hypothetical,” said Fabio Tronchetti, a law professor at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. “But now there are groups that are really serious. It changes everything.”
Robert D. Richards, Moon Express’s chief executive － whose business plan is “to expand Earth’s economic sphere to the moon and beyond” － is far from the only entrepreneur looking business opportunities beyond our planet.
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, boldly proclaims that his company will begin sending colonists to Mars in a decade. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is using part of his fortune to finance his rocket company, Blue Origin, and predicts millions of people will be living and working in space.
These companies raise questions addressed only fuzzily by the Outer Space Treaty: What are private companies allowed to do in space? Can a company mine the moon or an asteroid and then sell what it has pulled out? How are countries to regulate these businesses?
Internationally, countries have been discussing how to answer these questions. In the United States, Congress has begun tackling regulatory issues.
Some warn that if the United States does not set up business-friendly policies and policies, then the start-ups could move elsewhere － including such seemingly unlikely places as Luxembourg.
From Launch Complex 17 here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, many of NASA’s robotic planetary missions blasted off. Soon, the two huge towers that once cradled Delta 2 rockets will be torn down. A new tenant － Moon Express, a tiny company with far-out ambitions － is moving in.
Next year, the company, with just 30 employees, aims to be the first private entity to put a small robotic lander on the moon. It is investing at least $1.85 million to renovate decades-old buildings here. The company is transforming a parking lot into a miniature moonscape and will set up an engineering laboratory, a mission operations room and a test stand for spacecraft engine firings.
Its second spacecraft aims to land in 2019 near the moon’s south pole. A third, larger spacecraft in 2020 is to gather samples and then bring them back to Earth, the first haul of moon rocks since the end of the Apollo missions 45 years ago.
But these plans almost came to a halt a couple of years ago － not because of technical challenges or financial shortfalls, but because of an international agreement known as the Outer Space Treaty, which will have its 50th anniversary this year.
The treaty spells out what countries are and are not allowed to do in space. Its crowning achievement was stopping the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union from expanding into space.
But the agreement may now be getting in the way of entrepreneurs with plans to push farther and faster into space than national agencies like NASA.
“Before it was something really, really hypothetical,” said Fabio Tronchetti, a law professor at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. “But now there are groups that are really serious. It changes everything.”
Robert D. Richards, Moon Express’s chief executive － whose business plan is “to expand Earth’s economic sphere to the moon and beyond” － is far from the only entrepreneur looking business opportunities beyond our planet.
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, boldly proclaims that his company will begin sending colonists to Mars in a decade. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is using part of his fortune to finance his rocket company, Blue Origin, and predicts millions of people will be living and working in space.
These companies raise questions addressed only fuzzily by the Outer Space Treaty: What are private companies allowed to do in space? Can a company mine the moon or an asteroid and then sell what it has pulled out? How are countries to regulate these businesses?
Internationally, countries have been discussing how to answer these questions. In the United States, Congress has begun tackling regulatory issues.
Some warn that if the United States does not set up business-friendly policies and policies, then the start-ups could move elsewhere － including such seemingly unlikely places as Luxembourg.
A Quick Fix Before Launching
The Outer Space Treaty － officially it is the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space － declares that “the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all states parties to the treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes.”
The treaty also prohibited nations from making any claim of sovereignty over any part of the rest of the solar system.
Moon Express ran into a bureaucratic wall because the treaty declares that activities of nongovernmental entities － a classification that includes commercial companies － “require authorization and continuing supervision” of the government. （The United States insisted on the clause, rejecting the Soviet view that space exploration should be limited to governments.）
“We had a mission planned, we had investors invested but didn't have a way forward at the end of 2015,” Dr. Richards testified during a Senate committee hearing in May. “There wasn't anybody that didn't want to say yes. There was just no mechanism to do so.”
The Federal Aviation Administration licenses rocket launchings and re-entry of commercial spacecraft from orbit to ensure the safety of people on the ground.
The Federal Communications Commission regulates communications satellites, and the Department of Commerce regulates commercial remote sensing satellites.
But the United States does not as yet have a process for authorizing or supervising novel endeavors like a private company’s landing on the moon.
Moon Express spent about a year working with the F.A.A., the State Department and other agencies to devise what Dr. Richards called a “temporary patch,” using the F.A.A.’s existing authority to review rocket payloads to gain the approval Moon Express was seeking.
In announcing the decision, however, the F.A.A. said the approval applied only to this one Moon Express launching and that not even Moon Express could count on a favorable outcome in the future.
The Outer Space Treaty － officially it is the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space － declares that “the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all states parties to the treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes.”
The treaty also prohibited nations from making any claim of sovereignty over any part of the rest of the solar system.
Moon Express ran into a bureaucratic wall because the treaty declares that activities of nongovernmental entities － a classification that includes commercial companies － “require authorization and continuing supervision” of the government. （The United States insisted on the clause, rejecting the Soviet view that space exploration should be limited to governments.）
“We had a mission planned, we had investors invested but didn't have a way forward at the end of 2015,” Dr. Richards testified during a Senate committee hearing in May. “There wasn't anybody that didn't want to say yes. There was just no mechanism to do so.”
The Federal Aviation Administration licenses rocket launchings and re-entry of commercial spacecraft from orbit to ensure the safety of people on the ground.
The Federal Communications Commission regulates communications satellites, and the Department of Commerce regulates commercial remote sensing satellites.
But the United States does not as yet have a process for authorizing or supervising novel endeavors like a private company’s landing on the moon.
Moon Express spent about a year working with the F.A.A., the State Department and other agencies to devise what Dr. Richards called a “temporary patch,” using the F.A.A.’s existing authority to review rocket payloads to gain the approval Moon Express was seeking.
In announcing the decision, however, the F.A.A. said the approval applied only to this one Moon Express launching and that not even Moon Express could count on a favorable outcome in the future.
