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Space mining is now a totally real and legal thing

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 30 Nov 2015, 11:50am

Space mining is now a totally real and legal thing

It's not long before scenes like this will be realized.

In many sci-fi movies and games where man has ascended to the stars, space has become our next source of income.

Dead Space has huge ships called Planet Crackers, which are built specially to destroy barren worlds and asteroids to get at the valuable material that might be hiding inside. The Nostromo's crew in Alien is on a journey back to Earth transporting minerals and other mined metals. Even Star Wars has mining in it; Cloud City mines Tibanna gas (a critical component in the creation of blaster bolts). Also remember the Kessel run Han always brags about? Yup, he was transporting Spice, a drug mined in the space mines of Kessel.

From today, mining asteroids in space is no longer science fiction, it is now science fact.

President Obama has just signed into effect the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act or CSLCA. While it mostly involves the US' commitment to the International Space Station and relaxing regulations on space start-ups, the legislation also contains a section about space mining. Specifically, it states that under US law, that it is legal for a corporation to claim property rights to on a 'celestial body', which is assumed to be an asteroid, moon or something similar. It doesn't mean that the first corporation or person to stake a claim on an asteroid gets to keep it though, as the property rights only extend to what is mined and not the whole asteroid itself. For example. if Corporation A claims Asteroid X, its claims only extend to what it can mine off the rock, not the rock itself, which can't be claimed by anybody.

While the news of the legalities of asteroid mining something in itself, it's also opens up the question on how the US expects to enforce its law in space. Even more interestingly, since nobody owns space, would corporations not bound by US law even care what the US says about asteroid mining?

Source: US Congress (via Gizmodo)

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