▲ Vision on mineral extraction on an asteroid, from ExplainingTheFuture.com [Christopher Barnatt].

GLOBAL AFFAIRS JOURNAL / Mario Pereira

[14-page document. download in PDF]

INTRODUCTION

The American astrophysicist Michio Kaku recalls that when President Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana from Napoleon (in 1803) for the astronomical sum of 15 million dollars, he spent a long time in deep fear. The reason for this lay in the fact that he did not know for a long time whether the referenced territory (mostly unexplored) hid fabulous riches or, on the contrary, was a wasteland of no great value... The passage of time has more than proved the former, just as it proved that it was then that the march of the American pioneers began: those people who - just like the "Adelantados" of Castile and Extremadura in the 16th century - set out for the unknown in order to obtain fortune, discover new wonders and improve their social position.

Today's Jeffersons are the Musks and Bezos, American businessmen, owners of huge financial, commercial and technological emporiums, who, hand in hand with new "pioneers" (a mix between Jules Verne/Arthur C. Clark and Neil Armstrong/John Glenn) seek to reach the new frontier of Humanity: the commercial and mining exploitation of Outer Space.

Faced with such a challenge, there are many questions that we can (and should) ask ourselves. Here we will try to answer (at least briefly) whether the existing international and national rules and regulations concerning the mining of the Moon and celestial bodies constitute - or not - a sufficient framework for the regulation of such projected activities.

▲ lunar base proposal for obtaining helium, taken from ExplainingTheFuture.com [Christopher Barnatt].

GLOBAL AFFAIRS JOURNAL / Emili J. Blasco

[8-page document. download in PDF]

INTRODUCTION

The economic interest in space resources, or at least the reasonable expectation about the profitability of obtaining them, explains to a large extent the growing involvement of private investment in space travel.

In addition to the commercially strong artificial satellite industry, as well as the scientific and defense industries, where the state sector continues to play a leading role, the possibility of exploiting high-value raw materials present on celestial bodies, such as entrance asteroids closest to Earth and the Moon, has awakened a kind of gold rush that is fueling the new degree program in space.

The epic of the new space barons -Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos- has monopolized the public narrative, but alongside them there are other New Space Players, with varied profiles. Behind all of them there is a growing group of capitalist partners and restless investors willing to risk assets in the expectation of profits.

To speak of a fever is certainly exaggerated because the real economic benefit that can be achieved from space mining - obtaining platinum, for example, or lunar helium - has yet to be demonstrated, because although the technology is becoming cheaper, which financially allows us to take new steps in outer space, bringing tons of materials to Earth has a cost that in most cases detracts from the monetary sense of the operation.

It would be enough, however, that in certain situations it would be profitable for the issue space missions to increase, and it is assumed that this traffic in itself would generate the need for an infrastructure abroad, at least with stations where to refuel fuel - so expensive to lift to the firmament - manufactured from raw subject found in space (the water of the lunar poles could be transformed into propellant). It is this expectation, with a certain basis of reasonableness, which feeds the investments that are being made.

In turn, the increased space activity and the skill to obtain the sought-after resources project beyond our planet the geopolitical concepts developed for the Earth. The location of countries (there are particularly suitable locations for space launches) and the control of certain routes (the succession of the most convenient orbits for flights) are part of the new astropolitics.

▲ US X unmanned space plane, returning from its fourth mission, in 2017 [US Air Force].

GLOBAL AFFAIRS JOURNAL / Luis V. Pérez Gil

[10-page document. download in PDF]

INTRODUCTION

The militarization of space is a reality. The major powers have taken the step of putting satellites into orbit that can attack and destroy the space apparatus of the adversary or third States. The consequences for those who suffer these attacks can be catastrophic, because their communications, navigation and defense systems will be partially or totally disabled. This scenario raises, as in nuclear war, the possibility of a preemptive attack aimed at avoiding being in the hands of the adversary in an eventual war. The United States and Russia have the capability to carry out such actions, but the other powers do not want to lag behind. The rest are trying to follow the great powers, who dictate the rules of the system.

The great powers also compete in space to maintain their primacy in the global international system and try to ensure that, in the event of a confrontation, they can disable and destroy the adversary's command and control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, because without satellites their ability to defend themselves against the demolishing power of precision-guided weapons is reduced. From this follows the rule that whoever dominates space will dominate the Earth in a war.

This is one of the fundamental tenets of Friedman's work on power in international relations in this century, when he states that the wars of the future will be fought in space because adversaries will seek to destroy the space systems that allow them to select targets and the navigation and communications satellites to disable their warfare capabilities.

As a result, both the United States and Russia, as well as China, are financing large space programs and developing new technologies aimed at obtaining unconventional satellites and space planes, so that we can speak unequivocally of the militarization of space, as we shall see in the following sections.

But, before continuing, we must remember that there is a multilateral international treaty, called the Outer Space Treaty, initially signed by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union on January 27, 1967, which establishes a series of limitations to operations in space. According to this treaty, any country launching an object into space "shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, as well as over all staff carried thereon, while in space or in a celestial body"article 8). It also establishes that any country "shall be internationally manager for damage caused to another State party (...) by such an object or its component parts on Earth, in airspace or outer space"article 7). This means that any space satellite may approach a device of another country, follow it or make remote observations, but may not alter or interrupt its operability in any way. It should be clarified that, although nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction are prohibited in space, there is no limitation on the installation of conventional weapons on space satellites. At the urging of Russia and China, the United Nations General Assembly has been pushing since 2007 for a project multilateral treaty banning weapons in outer space, the use of force or the threat of force against space objects, but it has been systematically rejected by the United States.

▲ In addition to Moon return and Mars landings, asteroid travel programs also accelerate [NASA].

GLOBAL AFFAIRS JOURNAL / Javier Gómez-Elvira

[8-page document. download in PDF]

INTRODUCTION

Since time immemorial, human beings have imagined themselves outside the Earth, exploring other worlds. One of the first stories dates back to the second century A.D. Lucian of Samosata wrote a book in which his characters reached the Moon thanks to the impulse of a whirlwind and there they developed their adventures. Since then, numerous science fiction novels or stories can be found that take place on the Moon, Mars, other bodies of our Solar System or even beyond. Somehow all of them lost a bit of their fiction in the middle of the last century, with the first steps of an astronaut on our satellite. Unfortunately, what seemed to be the beginning of a new era did not go beyond 5 missions in 2 years.

The first stage began when President Kennedy uttered his famous phrase: "We choose to go to the Moon.... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too". Although perhaps the end was written in the beginning: the only goal was to demonstrate that the US was the technological leader over the USSR, and when this was achieved the project was stopped.

▲ Scene about anchoring on an asteroid to develop mining activity, from ExplainingTheFuture.com [Christopher Barnatt].

GLOBAL AFFAIRS JOURNAL / Emili J. Blasco

[8-page document. download in PDF]

INTRODUCTION

The new space degree program is based on more solid and lasting foundations -especially economic interests- than the first one, which was based on ideological skill and international prestige. In the new Cold War there are also space developments that obey the strategic struggle of the great powers, as occurred between the 1950s and 1970s, but today the exploration and defense aspects are joined by commercial interests: companies are taking over in many aspects from the protagonism of the States.

However debatable it may be to speak of a new space age, given that since the emblematic launch of Sputnik in 1957, there has been no end to programmed activity in different regions of space, including human presence (although manned trips to the Moon have ended, there have been trips and stays in the Earth's leave ), the truth is that we have entered a new phase.

Hollywood, which so well reflects the social reality and generational aspirations of each time, serves as a mirror. After a time without special space-related productions, since 2013 the genre is experiencing a resurgence, with new nuances. Films such as Gravity, Interstellar and Mars illustrate the moment of takeoff of a renewed ambition that, after the short horizon of the shuttle program - recognized as a mistake by NASA, as it focused on the Earth's orbit leave -, connects with the logical sequence of the perspectives opened by the arrival of man on the Moon: lunar instructions , manned trips to Mars and space colonization.

At the level of the collective imagination, the new space age starts from the square where the previous one "ended", that day in December 1972 when Gene Cernan, Apollo 17 astronaut, left the Moon. Somehow, in all this time there has been "the sadness of thinking that in 1973 we had reached the peak of our evolution as a species" and that later it stopped: "while we were growing up we were promised rocket backpacks, and in exchange we got Instagram", states the graphic commentary of one of the co-writers of Interstellar.

Something similar is what George W. Bush had expressed when in 2004 he commissioned NASA to start preparing for man's return to the Moon: "In the last thirty years, no human being has set foot on another world or ventured into space beyond 386 miles [621 kilometers in altitude], roughly the distance from Washington, DC, to Boston, Massachusetts".

The year 2004 could be considered the beginning of the new space age, not only because manned trips to the Moon and Mars have been back in NASA's sights since then, but also because it was the first milestone in private space exploration with the experimental flight of SpaceShipOne: it was the first access of a private pilot to orbital space, something that until then had been considered the exclusive domain of the government.

The American priority then went from the Moon to some of the asteroids and then to Mars, to return to the trip to our satellite to occupy the first place in the space diary . Returning to the Moon, the idea of a "return" to space exploration takes on a special significance.