A little bit of heaven.

• Author: Silber, Kenneth

Space-based commercial development will happen sooner than you think. How a system of extraterrestrial property rights might emerge.

Jim Benson plans to declare ownership of an asteroid orbiting between Earth and Mars. And he doesn't much care what the United Nations has to say about it. "If the U.N. doesn't like it, they can send a tank up to my asteroid, which of course they can't," he told the San Francisco Examiner this past February. In an interview with REASON, the 53-year-old entrepreneur is in a less belligerent mood, but the gist of his message remains the same. "There's really no entity to which such a claim of ownership can be made," he explains. "Therefore I believe it just needs to be made to the public in general."

Benson is the founder and CEO of SpaceDev, a Colorado-based company that is planning the first commercial mission beyond Earth orbit. The firm's Near Earth Asteroid Prospector, which it hopes to launch by mid-2001, is a desk-sized probe that will move into orbit around one of the hundreds of known near-Earth asteroids, collecting and transmitting scientific data, which will be sold to NASA, universities, or other clients. The probe then will land on the asteroid itself, which will be the basis for SpaceDev's property claim - including the right to mine what could be a wealth of natural resources.

SpaceDev is a publicly traded company, a fact that Benson expects will bolster the claim's legitimacy; the stockholders will "help strengthen the cause of property rights in space through sheer numbers," he says. He emphasizes that SpaceDev will not be accepting any government subsidies, since these might weaken the firm's assertion of asteroid ownership. Benson realizes that the Near Earth Asteroid Prospector will be navigating not only the depths of space but also a realm that is in some ways even more forbidding: the uncharted legal territory, and unpredictable politics, of owning property out there.

Benson is right to be wary of the United Nations. International law regarding space property rights is murky at best, downright hostile at worst. In particular, there are two international agreements, written under U.N. auspices, that are relevant to the question of owning territory or resources on celestial bodies such as the moon, the asteroids, and the planets. These are the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the Moon Treaty of 1979.

The Outer Space Treaty, which has been ratified by over 50 nations, including the United States, prohibits any claim of national sovereignty on an extraterrestrial body. The treaty makes no mention of private property, but it undercuts the ability of any government to recognize or enforce a private claim. Negotiated at the height of the U.S.-Soviet space race, the pact was a creation of Cold War politics; it assuaged each superpower's fear that the other might claim the moon or place nuclear missiles there. (The treaty bans military bases, weapons testing, and military maneuvers on celestial bodies.) The economic potential of space - the first commercial satellites had just been deployed in the mid-1960s - was a secondary consideration at most.

The Moon Treaty, too, reflects the international political climate of its era, in this case the 1970s emphasis on wealth transfer from the West to the Third World. The treaty (which applies to all celestial bodies, not just the moon) prohibits the ownership of territory by any government, "non-governmental entity," or "natural person"; space resources are defined as "the common heritage of mankind" and placed under the governance of an ill-defined "international regime."

The Moon Treaty, however, was not ratified by the United States, and it has dubious international standing; its signatories include Austria, Pakistan, and a half dozen other nations, none of them major space powers. Nonetheless, the treaty is nominally in force and could serve as a precedent for future attempts to collectivize the solar system.

The upshot of...