Who owns Mars?

Factual Questions
21

But the colony on Mars does not have all the capabilities of the home base. In specific, it won’t have the ability to manufacture a large rocket, fuel it, and launch it. Or it won’t for many, many years. So if you want your colony to have one, you’d have to ship it from Earth.

It’d be easier to include an orbit-to-surface missile with a supply mission and wipe out the colony that way. (Note: please spare me any cliches about the only way to be sure.) While that’s possible, are you really going to take up valuable resupply mass for a weapon that’s going to murder innocent colonists? Are you prepared for the political backlash you’d get for doing so?

Semantic quibbling.

22

And we all know how good such treaties worked out for the Indians.

23

A single shot would scare the hell out of any Indians who attacked. Win the battle with one shot. Also, defence against the Spanish, mainly. They had a history of massacring Protestants in the New World.

24

And then your militia is stuck there because no one thought about refueling the MAV for a return trip. The new colony doesn’t have facilities for making rocket fuel. Meanwhile, your captives are plotting against you…

25

Yes, but Elon Musk is neither a country nor a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty. Is he a resident of such a signatory country, and does the treaty require its signatories to prevent colonial action on the part of its residents? If so, then Elon could conceivably move to some non-signatory country and then colonize away.

26

Right, the more accurate statement is that the space program was both enabled by military technology and, at least in the early days, heavily motivated by military objectives. In 1953 Werner Von Braun was quoted in LIFE magazine proposing an orbiting space platform whose sole purpose would be military surveillance and bombardment, which he envisioned would give the US “permanent military control of the entire earth”. During the Cold War that kind of thinking was dominant.

27

The treaty does not actually forbid colonization of Mars, or where ever. It states that a signatory country may not claim jurisdiction. In other words, the country of origin can sponsor and support a Mars colony and theoretically benefit from whatever the colony can obtain and ship back to them (trade for support), but the territory settled cannot belong to the sponsor country (the colony must be a politically independent entity, which makes sense given the enormous burden that would be involved in defending remote territory from hundreds of millions of miles away).

The country of origin would also be responsible for any “damage” done to the distant site. This could get very tangled: what constitutes “damage” and how much development of Mars and resource extraction would be tolerable? If the colony is an independent political entity, what is their relationship to the treaty? And if the country of origin is not a signatory, how long do they expect to survive the approbation of the 100+ actual signatories if they run afoul of the treaty?

28

Right. And on a more serious note, the actual problem is that these space colonies would likely not be remotely independent of earth. Not without incredible advances in technology or a very large scale colonization effort.

So they aren’t really independent tribes, more like 2 ships in the same ocean. Ships at sea as representatives of a superpower don’t usually open fire on each other, and doing so would potentially trigger a war or at least sanctions between their home superpowers.

Since China and the USA have a tepid relationship, and are currently the two superpowers most likely to have colonies, both have a strong incentive to keep control of their colonies. If either colony destroys the other one, the two home superpowers are likely going to impose sanctions on each other at a minimum.

And if a colony rebels and then attacks the other colony, it means the superpower that owns it needs to send out the space cops so that justice gets served. Or just stops sending supply missions.

The only way for a colony to be independent would with today’s technology require a colony with millions of people and thousands of tons of startup tools shipped from earth. In theory it could then build a local supply chain able to make everything important.

This of course isn’t the only way, a 3d printer and a 6 axis CNC machine are both examples of tools that can do the same task as whole factories full of special purpose tools. A 3d printer is able to do the same thing as factories full of plastic injection molding machines (albeit only recently have they gotten to be cost competitive). A CNC machine or metal 3d printer are almost as good as whole factories full of custom metal molds.

So you can at least imagine more general purpose robotic factories that can make hundreds of products yet are fairly compact. Sort of like a shipping container crammed full of robotic waldos and tool stations and multiple types of 3d printer. And of course, ultimately you could build extremely small and make some kind of factory able to make things like CCD sensors and silicon chips.

29

Just want to make a correction: in my post #26, I screwed up the formatting of the quote. The first line of the quote is from watchwolf49, not Exapno Mapcase. The rest of it was Exapno’s response to watchwolf, which I was agreeing with. Sorry about the confusion. The quote was supposed to look like this:

30

Who owns it initially will come down to whoever has the best outer space navy and ground forces. It is logical to assume some asteroids, moons, and planets will have natural resources of value.

Once an established government is there, things may change.

31

Why do you want to know, Terrestrial Sub-Creature?

32

all these worlds are yours – except europa. Attempt no landings there.

Ps.
Oh yea and mars too

33

Any of this assumes that China would actually obey the 1967 treaty. As they’re showing in the South China Sea, they’re establishing the precedence of ignoring treaties that counter their current political will. As they said about the treaty they’re breaking now, they weren’t really involved in negotiating the 1967 treaty, so they likely won’t feel bound by it.

I would expect any Chinese Mars colony to “annex” large amounts of the surface and threaten consequences to anyone who infringes upon it.

Likely they’ll do the same when it comes to asteroid mining.

34

CATS: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

What is the rule of law on commercial spaceships with regards to jurisdiction? Merchant ships on Earth must be registered to a specific country and are subject to its laws. Would Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy that recently launched have been registered in a similar way to the United States? What about commercial satellites - are they registered with a country?

While the Outer Space Treaty forbids signatory countries from claiming jurisdiction on planets “by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”, it also says that the State that launches a space object retains jurisdiction and control over that object. So that might mean that the inside of a space colony base would remain under the jurisdiction of the State that sent it or that it was registered to (if commercial spaceships have to be registered to a country), but that it could not claim jurisdiction beyond the space structure’s walls.

The laws regarding planetary protection and biological contamination seem the sort of thing that space lawyers might find ways around. We have already sent exploration vehicles to the surface of Mars, so have made the first step. A modular colony base made up of spaceship modules, like the International Space Station but on the planet’s surface, with unmanned remote-controlled exploration and exploitation vehicles and all waste sent out to Space in spaceships, would provide an arguably hermetically-sealed environment.

35

I have my doubts. The cost per kilogram of resource extraction on Mars for use not-on-Mars would be, um, astronomical. A Martian colony would have to establish self-sufficiency and would end up minimally connected to the home country. And defending large swaths of Martian territory is way more expensive than most of that territory is worth.

I am just not seeing it happening.

36

Short of a space elevator or a SciFi level of power generation, you’re right.

37

No one would mine materials on Mars for return to Earth any more than they would shoot their garbage into space from Mars. Neither make any economic sense.

Mining on Mars would be for the purpose of building on Mars.

However, territorial claims would be an entirely different matter. Those would be about claiming potential resources and excluding others from using them or establishing colonies on them.

And no one would ship a complete ICBM from Earth to the surface of Mars to use there. You’d keep the warhead and guidance systems in orbit with your other stuff, such as the navigational and communications satellites you’d need to establish in orbit there.

38

I’m not sure the wording in the 1967 treaty categorically prohibits establishing large scale (even permanent) physical presence on celestial bodies, or exploiting resources there for economic gain.

From one viewpoint, an authorized space entrepreneur could mine ore on Mars, and (whether economically viable or not) melt down ingots and sell them on earth. He and his crew could live on Mars.

The treaty simply prohibits claiming sovereign ownership. In modern terrestrial society, establishing sustained physical presence and harvesting resources might seem like sovereign ownership, but space is like an undeveloped frontier – somewhat like the US west in the late 1700s or early 1800s.

If an early western pioneer and his intrepid band camped in the wilderness, cut down some trees and burned the firewood on unclaimed, unowned land, he is not laying claim to the land, just scavenging materials. He might even haul the firewood back to civilization and sell it, but he’s no more claiming the land than an offshore fisherman claims the ocean when hauling in a catch from international waters.

Likewise when the crew on a gigantic offshore oil platform occupies a region of the ocean for years, they aren’t staking a sovereign claim on the ocean itself – they are just working and living there: http://energy-cg.com/EandP_pics/DeepWaterSemi-GulfOfMexico-BOEMOPA.jpg

Most oil platforms are build within the 200 mile “Exclusive Economic Zone” from shore, but in theory they could be outside that: Oil rigs: Cities at sea | The Week

You could then argue that the late 17th century frontier explorer was at least claiming ownership over the wood he scavenged. But does the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibit claiming ownership over geological fragments of celestial bodies? If it does, then what legal basis did the US government have to haul nearly 1/2 ton of moon rocks back to earth and claim ownership over them – at a time when they had already signed and ratified the 1967 treaty?

In the western frontier case, even though during certain periods nobody had unassailable sovereign ownership of the land, there was some risk of conflicting claims. In theory Napoleon Bonaparte could have challenged the wood-cutting explorer, saying the wood belongs to France.

However in the space case, the 1967 treaty has already prohibited sovereign ownership. So by treaty nobody can complain if someone takes tons of ore off the moon or Mars, because they signed the treaty and agreed to not claim or contest sovereign, territorial ownership. By that viewpoint, deep space is simply “first come, first served” – provided you don’t plant a flag and claim sovereign, territorial ownership.

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/private-exploration-moving-faster-than-law-in-new-space-race.html

39

No, he could not. The cost of getting a kilo of iron from Mars to Earth is orders of magnitude higher than the value of the iron itself. Unless shipping it through space bathed in cosmic rays could somehow transmogrify the iron into something of tremendously greater value. I doubt that one could make a profit on gold, or even copper, unless the shipping increased its value in some way. Exploiting Martian resources is simply unrealistic. Now, space rocks, that could be a different matter – but you would not use a wetware crew to mine those.

40

As I stated, the issue is NOT whether it’s economically viable. Likewise, the thread title and the OP question is not about cost feasibility. The question was what rules govern ownership and usage permission for resources on Mars.

As stated in this link and others, it’s necessary to think and plan far in advance of economic viability: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/private-exploration-moving-faster-than-law-in-new-space-race.html

The OP question was in line with regulatory planning already taking place.

We don’t preface each and every sentence with “hypothetically” because we assume readers understand the entire concept is conjectural. Discussing future legal and regulatory issues often involves thought-experiment scenarios. It is not necessary that each and every one of those be economically or technically achievable using current methods in order to be valid points of consideration.

That said, 1 gram of Apollo moon rock has been offered for sale at $5 million. The legal status of these has been debated: Stolen and missing Moon rocks - Wikipedia

However if you do the math, the 1/2 ton (454,000 grams) of Apollo moon rocks if sold at $5 million per gram would be $2.3 trillion, which is 19 times what the entire Apollo program cost. Obviously that is a thought experiment and would never happen, but it illustrates that developments can transpire which you didn’t envision.