Abstract
Despite the adoption of several national space mining legislations, Space Resource Utilization (SRU) suffers from international legal ambiguity that increases investment risks. We consider the vagueness of the benefit-sharing requirements from space activities under the Outer Space Treaty Article I to be the main legal gap regarding SRU.
To increase private investments into the SRU sector, we offer a way to address the legal uncertainty. We argue that: (1) there is a low likelihood of an emergence of a new international space-mining regime that would fix this uncertainty, and (2) the relatively low knowledge regarding the required processes, technologies, and final benefits of SRU prevent us from designing an effective, functional, and flexible way of sharing the benefits without significantly constraining private investments.
As a fix we provide an investor-oriented approach that (1) shifts the responsibility for defining and proposing the benefit-sharing mechanism to private actors soliciting authorization for space mining; (2) considers the contributions of space-mining actors to the existing globally agreed goals, such as the Sustainable Development Goals or the Paris Agreement, as a form of ensuring the use of outer space benefits all countries in accordance with the OST Article I.