The space competition: from Elon Musk to Russia

Asteroid 101955 Bennu is nothing more than a pile of rubble held together by its own gravity, the remains of a catastrophic event that occurred a billion years ago. But Bennu is also a carrier of both life and death, as it contains clues to the origins of life on Earth and, at the same time, has enormous destructive potential. Over time, the agencies of physics and chance have brought the 500-meter-wide asteroid into an orbit very close to Earth.

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A robotic spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx set off in September 2016 to establish contact with Bennu. After many tests, each time getting closer to Bennu, the ship made a brief landing, which allowed it to collect a sample from the asteroid’s surface. Scientists will spend decades analyzing the 120 grams of material, which includes amino acids, the building blocks of life.

However, the OSIRIS-REx mission goes beyond science. NASA admits that the visit to Bennu is a prelude to possible mining operations, with governments and private companies hoping to extract water from asteroids to make rocket fuel, thus allowing for greater space exploration and, perhaps, an economy outside of space. Land. But some states oppose these plans, arguing that space mining, if it were to occur, would be illegal in the absence of a widely agreed multilateral regime. They point to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits national appropriation and declares that the exploration and use of space is the province of all humanity. There is also reason to worry that space mining, if carried out without proper oversight, could create risks, including the low-probability risk of an asteroid being inadvertently redirected onto an impact trajectory on Earth.

A little Pomeranian named Saba missed out on the chance to join Sharon and Mark Hagle on the first of their four planned flights into space, although Blue Origin offered him a custom-made flight suit. As for the Hagles, they already have tickets to Virgin Galactic and are now in talks with SpaceX. Traveling to space is an “extraordinary” experience for the Florida couple, whose previous adventures include swimming with whales and rappelling into caves. “Mark has always taken me out of my comfort zone,” Sharon said of her 73-year-old real estate developer husband.

More and more of the world’s ultra-rich are traveling to space as tourists on short suborbital flights or much longer orbital flights, and more and more are going to the International Space Station. Trips around the Moon could also become a reality soon. Hollywood, dissatisfied with the visual effects provided by CGI or parabolic airplane flights, is following closely, and Tom Cruise is expected to soon fly to the International Space Station to shoot a movie. It’s all in good fun, of course, unless you take into account the environmental repercussions.

The Soviet spy satellite Kosmos 1408, launched in 1982, ran out of propellant decades ago and became just another piece of space junk… until it found a new purpose in life. He was chosen as a target by a powerful army to demonstrate a capability that everyone already knew he possessed: destroying a satellite at will.

A ground-launched missile hit the 1,750 kg satellite at a relative speed of at least 20,000 kilometers per hour, creating a huge explosion and, at the same time, more than a thousand pieces of high-speed space debris large enough to be tracked by ground radar. To be sure, tens of thousands of smaller but still potentially lethal pieces were also created, many of them in elliptical orbits that cross the orbits of thousands of operational satellites, as well as the International Space Station and China’s new Tiangong Space Station. Immediately after the explosion, the astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts retreated to the shelter of their capsules, hardened for atmospheric reentry, and battened down the hatches as the largest concentrations of debris blew away.

However, the story did not end there. Some of the debris will remain in orbit for many years, constituting a constant threat to all satellites, including many operational satellites belonging to Russia itself, the state that undertook this dangerous and completely unnecessary action.

SpaceX recently moved most of its operations from California to Texas, attracted by the Lone Star State’s low taxes and minimal regulations. The move may also have contained an implicit threat to the US government: the now dominant space player could once again up its ante, but next time to another country. Luxembourg, a well-established tax haven, would be an obvious place to incorporate. Although it is a tiny European country, it provides a friendly home to two of the world’s largest operators of geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) communications satellites and, in 2017, passed legislation to facilitate commercial space mining. SpaceX, for its part, has already acquired two large oil drilling platforms that could be used to enable offshore launches.

Having launched more than 5,000 satellites since 2019, SpaceX now controls large swaths of Earth’s most desirable orbits. Should a company, or indeed any actor, be allowed to use the most valuable parts of low Earth orbit (LEO) to such an extent that its use effectively excludes other actors from safely operating there? At what point does SpaceX exceed LEO payload capacity and degrade the safety of spaceflight for everyone?

Stricter rules are coming. But these regulations will be the result of negotiations, and companies, knowing this, are working now to establish the strongest possible negotiating positions. The appearance of Luxembourg and other “flag of convenience” states in the space field will undoubtedly help those who seek to minimize regulation. SpaceX only exists thanks to the NASA contracts it was awarded when it was a fragile start-up. It still relies on contracts from NASA and the US Space Force for revenue, but the company is becoming increasingly powerful, launching thousands of satellites each year and planning missions to both the Moon and Mars. At some point, governments could discover that they are negotiating with a leviathan that can and will cross all borders.

Article translated from English from the website The Hub. Excerpt from “Who Owns Outer Space?” (Cambridge University Press, 2023).