Why the stagnation?

Last week was World Space Week, although an observant consumer of major news media could be forgiven for having not known it.

Although I am usually loath to celebrate the commemorative days and weeks the U.N. dreams up, I nevertheless think a discussion of the issues related to the (largely ignored) event is in order, given both their importance and the relative lack of attention paid to them in public discourse.

Among the most important of these issues is the question of why human efforts at space exploration and settlement have largely stagnated over the last few decades.

Explanations abound, but some simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.

For example, the notion that the end of the Cold War reduced the urgency of the superpowers’ efforts ignores the fact that space exploration was already languishing long before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Second, the argument that governments have simply come to see the folly of spending billions on projects in space when they have domestic problems to attend to ignores the billions of dollars such governments continue to spend on frivolous infrastructure projects and mitigation of less-than-immediate military threats every year.

More plausible is the argument that the efforts of NASA and other organizations have backslid because they were moving at breakneck speed in the early part of the Cold War and simply couldn’t keep up the pace indefinitely.

This view is corroborated by the fairly obvious notion that, without government funding, most major efforts in space would not have been economically viable and that, as such, increasingly ambitious projects in space would have required increasingly (and perhaps prohibitively) large investments on the part of governments, which have finite sources of funding. However, it fails to take into account the deleterious effects of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which are described below.

In my opinion, the most plausible argument is that the regulations imposed by the Outer Space Treaty have removed almost every incentive for governments or corporations to explore the rest of the Solar System, especially celestial bodies like the moon, Mars and near-Earth asteroids.

This treaty, which has been ratified by all of the major spacefaring nations, effectively declared all areas of the universe beyond Earth’s atmosphere a res communis, or an international common area, and left nothing designated as terra nullius, or territory that has yet to be claimed but can be claimed in the future.

The effect of this and other similar provisions has been to discourage both governmental and non-governmental entities from extracting resources, conducting exploratory missions and establishing colonies on other celestial bodies because these entities cannot count on their property rights or their property being respected.

Business leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and private citizens who are frustrated or perplexed by the stagnation of efforts at space exploration should look no further than the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

Its repeal, coupled with the declaration of all of the celestial bodies in our Solar System as terra nullius, would be the ideal prescription for reenergizing humanity’s efforts in space.