Who Owns An Asteroid?

AEvery few years a figure appears in the press putting the worth of a single metallic asteroid at some improbable multiple of world output, and the article that follows asks who will own it. The arithmetic behind such headlines is simple, and it is simple in the wrong way: the mass of nickel, iron and platinum-group metals in a body a few kilometres across is multiplied by today's price on a terrestrial market, as though the market would sit still while the cargo arrived. Lawyers, meanwhile, argue about a treaty drafted in 1967, when only two states could reach orbit at all, which forbids any nation from claiming a celestial body as its territory but says nothing whatever about a company removing material from one. Neither the arithmetic nor the treaty, on the view now gaining ground among specialists, describes the problem that will actually arise. What a mining venture needs is not a title deed but the ability to work a site undisturbed for as long as the work takes.

BNadia Sarpong, a resource economist at the Helwan Centre for Extractive Policy, has spent a decade arguing that the headline valuations invert the economics of the business. Platinum-group metals are scarce and therefore expensive; a delivery large enough to repay a mission would end the scarcity, and her model puts the fall in price at 68 per cent for a cargo equal to a single year of world production, about 190 tonnes. The commodity that grows more valuable the further it is carried, she maintains, is not metal but water, because water taken apart into hydrogen and oxygen is rocket propellant, and propellant is the one thing a vehicle already flying cannot make for itself. Lifted from the ground, a kilogram of anything cost about 9,800 dollars to place in orbit in 2015 and about 2,100 dollars by 2023, while a litre of water carried up to a high orbit still costs roughly 2,300 dollars. A plant on a wet asteroid turning out 100 tonnes of propellant a year would, on her figures, undercut that comfortably.

CThe economics reshape the legal question rather than removing it. If the asset is a working plant on a particular body, and not the body itself, then what an operator has to secure is continuity of operation: no other vehicle landing beside the drill, throwing dust across the solar panels or drawing on the same deposit of ice. Practice has already run ahead of law here. An understanding adopted by fourteen governments in 2020 recommends that anyone conducting operations should announce a zone, in some proposals as wide as 100 kilometres, within which others are asked to give notice before approaching. Sarpong insists that this is an adequate settlement, on the ground that a great deal of valuable activity proceeds without ownership: a fishing quota, a radio frequency and a slot in geostationary orbit are all rights to use something nobody owns, and all of them are traded, insured and defended in court.

DHalina Zawadzka, professor of space law at the Brindale Institute, takes the distinction between using and owning to be a piece of drafting rather than a fact about the world. Exclusive control of a place, for an unlimited period, from which others may lawfully be kept away, is what property consists of in every legal system she has examined; calling the arrangement a safety measure changes the label and not the substance. Reviewing 62 declarations and policy statements issued between 2016 and 2024, she found that 41 of them proposed zones with no stated end date. Zawadzka concedes two weaknesses in her own case. Not one of the documents she analysed has been tested by an actual operation, since no commercial extraction has yet begun anywhere, and her sample took in only material published in English, which leaves out much of what has been written in Asia. Neither weakness is fatal, but both narrow her claim.

EA third consideration is quietly doing more work than either argument. Under the 1967 text a state remains answerable for what its nationals do beyond the atmosphere, which means that a venture must be registered somewhere, and that whichever government authorises a mission accepts liability for the damage it may cause. Insurers price that liability, and in pricing it they will decide which zones are respected long before any court rules on them, since a vehicle that ignores a declared zone becomes uninsurable whatever its lawyers may say about the treaty. Small states with light regulation have already begun to advertise themselves as registries, a development that Zawadzka views with alarm and Sarpong treats as ordinary commercial evolution. Insurance, in short, is quietly writing the rules. Both accept that liability, rather than title, is the mechanism likely to bite first.

FNothing may happen for a very long time. No propellant plant is expected before the 2040s, and every projection of that kind made in the past thirty years has turned out to be optimistic. Even so, the shape of the eventual settlement is becoming visible, and it is unlikely to take the form of a grand renegotiation, since an amendment requires the consent of states that gain nothing by giving it, whereas registries, insurance and the quiet mutual recognition of zones can accumulate without anyone's agreement. Zawadzka's warning is that a regime assembled in this fashion will harden into ownership by default, recognised only in retrospect and only for those who arrived first. Sarpong's reply is that every regime yet devised for a commons was assembled in exactly that way, and that the alternative on offer is not a fairer rule but no rule at all.