In less than a year, the race to put the first commercial vehicle on the surface of the moon will be in full swing. Eighteen teams from 12 countries are competing to win the Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP), which tasks contestants with building a space probe, landing it on the moon, and traveling 500 meters across the lunar surface while relaying HD video back to Earth—all before December 15, 2015. The prize: $20 million. If the GLXP succeeds in its goal of radically transforming the economics of space exploration, and if Russia, India, China, and Japan follow through on plans to send their own robots to the moon in the next few years, our nearest celestial neighbor could become home to significantly more human travel and exploration. In the process, the legal questions surrounding the moon’s use, ownership, and visitation will likely become significantly more contentious.
Revolutionizing the Playing Field
The GLXP is a follow-up to the Ansari X-Prize, which saw the world’s first privately-funded human spacecraft launch in 2004 and paved the way for Virgin Galactic to begin commercial flights as soon as this year. Both prizes are spiritual successors to the Orteig Prize, which spurred Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in 1927. The GLXP intends to transform the lunar surface from the exclusive domain of superpower governments to a more open playing field comparable to Earth orbit, where private companies and other independent groups have operated satellites for decades. The GLXP aims to radically transform the economics of sending payloads to the moon, in the same way that the Orteig Prize transformed air travel in the 1920s: by encouraging competition and creating tangible rewards for spaceflight innovation. Participants may raise no more than 10 percent of their budget from government sources, and the teams have found funding from a diverse group of investors ranging from Otsuka, the manufacturer of a popular Japanese sports drink, to noted gaming tycoon and Newt Gingrich-enthusiast Sheldon Adelson.
If any of the 18 private lunar landers fulfill the GLXP’s goals next year, it will have demonstrated that depositing a payload on the surface of the moon can be accomplished for millions of dollars, rather than hundreds of millions. While still pricy, this would put lunar surface operations within the budgets of thousands of individuals and corporate entities, dramatically expanding the types of projects that could be feasible. In an interview with the HPR, Brad Kohlenberg, media representative for GLXP frontrunner Moon Express, states that his company’s “MX-1” platform will open up the moon to “art, vanity, and business” where before it had only been open to government-sponsored research. Indeed, Moon Express and its competitors have already sold payload space for a Japanese sports drink advertisement, a Swedish art project, and vials of cremated remains for the space burial firm Celestis. Moon Express also hopes to begin prospecting the moon for rare minerals that might be worth mining for shipment to Earth. For the first time, it looks like it might be possible for groups to make money by going to the moon.
Scientific research would also benefit from access to low-cost small moon landers. Harvard astronomy professor Dimitar Sasselov told the HPR that the astrophysics community has long hoped for a small radio telescope on the moon’s far side to study objects in deep space away from the interference of human communications. Furthermore, the planetary science community is eager to study unexplored regions of the moon to fill gaps in our understanding left after the Apollo missions.
The Intergalactic Academy
As the costs involved in space exploration decrease, many expect universities to more aggressively participate in the process, raising questions about the relationship between academic institutions and NASA. Sasselov notes that, while university consortiums have invested millions in off-campus research facilities on earth, including giant telescopes in Hawaii and the Andes, no major space mission has ever been primarily university-funded. In 2008, Google and researchers from MIT and Harvard attempted to raise $20 million for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to look for nearby earth-like worlds. However, according to Sasselov, university donors and administrators were wary of stealing the limelight from NASA. Many apparently feared that funding a university-led mission on this scale would weaken the political case for future government spending on exoplanet research, which would ultimately cost Harvard’s astronomy program considerably.
Sasselov predicted that in the next 5-10 years the falling costs and rising legitimacy of private sector space research will create a transformation in the way universities conduct off-planet science. Today, experiments led by Cornell, the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins, and other universities are taking place on and around Mars and throughout the solar system, but all of them are attached to NASA spacecraft. With the advent of private missions beyond Earth orbit, university space science may begin behaving more like other fields of study, being conducted on both government-owned and private spacecraft and funded with both private money and government grants.
Uber for Space
Meanwhile, GLXP is also expected to bring more attention to the technical and economic challenges of bringing a spacecraft to the moon. Because the GLXP guidelines don’t specify how the spacecraft must get to the moon, participants are considering increasingly creative routes to accomplishing their goals on a budget. Rather than building or purchasing their own rockets—people in the space business prefer to call them launch vehicles—for tens of millions of dollars, most entrants in the GLXP plan on buying extra space from commercial communications satellite operators who can afford to buy their own rockets. Modern rockets, like Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V and SpaceX’s Falcon 9, are mass-produced with a limited number of configurations. As a result, the rocket purchased by a satellite television provider, for instance, might have extra space in its payload shell or be slightly overpowered for the primary satellite, and the satellite operators or launch providers will often sell that extra capacity to defray costs. Piggybacking on larger missions is a tried-and-true method for lowering launch costs of the tiny, standardized “CubeSat” satellites used by various researchers and start-ups, but a lunar lander would have to carry some of its own fuel in order to bring it from Earth orbit to the moon.
Unfortunately, because a communications satellite can cost upwards of $750 million to build and launch and can provide billions in profit over its lifetime, Team Phoenicia’s CEO William Baird explained, most satellite launchers are unwilling to stomach the risk that comes with carrying an explosive mini-rocket with them to space in exchange for the tiny profit offered by small secondary missions. For this reason, after securing a dedicated launch vehicle for their proposed moon lander, Baird’s company decided to drop out of the X-Prize. Instead, they shifted their focus to the potentially more lucrative prospect of using the space on their rocket to carry other missions with “active propulsion systems” to the moon, including a number of their former GLXP competitors and RevUp Render’s DogeCoin-themed Lunar Iditarod. Because existing satellite operators do not want to accept the risks associated with new types of small satellites, Team Phoenicia has stepped in with a way for small firms with risky satellites to pool their resources together and get to orbit independently of the major players—a sort of Uber for space. Making lunar voyages a profitable enterprise will require risk-sharing schemes like this. Ditto other commercial rocket-propelled small satellite missions enabled by GLXP-fueled innovations. Team Phoenicia envisions a substantial market for their services.
Governing the New Ocean
Potentially more complicated than the technical issues surrounding commercial use of the moon are questions of sovereignty and international law. If a United States-based company opens a mine on the moon, does that give the United States the right to exclude others from the mine or bring minerals back to Earth for sale? Does the operating company possess this right? If, in Baird’s words, “the man on the moon starts having acne,” and a large-scale Helium-3 harvesting operation produces damage visible from Earth, would anyone be held accountable?
Many proponents of commercial space utilization agree that precedent exists for answering these questions. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is the foundational document for space law, and one of its provisions bans nations from claiming territory on extraterrestrial objects. However, it makes no mention of the status of extraterrestrial objects returned to the Earth inside a spaceship. However, subsequent cases in international courts ordering stolen goodwill moon rocks returned to NASA affirm that objects returned to the Earth inside spacecraft count as parts of the spacecraft for the treaty’s purposes, and are thus under the jurisdiction of the nation that launched the craft. As a result, Kohlenberg and others assert, space and the high seas have obvious analogies: the fish, oil, and other resources in international waters belong to no one, but any nation’s vessel can claim them. Issues relating to conflicts between private entities, environmental damage, and space debris could be addressed through the frameworks of the Outer Space Treaty, which enables all signatory nations to request consultation regarding actions by entities from any other nation that might pose a danger to its own space activities.
Existing law, in the form of domestic launch regulations, may also allow for significant self-policing and cooperative governance under the terms of the Outer Space Treaty. Professor Joanne Gabrynowicz, editor-in-chief emerita of the Journal of Space Law, noted in an interview with the HPR that Article VI of the treaty obligates each signatory nation to regulate the in-space activities of entities that launched under its jurisdiction. In the United States, this regulation takes the form of FAA launch licenses, which govern the terms of launch and activities thereafter. This includes granting 200-km non-interference zones around crewed vehicles in order to ensure astronaut safety. Gabrynowicz believes that these launch licenses could also be used by the FAA to regulate moon and asteroid landings undertaken by private entities that launch under U.S. jurisdiction. As the FAA already cooperates with flight safety agencies all over the world to ensure safe air travel, it is logical to believe that this cooperation would extend to the organizations that govern launches in various countries, eschewing the need for new institutions to resolve conflicts that might arise.
It is always possible, of course, that the mechanisms provided by the Outer Space Treaty or launch licensing could repeatedly fail to address some particular type of issue. If this is the case, amendments to the treaty or the creation of entirely new international frameworks might be necessary. However, it is unclear whether the political will for such an exercise exists, and the representatives of private space corporations interviewed for this piece remain noncommittal over the necessity of such a step.
One way to determine whether the world is ready for the challenges to come, suggests Baird, is to create a test case. The Team Phoenicia CEO argues that some private entity should send a mission to land on an asteroid, claim it for themselves, and have a rival corporate interest sue over it. The ensuing lawsuit would prove whether or not existing institutions were up for the task. If they proved themselves to be insufficient, the interest such a suit would raise might be enough to muster political support for changes to the existing framework of space law. As of yet, no group has laid out plans for such a mission to test the legal waters, but a test case would allow space entrepreneurs to be proactive about confronting the legal challenges ahead, rather than forcing them to react to later cases when the stakes might be higher.
The coming year promises to be a time of exciting change in our species’ interactions with the moon, as corporations, nation-states, and even universities return to the site of humanity’s first off-world footprints for profit, pride, and science. Policy debates over issues raised by these future endeavors will undoubtedly be contentious. Still, the fact that we will be having them at all is a testament to just how far we’ve come in only six decades of spaceflight.
Photo Credit: NASA