"Green is Nations that signed outer space treaty. Yellow signed but have not ratified. Red not signed on." By User:Happenstance, User:Danlaycock et al. - File:Seabed Arms Control Treaty parties.svg, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38680050
(Nearly 50 years ago, of course, we didn’t know anything about the economic potential of space and nobody was seriously talking about humans as an interplanetary species. Certainly, there were not any private companies angling for a piece of the action. Space exploration was solely the preserve of sovereign governments and we referred to astronauts as the “envoys of mankind.” The prevailing sentiment, as expressed in the Outer Space Treaty, was that outer space should belong to all of humanity, not just the first nation to venture into space and plant a flag on the surface of a celestial body.
What’s happening now, in essence, is a sea change in how we think about outer space. To convince private commercial space exploration companies to invest millions of dollars, there have to be economic incentives involved. In short, financial backers of these companies have to be able to realize a profit from their investments if innovation is going to happen. That’s the reality.
Richards cites the rights of fishing boats in international waters as an economic template for the SPACE Act, “The ships are owned by companies flying flags of nations under which laws they are bound: they have a right to peacefully fish in international waters that they don’t own; but they have a right of ownership of the fish once obtained.”
The fishing analogy is a useful one. It suggests that we’re simply extending the same economic principles used on Earth to the moon and beyond, not creating new principles. Seafaring nations are now spacefaring nations. Moon Express even refers to the moon as “the eighth continent,” suggesting that people should think about the moon the same way they think about the other seven continents on the planet. And Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company, refers to the “off-planet economy.”)
Me, "Personally, I think the Outer Space treaty should be scrapped. It causes too many headaches and you have to find ways around it to make Space a place for governments and private industry to want to go. It just doesn't fit into our present day and age. Imagine if The New World (North and South America) had been treated like the outer space treaty requires us to do to other space bodies. It would have caused all kinds of conflicts. Because everybody wanted a piece of the New World. The same with Space.
Sure, Antarctica is used as a model for how all Earth nations should treat space. But the thing with Antarctica is no one wants to live there except researchers and support staff. It's just not desirable to regular people.
But a lot of people want to live in space, participate in opening it up, for regular people, and work in space if it is offered to them.
If you have quotas, how much land a government can aquire a year, if you have basic fair rules, ways for all nations to acquire land on space planets and moons, you can start a movement out into the solar system.
Space faring people would want what everybody on Earth wants: a piece of land they can grow and thrive on, a kind of nationality. A country, an annexation of a spacebody land by any Earth government, they can live there under with that government's rule of law."
