It's time to lay down the law on space exploration

An artist's impression of a lunar base. The time has come to think harder about agreed rules to avoid a dystopian future. Photo: ESA

In 2019’s Ad Astra, a somewhat glum portrayal of space travel set in the near future, Brad Pitt plays Maj Roy McBride, a US military astronaut who is sent to Neptune to uncover the truth about his missing father. The first stop on McBride’s journey is the recently settled Moon. Eschewing any Star Trek-style utopias, the film presents humanity’s first space colony as a dangerous, commercialised and anarchic outpost.

Its eerie but resource-rich moonscape is peppered with militarised bases belonging to competing countries and McBride is briefed that some zones are “in a state of extreme lawlessness”. The dark side of the Moon is especially perilous, being home to thermonuclear reactors and mining bandits who in one gripping scene ambush McBride’s military escort in a deadly – and entirely silent – low-gravity lunar shootout.

Ad Astra is one of the newer depictions of a space-faring humanity who instead of using groundbreaking technology and scientific discoveries to put aside political differences and economic rivalries instead transfers them to the heavens. It is not the first film to have done so: the Moon in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is divided into American and Soviet sectors whose Cold War secrecy and suspicion cloud humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

But as human beings inch closer to longer, perhaps permanent stays in space – the US-led Artemis programme has the establishment of a lunar space station and a Moon base as its two primary objectives – I would argue that the time has come to think harder about agreed rules to avoid the dystopian predictions of Ad Astra, 2001 and others.

The UAE – a committed and ambitious newcomer to the space race – is dealing with this very topic. This month, the Emirates set up a new organisation, the Supreme Space Council, to oversee the development of its booming space sector. The new council will look at approving regulations and set priorities in investment, acquisitions and infrastructure. Interestingly, it will also have the power to approve plans aimed at achieving space security in co-operation with international partners.

Such plans cannot come too soon. As global society continues to draw on limited and diminishing natural resources on Earth, some governments and private companies are already considering new and vast sources of energy, water and minerals relatively close to our home planet, such as in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The potential rewards are enormous: research published in 2022 by the Harvard International Review included findings from aerospace companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries. These businesses designed satellites that identified about 15,000 asteroids “with significant potential for mining”. Just last week, a UAE mission to travel to the asteroid belt reached a milestone when an agreement was signed to provide services for the 2028 launch of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Explorer spacecraft. This will perform close fly-pasts of six asteroids to gather data before landing on a seventh in a years-long journey of more than five billion kilometres.

The Moon is another highly strategic destination; the European Space Agency says its lack of atmosphere makes it an ideal place to generate electricity from solar power and its reserves of iron, titanium and uranium could be used to produce rocket fuel to “make it viable to refuel spacecraft in the lunar vicinity”.

If used in a spirit of co-operation – buttressed by effective rules and laws – such resources could revolutionise life on Earth and establish a toehold for humanity in space. If fought over, they could end up merely adding to humanity’s long and ignoble history of conflict. This is what makes realistic and far-sighted preparation for space exploration so important. Thankfully, the UAE is not alone in working to make space a safe, rules-based place.

On October 4, the Dominican Republic became the 44th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a series of multilateral agreements that Nasa says “provide a common set of principles to enhance the governance of the civil exploration and use of outer space”. Already signed by the UAE and the US, the Accords build on the work of earlier international co-operation, such as the UN’s 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

But how close are we to having rules about space that have widespread international acceptance? According to some legal experts, too much remains unsettled. In March, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, Memme Onwudiwe, said that the 1967 UN treaty remained the only binding legal framework for space exploration, despite it being “pretty vague” and mostly aimed at preventing the US and former Soviet Union from using space to launch nuclear weapons.

“There’s a lot to yet be decided on because we don’t really have a well-articulated space law,” Mr Onwudiwe told Harvard Law Today. “We have that Outer Space Treaty from 1967 that I mentioned, and everything else is domestic or bilateral in nature.”

However, as we get closer to being able to harness the natural resources in our solar system, questions of rights, ownership and use will become more pointed. “These questions are really big, and the only reason we haven’t grappled with them is because we haven’t had to,” Mr Onwudiew said. “But the second we do, it’s going to dwarf terrestrial issues, because of the vast size of the opportunity out there in space.”

Such questions may arrive sooner than we think – and not necessarily from space. As part of Ad Astra’s depiction of what could happen in the near future, it also reveals that Pitt’s character earned his military stripes during three years of war in the Arctic. In the real world of 2024, global warming is speeding up the melting of polar ice at record levels, possibly uncovering trillions of dollars’ worth of hitherto unavailable gas, oil and minerals. This, some analysts say, could start a race for dominance in the Arctic and even a superpower conflict. If humanity is going to share space together, now may be the time to lay down some ground rules for a resource bonanza that’s closer to home.