Mining the high frontier

Title: Mining the high frontier: sovereignty, property and humankind’s common heritage in outer space

Researcher: Dr Matt Johnson, PhD (awarded 2020), thesis available at: https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/142380

Supervisors:  Dr. Jeremy Walker & Dr. Jon Marshall 

Abstract

Members of the ‘NewSpace’ network claim that exploiting the mineral resources of the Solar System is essential to humanity’s future, enabling the exploration and settlement of the cosmos and resolving ecological crises on Earth. NewSpace’s techno-utopian justification for colonising the ‘high frontier’ is often infused with a vision of stateless libertarianism. Arguing that government space programs have failed to build on the heroic achievements such as the Apollo Moon landings, NewSpace lobbies for their displacement by commercial enterprise – instantiating a new era of entrepreneurial space exploration. A significant milestone in this project has recently been achieved: the United States has unilaterally passed laws that pre-emptively guarantee the claims of US corporations to own and sell space resources. Yet in 1967, the UN Outer Space Treaty declared the exploration and use of outer space to be ‘for the benefit of all mankind’ and ‘not subject to national appropriation’ by sovereign claim. In this dissertation, I argue that private property rights to space resources contravene international space law, pre-emptively projecting state powers of appropriation – manifest in privately-held mining rights – onto the extra-territorial and extra-terrestrial frontier. The histories of spacefaring, frontier resource appropriations and mining law reveal indistinctions between national sovereignty and corporate power that are obscured in NewSpace discourse. Far from offering a stateless space utopia, the NewSpace colonisation project rests upon the ‘strong state, free economy’ aporia of neoliberalism. As a case study in political economy and legal geography, the anticipatory expansion of private property claims beyond the Earth both resonates with and problematises the ‘terrain’ of political history, such as the tensions between states and markets, public law and private power, ‘the commons’ and exclusive property. Deploying methods of historical sociology, I demonstrate that NewSpace cosmopolitics mirrors (and is often explicitly embedded in) neoliberal geopolitics, prompting urgent questions about how we can reaffirm principles of democracy and ‘common heritage’ in the international laws of Earth and space.