White House Releases Executive Order On Space Resource Use
Administration Statement on Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources
“Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources. This order addresses U.S. policy regarding the recovery and use of resources in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies. Dr. Scott Pace, Deputy Assistant to the President and Executive Secretary of the National Space Council, released the following statement on behalf of the Administration: “As America prepares to return humans to the Moon and journey on to Mars, this Executive Order establishes U.S. policy toward the recovery and use of space resources, such as water and certain minerals, in order to encourage the commercial development of space.”
Fact Sheet: Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources
Hopefully a good step. The item about funding by Congress…wonder what might happen to it when they get involved.
While I agree with the sentiment of this executive order, I’m struggling to figure out what it actually does. There are words expressing support for the use of space resources, including commercial extraction and use/sale, and saying (in effect) that the Moon treaty isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. But in terms of concrete actions, the only thing I can find is that:
“This Executive Order directs the Secretary of State to lead a U.S. Government effort to develop joint statements, bilateral agreements, and multilateral instruments with like-minded foreign states to enable safe and sustainable operations for the commercial recovery and use of space resources, and to object to any attempt to treat the 1979 Moon Agreement as expressing customary international law.”
That is, encouraging other nations to express similar support for the idea of using space resources. That may be enough to reassure potential investors, but probably not much else. When I saw the headline, I was hoping for something more (e.g. public/private partnerships to develop the necessary technology or perhaps tax breaks for companies investing in this.)
Hopefully Australia will withdraw from the Moon Agreement so U.S. firms will be able to partner with them on space ventures.
India might also be nice. Fortunately, New Zealand never signed the Moon Treaty, so Rocket Lab doesn’t have any problems.
Although India, like France, signed it they never ratified their signature and so were never part of it, as per the Vienna Convention on Treaties.
What is interesting about this Executive Order is not the Moon Treaty, which as the Order points out the US is not a signatory to, but international treaties and US laws it does NOT mention.
In particular the US signed the Outer Space Treaty on January 27, 1967 and ratified it on October 10, 1967. Its signatories agreed not to claim sovereignty over any part of outer space or to deploy WMD, though conventional weapons were not forbidden. In 52 years the US has made no move to withdraw from this treaty.
Even more interesting, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 was signed into law by President Obama on November 25, 2015. Until now Trump has worked hard to undo everything Obama ever did. Nobody seems to have pointed out to Trump that his Executive Order merely encourages what Congress and Obama had already made the law of the land.
Had Trump been aware of this 2015 law, one imagines his Executive Order would have pointed out how terrible this law was and proposed replacing it with a vastly superior one, along the same lines as his insistence on replacing the terrible Affordable Care Act with something vastly superior.