Thanks for your comments! I think you’re right that, at some point, space mining companies will channel the materials they collect in space around the US, in order to find the lowest regulatory and tax regimes. And certainly adoption of schemes used by terrestrial mining and drilling transnational companies makes the most sense; why invent the legal wheel, after all? I believe that, in the near term, the US can use the “carrot” of recognizing and defending private ownership in the materials collected in space to encourage companies like PRI to bring those resources into the US.

Thanks for the article about applying Canadian terrestrial mining expertise to extraterrestrial mining!

I agree with you that “private companies like Planetary Resources and Shackleton Energy indirectly argue for creation of individual property rights in space resources. Rather than simply lobbying for changes in law, these companies pour their creative energies into actually engineering ways to locate, mine, and bring rare platinum group metals back to earth.”

They’ll do more than that at some point. They’re smart enough to know that US customs agents aren’t the only game in town on a planet with 100+ distinct nation states.

The time will come when they will certainly arrange for any materials collected from orbit to be inspected by customs agents from the EU, Russia, China or even the Isle of Man in the same way that pretty much every other trans-national corporation arranges to function in jurisdictions with favorable tax and legal structures.

As per your comments about the 1979 Moon Treaty, it’s worth remembering that this treaty has not been ratified by any nation which engages in self-launched manned space exploration or has plans to do so. In fact only a dozen and a half countries altogether have signed or indicated an intent to sign the treaty and it can safely be categorized as a “failed treaty.”

Certainly the US government doesn’t feel bound by it.

If you’d like to get some idea of what they’re talking about in my country (Canada) about this issue, then check out “Using Tools from the Mining Industry to Spur Innovation and Grow the Canadian Space Industry” at http://aerospacereview.ca/eic/site/060.nsf/vwapj/CanadianSpaceCommerceAssociation-Part2-ChuckBlack.pdf/$file/CanadianSpaceCommerceAssociation-Part2-ChuckBlack.pdf.