| Wanted: Interplanetary Legal Experts to Hassle Asteroid Miners
Space police. When is it too soon to make a new federal policing agency to make sure no one is illegally mining asteroids?
We can call it the EPA, Extraterrestrial Protection Agency. They can ignore newly structured interplanetary property rights, and insist that space-dust runoff from the asteroid mining operations are causing mass extinctions on Mars.
You might think space would be vast enough so that property rights in the final frontier were not a huge issue. But to say politicians want to control everything on Earth is an understatement. They also want to control everything in space.
Legal experts are left wondering, how will taxes be structured for space mining companies? Who will own the resources mined? And does this violate a 1967 treaty which says nations cannot claim celestial bodies as their own?
Sane people are left wondering, really?
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