"Space Resources: Physical Constraints, Policy Choices, And Ethical Considerations" - By CWP Alum Alanna Krolikowski
The governance of the vast resources of the Solar System will be constrained by the nature and distribution of those resources. We outline these constraints for the Moon, Mars, and the Asteroids. Governance is also historically contingent, and the “Founder Effect” means that our actions in the first few decades of harnessing space resources, mostly on the Moon and the near-Earth asteroids, will have a strong influence on the very different circumstances that will obtain later as our space-based economy grows. We review the nascent efforts to put in place principles and concepts for space resource governance. We present four sets of policy choices that will influence moderate-term, 30-year, developments: governments as anchor customers, governments supporting emerging firms, trade-offs between types of activities, and collective management of crowding and interference. We then describe some ways in which these choices are already being formed. There are two general ethical questions we pose: the “tenure and entitlement” problem, and the “near-term justice” problem. They are not unique to space, but the space examples throw them into high relief. The high cost threshold of space activities suggests that a quasi-monopoly power by a few corporations could well result, leading to evidently unfair treatment of workers within the corporations, and manifestly unjust distribution of the benefits to the wider global society outside the corporations, or an over-rapid exhaustion of those resources to at the cost of future generations.
Book Editor(s):Volker Hessel,Jana Stoudemire,Hideaki Miyamoto,Ian D. Fisk
First published: 01 July 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/9783527830909.ch20 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9783527830909.ch20
Alanna Krolikowski focuses her research on China-U.S. relations in strategic high-technology sectors. Her doctoral dissertation examines trade and technical cooperation between the two countries in commercial aircraft-manufacturing and civil-commercial space. During her time in the program, she will develop this project to examine bilateral relations in other high-technology sectors.
Alanna holds a PhD in political science at the University of Toronto. She has conducted research in Beijing and at several other sites across China as a visiting scholar in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and in Washington, DC, as a visiting scholar in the Space Policy Institute of The George Washington University. Alanna graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours from McGill University and has a Master's degree from the University of Toronto.
Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/wikiimages-1897/
