Space Mining and Planetary Protection
Space Mining
“Your kids might live on Mars,” claimed Stephen Petranek in a 2016 TED Talk. Such arguments might be dismissed if the world-renowned space journalist had no front-row seat to SpaceX and Elon Musk’s future plans for lunar and Martian travel.
But, is it possible for humans to live on another planet? What will human civilizations do in outer space? What implications would it have on life on Earth?
Human’s conquest of outer space since the Apollo missions provides cues on the drivers for establishing human settlements beyond Earth. A plausible hypothesis is space mining. Earth-based resources are finite, while space holds an unlimited reservoir of minerals.
High-value space materials are rich in precious platinum group and industrial metals and organics, which are vital to the advancement of human civilizations. However, unethical space mining might set the foundation for backward contamination with potential extraterrestrial life forms.
Extra-Terrestrial Samples
Since the first lunar landing, NASA’s Lunar Curation Laboratory has appropriated lunar samples for more than four decades. As of 2011, NASA held about 18,000 and 140,000 samples derived from meteorites and the moon, respectively, and an additional 5,000 specimens sourced from cosmic dust, comets, and solar winds. Similarly, JAXA collected and appropriated asteroid samples in the Hayabusa 1&2 missions.
The JAXA and NASA approaches might inform future space governance frameworks in which parties to the Outer Space Treaty assume custody of space resources based on a first-come-first-served basis — the first entity to extract the Astro-materials has a right to ownership. Considering that both NASA and JAXA fully funded their space missions, they had the legal right to the extraterrestrial specimens and resources, but the potential contamination risks have been disregarded.
Planetary Protection
Beyond the legal uncertainties in managing extraterrestrial resources, there are no globally acepted standards. NASA’s Lunar Curation Laboratory has lost a least 516 extraterrestrial materials since the Apollo missions. The losses were linked to lapses in tracking the Astro-materials loaned to non-NASA affiliated institutions.
A fundamental question is whether the lunar samples’ appropriation had set the pace for the large-scale takeover and unregulated mining of extraterrestrial minerals by public and private entities in space-faring countries. Even though the value of NASA’s stockpile of Astro-materials is unknown, the events surrounding the handling of the space mineral samples demonstrate there are critical challenges in the management of extraterrestrial specimens and minerals.
In the long-term, the ownership of specimens by national agencies such as NASA and JAXA might introduce irreversible backward contamination risks given that a significant fraction of samples under NASA and federal agencies’ custody were lost or misplaced. Even though space-faring nations had little regard for space governance guidelines, humans are obliged to protect the earth from backward contamination and safeguard space resources for future generations.
