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The Outer Space Treaty and Its Unforeseen Gaps in Resource Governance
《外空条约》及其在资源治理中的未预见漏洞
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The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies but deliberately avoids defining 'appropriation' in commercial or extractive contexts.
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Its framers assumed state-led exploration, never anticipating private firms launching autonomous mining probes to asteroid belts by the 2020s.
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The treaty bans sovereignty claims yet remains silent on whether processing lunar regolith into oxygen constitutes 'use' or de facto 'appropriation'.
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National legislation like the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 exploits this ambiguity by granting property rights over extracted resources.
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Meanwhile, Luxembourg and the UAE have enacted parallel frameworks, creating jurisdictional fragmentation without multilateral coordination.
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No existing mechanism adjudicates conflicting extraction licenses near Shackleton Crater, where water ice deposits attract multiple sovereign and corporate actors.
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The treaty’s consensus-based amendment process has stalled for decades, leaving governance reactive rather than anticipatory.
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Legal scholars increasingly argue that customary international law may crystallize around unilateral national claims unless counter-norms emerge rapidly.
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Proposed alternatives—such as a multilateral resource registry or UNESCO-style heritage zones—face geopolitical resistance from major spacefaring states.
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Without binding rules, commercial activity risks triggering orbital debris cascades and irreversible environmental degradation on planetary surfaces.
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This regulatory vacuum reflects deeper tensions between technological acceleration and institutional inertia in global governance.
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Resolving it demands reframing space not as frontier but as a shared infrastructural domain requiring collective stewardship.