J. E. Landau

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was a landmark international treaty forbidding nations from claiming territory in space, using space for war, or basing nuclear weapons in space. It has subsequently frustrated many science fiction authors and space nerds, but I believe that it might actually lead to a more interesting future history.

1967 was, of course, just two years before the 1969 moon landing, which included, somewhat controversially, American astronauts planting an American flag on the moon—something traditionally associated with claiming a territory for a nation.

The Americans were hardly unique in this type of action. Luna II, launched in 1959, included spheres with Soviet-themed pennants that were detonated to scatter symbols of the Soviet Union all over the moon. If the Soviets had ended up landing on the moon, they no doubt would have left their own flags there, as well, and I don’t believe that anyone seriously thinks that these flags represent a claim to these sites, although the Apollo 11 site has been discussed as a possible national park site.

The real purpose of the outer space treaty, in truth, probably rested more on the prohibitions against basing nuclear weapons in space, something that was a serious prospect early in the Cold War. I’m not here to litigate the Outer Space Treaty or give a comprehensive history of it, although it is important to mention that a stronger version of the Outer Space Treaty called the Moon Treaty was discussed in 1979 but not passed in any spacefaring nation, mostly due to the efforts of libertarian-minded space nerds. This will come up again later, but we should set it aside for now. Instead, we’re here to talk about how the Outer Space Treaty being in force could impact the future of space settlement.

Now, for science fiction writers all of this presents a problem, and a lot of authors just throw out the Outer Space Treaty altogether. There are some reasons to do this and it seems fairly likely. For example, Russia’s “Sarmat” weapons system is something called a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, which, to make a long story short, is a special kind of nuclear missile that is maybe just barely not an orbital nuclear weapon. Russia has also threatened to place some sort of “nuclear powered anti satellite weapon” in space which might be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty.

Without the Outer Space Treaty, you might have an American Mars or Moon colony, and a Chinese one, and a Russian one, and an Indian one, and so on, and then things would work fairly similarly to the historical Scramble for Africa, or colonization of the New World.

Fortunately, our solar system doesn’t appear to have any natives to genocide, so it is unlikely that the worst abuses of the colonial era will be repeated in space, but you could still see the awkwardly drawn territorial claims of the past, such as the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided up nearly the whole world between Spain and Portugal, neither of whom were able to enforce their claims on exactly the territory specified, or the Scramble for Africa which divided up a whole continent between European powers, and which has left scars in the form of strangely drawn borders to this day.

This sort of thing does make writing a future history a lot easier. Americans get the Mare Tranquilitatis, China gets Shackleton Crater, and then you can draw up a whole map. Or even more aggressively, you could say that, for example, India gets the Moon, China gets Mars, and America gets some of the moons of Jupiter, from the tabletop game Eclipse Phase. This makes it very easy to draw a map, and it makes it very easy to give places toponyms—oh it’s the American Sector or just the Moon, for example.

More libertarian-minded science fiction writers also have a tradition of whole planets banding together as one polity and revolting against Earth, which has a similar outcome. One of the early examples of this is Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress which has the whole moon revolting against the Earth and becoming a new national power. More recently, The Expanse has the setting’s three main powers being the Earth (and its moon), Mars, and the Belt, all of which were settled by diverse groups but which banded together into single factions that make the politics somewhat comprehensible.

I think that, to some extent, this underestimates the sheer size of a planet, but I don’t think it’s a terrible compromise to make in service of the plot.

It is important, however, to note that these sorts of treaties might not be a massive barrier to nations claiming territory in outer space. As Zach Weinersmith pointed out in A City on Mars, Antarctica is also governed by a similar international treaty regime, but is also divided up between several southern hemispher nations (and Norway and the UK). While countries other than the treaty nations operate bases there (including the US, Russia, and China), only Chile and Argentina claim to be permanently colonizing the continent, but they have had children born there.

Resource extraction in Antarctica has been somewhat hampered by the treaty system (a fear of many space settlement advocates) but that has not stopped Antarctica from being used as a base for whalers and fishers, and most of the barriers seem to be economic and logistical instead of legal. Authors have already considered mining Antarctica and there are controversies about doing so but no clear direct legal barriers imposed by the treaty system.

Indeed, space mining is something that is sometimes claimed to be legal under the outer space treaty, although this is a subject of some controversy. Specifically, the United States has claimed that the Outer Space Treaty permits space mining while Russia and China disagree.

A bigger barrier to space mining, however, is the fact that there are very few resources that are likely to be profitable to mine from space. The often cited exception is helium-3, which is an isotope of helium that might be useful for nuclear fusion, but we don’t have nuclear fusion yet, and the companies working on it don’t seem to be depending on getting new sources of helium-3, and so the market is very, very small and likely easy to saturate. Other companies, like AstroForge, are planning to mine for platinum-group metals, which are theoretically profitable to mine in space (and which have a large enough market to avoid oversupply), but it’s unclear if they will succeed on a technical level or if they will be profitable if they succeed.

An environment where space mining and industry are largely unregulated but states are not able to claim territory in space is something that has been considered pretty often in science fiction, especially recently.

Two recently-published novels I read, Dead Space by Kali Wallace (no relation to the video games) and Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes depict a future where corporations run all of space, and ruthlessly exploit people there. After all, if there are no governments in space, then those corporations can treat their workers however they please. This is hardly a new idea. The Expanse had corporate rule as a key feature of living in the asteroid belt, and this is a common attribute of cyberpunk, going back to William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, where megacorporations hide their CEOs away in space.

I do think that in the near-term, some of these visions might be overly pessimistic. After all, if those companies still rely on Earth for the supplies and manpower they need to operate, Earthly governments will still be able to exert significant leverage over them. If you’re mulching people on Mars, there’s a good chance that Earth will stop the supply ships coming until you cut it out. On the other hand, if you have a democratization of space access or a much friendlier regulatory regime on Earth, you could have a situation where space launches can continue anyway, from a third country like in Andy Weir’s Artemis or from international waters or corporate-run territory, and this could become more likely in the long term if corporations continue to gain influence over governments.

One scenario that I haven’t seen discussed much is one where space travel is really locked down, like the space advocates worry about. What if space gets super heavily regulated and locked down, and people aren’t allowed to mine for profit?

First of all, this would certainly make space colonization more difficult. Carrying stuff into space is extraordinarily expensive, so it’s important to be able to source as much as you want on-site. It’s almost certainly impossible to seriously settle anywhere past Earth orbit without the ability to mine in space, but a strong international regime might not prevent this outright, just restrict it. This would still slow down space colonization, but it wouldn’t prevent it. One of the major issues with space colonization is that there is no clear reason to do it, because it is very expensive to go to space and very hard to do things there. Many space settlement advocates spend their time looking for profitable things to do in space, and a regulatory environment like this would cut some of them off (like space mining and most manufacturing) but not others (pharmaceuticals, tourism, or media).

Secondly, it would probably make it a lot more diverse. If the rules prevent claiming territory, but there are still incentives to settle near one another, like helping each other in an emergency, then I think you could see a situation where there is immense diversity.

Instead of having a dedicated “American moon colony” in one crater and a “Chinese moon colony” across the way, you might have American, Chinese, Russian, European, Indian, Brazilian, corporate habs all piled on top of each other, overlapping, sometimes connected, sharing infrastructure and resources, and in the long run that could become the basis for an extremely interesting culture as things transculturate and homogenize, creating something new from everything there. In The Expanse, this is explored partly with the Belters and their “cant” conlang, and in Artemis there is some exploration of the very diverse moon colony there and the characters’ identities in that context. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity there.

Third, I think that this sort of settlement could be more prone to creating egalitarian and democratic societies. In science fiction, there is a tendency to see nations in space as totalitarian or at least very conformist, because of the harsh environment, but I don’t think this has to be the case. If space colonies evolve naturally from bases similar to Antarctic stations and scientific outposts, that would no doubt come with its own problems, but I think that a fundamental ethos of cooperation, science, and exploration could make for a much kinder society than the quasi-fascist Martians from The Expanse or the many fictional examples of corporate space dictatorships. A society with a strong emphasis on regulation might be able to overcome the proposed “three-generation rule”—the idea that space colonies will collapse because they stop caring. I personally am not a believer in this, but if you are, it could be something to consider.

Although it has often been overlooked, I believe that space colonization under strong regulation could actually be more amenable to creating a “space opera future”, where you have planetary-scale nature reserves, distinct planetary characters, and governments that look a lot like what we have today, or a more optimistic version of what we have today.

For those of us who want to go to space in our lifetimes, I do think that this sort of future is inconvenient. It forces us to push everything back and makes the prospects for major space settlement in the near future far, far worse. I would like to go to space, and so I mostly think about futures where people go to space in my lifetime, because they interest me more. That doesn’t meant that those futures are the best futures, or the most likely, or even the ones that are most interesting to write about, and I believe that this is a blindspot to be explored.