Asteroid mining could be space’s new frontier: the problem is doing it legally

Extracting minerals in space will be costly and challenging, but the biggest difficulty may lie in a treaty over who owns the moonWhen Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong hoisted the Stars and Stripes on the moon, the act was purely symbolic. Two years earlier, mindful of Cold War animosity, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) had decreed that outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty”.In other words no coun