Business on Mars
With President Bush strongly pushing for a return to the moon and, ultimately, for crewed missions to Mars, and with private spacecraft quickly becoming a reality, people are starting to consider the implications of commercialisation, tourism and even colonisation of our solar system.
Space exploration could be a very lucrative venture. Not only is there the potential for tourism and patriotic (and controversial!) acts like flag planting, but the solar system is expected to be abundant in natural resources, such as oxygen, hydrogen and water (to supply rocket fuel) and rich deposits of copper, nickel and other metals. The bottom line is that if it becomes profitable to travel out, mine these metals and return home, then it will be done. And sooner rather than later, I expect.
What I find most concerning is comments like “The solar system is like a giant grocery store. It has everything we could possibly want.” and “The solar system’s seemingly limitless energy and mineral wealth will solve Earth’s resource shortages.” Both comments are from the founder of the Ansari X Prize.
Many people, including myself, are worried that this sort of attitude is going to lead to a disregard for environmental concerns, and reinforce the “throw away” attitude that many people currently have. “Who cares about recycling, if we can get all we need from the solar system?” Ultimately though, if we take that tack, we’re going to run out of resources, even if it takes a thousand years, or pollute the other planets like we’re doing to Earth.
Fortunately, not everyone thinks like this. Some want to put into place a system of conservation parks on Mars, to protect the most important sites like Olympus Mons, the largest volcano (mainly form irresponsible mountineers from despoiling like has happened to Mount Everest!), the ice caps for biological studies, and the landing sites of earlier space craft. Th
However, there’s still no agreed property laws in space. One can hope that we will come to an agreement like in Antarctica, but as the U.S., Russia and China haven’t event signed onto the existing UN Moon Treaty (to make the Moon and other celestial bodies “the province of all mankind”) it’s easy to be concerned.
Ultimately, we need a compromise. Commercial enterprise is a fact of life, but I think we have to start building conservation, scientific research and heritage sites into the business models from the ground up, rather than as weak laws after the fact. Perhaps these new worlds will give us the chance to change the way we as a planet do business. (Sorry for another long post - it will give you some weekend reading!)