I'm John Batsho, Hotel Mars, David Livingston, Dr. Space, the Space Show, and we're very pleased

to be speaking with Dennis Suarez, a novelist of science that for now is taking what we have

here on Earth in hardware and software and projecting them into Earth orbit, Sys Lunar

orbit, the solar system for prosperity. Prosperity, of course, brings competition. We've

talked about the hardware, the spin gravity station, the SPS Alpha Mark III solar power satellite,

mining of regolith, the software. We have the outer space treaty, which is a product of

the Cold War in 1967. We have the moon treaty, and now we have the Artemis Accords. None

of these, to my knowledge, exactly fit the circumstances that Daniel is very convincingly

presenting, private enterprise, in competition with state enterprise, that would be the authoritarian

regimes that have science and engineering to match ours, and the contest on the moon in

lunar orbit, and especially in the proximity of an asteroid. Daniel, go right to the heart of it.

Who owns that asteroid? Yeah, that's a fair question. Now, if you take the outer space treaty,

no entity can own a celestial object. At least that's the legal statement or proclamation

that we have thus far. So if you go back to the nation of Luxembourg, I believe it was 2017,

they put out a space law saying that you, while you may not be able to own celestial objects,

you can mine them and process those resources, potentially bring it back to Earth. Although,

I think the real main thrust of that there was that you could bring the value of it back to Earth

to sell and trade now, perhaps leaving the resources themselves in space, thus creating an off-world

market. The United States followed suit very shortly thereafter, and then it started to build

into the Artemis Accords, which I think is an effort to try to build a modern version of the outer

space treaty. The moon treaty exists, but there are not many signatories to it, and I think what's

going to happen when it comes to both the Artemis Accords and the outer space treaty is they are going

...