Hello and welcome to the Tech Policy podcast, your source for tech policy rants and raves from Tech Freedom,

your Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate both here on Earth and in space.

I'm Baron Soka, and I'm interviewing Jim Dunstan, veteran space lawyer of 33 years.

In our third interview about space law, Jim is an adjunct fellow here at Tech Freedom,

founder of Mobius Legal Group, and a pioneer in space law.

Jim, thanks for coming back.

Great to be back, Baron.

So in our first episode we talked about the basics of space law.

In the last episode, we talked about space property rights and the legislation that Congress

passed last year, trying to relate that back to the Outer Space Treaty to fundamental

principles of space law and trying to understand what was right about that legislation and

maybe what wasn't right, what might need to be fixed, but also what Congress

didn't do in that legislation.

So let's pick up where we left off last time when we talked about this.

You were explaining your concern that the legislation as passed by Congress might be interpreted

to go beyond creating personal property rights in resources that were extracted from an asteroid and instead

could be used to create something like a territorial claim over an asteroid that

somebody hadn't necessarily even landed on something that someone had merely

quote obtained to use that word from the legislation for remote sensing or through some other means.

So that was one problem with the legislation.

What's the fix for that?

Well, I think the fix is pretty easy, and that would be some sort of amending language

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