A Moon of Opportunities – Blog Update

The Moon for all, all for the Moon!

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to New Gold Dream by Simple Minds

We were there 50 years ago. We made six manned visits on its surface and then we stopped. Why?
It has been mainly a matter of opportunities!
And why in the recent years the interest around the Moon increased significantly?
Again, opportunities! Recent scientific researches have demonstrated that our rocky neighbor can unlock many resources to nurture the newly born space economy.

In the newly updated blog section A Moon of Opportunities, now also in Italian, you can find some history, a look at present developments and some taste of future… opportunities.

Have a look and shout the Spacepolitans motto: Space For All, All For Space!

Humans in Space – Blog Update

We travel to space… to stay!

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Spacelab by Kraftwerk

Going into space is not enough to take advantage of all the possibilities that the space environment could unleash, you have to learn to stay up there. And indeed we are doing it! The first space outpost, the Russian Salyut-1, was launched into Low Earth Orbit fifty years ago, just ten years after the Yuri Gagarin’s first flight.

Since then, many “space stations” orbited the Earth, and humans have now lived in space continuously for more than twenty years. And many space habitat projects are just awaiting to be done in the near future!

In the newly updated blog section Humans in Space, now also in Italian, you can find some history, a look at present developments and some taste of future possibilities.

Have a look and shout the Spacepolitans motto: Space For All, All For Space!

Travel to Space – Blog Update

Probably the most amazing trip for a human

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to to Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath.

If we want to exploit all the possibilities that the space environment could unleash, we need to get there. The good news is that we are currently able to do it: some week ago we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the first human spaceflight by the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin.

So, what happened during all these 60 years? How did astronauts reach space? How are they doing it today and how will they do it in the future?

I tried to summarize the answers to all these questions in the blog section Travel to Space, now also in Italian and just updated with the fresh new flight of Virgin Galactic VSS Unity!

Have a look and shout the Spacepolitans motto: Space For All, All For Space!

The Overview Effect – Blog Update

Probably the most enlightening human experience

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to The Overview Effect by Hellhaven .

Space is a great vantage point to observe our planet and provide services that are supporting and improving our lives and the health of the environment, as already shared in the updated pages Space for Earth and Observing the Earth from Space.

However, there is another aspect linked to this vision, something less technical and more psychological. It is something that the view of the Earth in space is changing in every person, a cognitive shift of the perception of the planet and of the self, the so called Overview Effect.
In this blog there is already a page dedicated to it, which has just been updated with new important initiatives and has been translated into Italian, as part of the blog localization project.

So now it’s up to you: do you want to review the updated English version or the new Italian one? In both cases, have an enlightening reading!

Space For All, All For Space!

Mother(Earth)’s Day 2021 – Blog Update

For Mother’s Day, a blog update about how Space helps us recovering Mother Earth.

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Space for the Earth by Ozric Tentacles (again and again!).

A good way to celebrate Mother’s Day? Publishing an important update about the blog’s section dedicated to the direct benefits space can offer towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the global agenda to save our planet and ourselves. The content of Space foe Earth page has been improved with new information and it has been finally tranlsated into Italian!
Go and check the English version (Space For Earth) and the Italian one (Lo Spazio Per La Terra)!

On this special day, I take the opportunity to dedicate this very meaningful and special section of the blog to the memory of a person I have known for a few months, Dr. Shivani Johri, a very special Indian scientist. She flew prematurely among the stars on May 7, 2021. We will continue to love space for her too!

Space For All, All For Space!

Earth Day 2021 – Blog Update

A year ago, Becoming Spacepolitans Blog went live…

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Dance of the Clairvoyants by Pearl Jam

Today is Earth Day (22nd of April), the biggest annual event in support of environmental protection.
Today, the Becoming Spacepolitans blog turns one!
What better way to celebrate its first birthday than with a blog update with some big news?

Becoming Spacepolitans is about to be translated into Italian! Many friends asked for it and finally here it is! Today the first section is out, the same one published a year ago in the first post, the Spacepolitans Manifesto. This section is also updated in the English version and new insights are added in the “Awareness” paragraph. They provide a better understanding of the current plight of our beloved planet by exploring topics like population growth, “Earth Carrying Capacity” and “Overshoot Day”.

Fancy reading it? Now you have two choices: “Spacepolitans Manifesto”, the English version, and “Manifesto dei Cittadini dello Spazio”, the new one in Italian, choose the one which suits you best!

Looking back, we have already considered a lot of information about the importance of space for our planet, from many different points of view. We highlighted how and why space is the new fundamental element for the next step in human evolution. We went through topics like the benefits of outer space to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the contribution of Earth observation technologies, sixty years of human spaceflight, Moon colonization, the potential of asteroid mining and many more. In the coming weeks, all these pages will be updated and translated into Italian, allowing the Spacepolitans message to reach more and more people.

So, should we shout the Spacepolitans motto? Yes, of course! But this time let’s do it in its Italian form: Lo Spazio per Tutti, Tutti per Lo Spazio!

Space Technology Transfer

Made for Space, Made for All

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Technologic by Daft Punk.

Space technologies are directly beneficial to our daily life in several ways, we came across their multiple benefits on many pages of this blog. However, there are also indirect positive effects which are less known to the public but equally important. Continue to read if you want to know more…

“Space is a hard”, this is the most common sentence echoed when something doesn’t go as planned in a space related activity. It means that reaching space and working there is tough, hence failure is sometimes inevitable. However, scientists and engineers are putting a lot of knowledge, effort and creativity to overcome the countless problems they encounter for every space mission. They invent new solutions and technologies to break though the barriers and push the boundaries and this results in a rapid and unusual development that could be impossible without such cosmic dares. On the other hand, the public is spending a lot of tax money to allow this magic to occur.

What happens to all the intellectual property generated so far? Are those scientific and technological advancements confined to the space arena and the tax money lost in space? Luckily for all of us the answer is no, they are not limited to space exploration. They are shared constantly with the “non-space” industries, enabling them to generate new wealth out of that initial investment.
In order to do that, space agencies like NASA and ESA launched specific technology transfer programs, aimed to bring indirect benefits from space to the ground (see NASA Technology Transfer Program, ESA Technology Transfer).
The mechanism of these programs is pretty easy. First of all, there is the discovery of a new technology, developed to overcome a limit imposed by the harsh space environment while trying to perform a specific activity. Once the technology is functioning as expected, the related intellectual property is disclosed to the public, usually through dedicated web sites or communication channels. If companies and entrepreneurs find an interesting technology to enhance one of their products or to make a new one, they could sign an agreement with the space agency to license its use.
In addition, space agencies manage also special business incubators, specialized in supporting new start-up enterprises aiming to bring space technology to the “standard” economy. Examples are the NASA Kennedy Space Center Innovation Incubator and ESA Business Incubation.

Let’s have a look at some specific cases, just to understand the wide scope of technology transfer.
Do you like your mobile phone cameras? Are you having fun creating HD videos with your Go-Pro? You need to know that they would not be performing so well without the CMOS image sensors and that this technology was developed at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) to equip spacecrafts with new high-resolution cameras.
In the last year or so, how many times did you measure your temperature with an infrared thermometer? In the early Nineties, the company Diatek Corporation partnered with NASA JPL to produce this new kind of thermometers, adapting infrared sensors developed to measure the temperature of stars. So, not only you are made of stars, but also your temperature is measured like the stars’.
What about something more spacepolitan? For more than twenty years, the ESA-led Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative programme, better known as MELiSSA, has been studying how to sustain astronauts during long missions in space. Its objective is to develop a closed life-support system, processing waste to deliver oxygen, water and food. One of the most promising technologies developed so far is a special filtering system for water, capable to remove many pollutants, including nitrates. Thanks to its partnership with MELiSSA, the French company Firmus was able to built a water purification station and test it for a school in Morocco, for the village of Sidi Taïbi, close to Rabat. The population of this town was growing rapidly and providing fresh water for everyone was a big issue, since the groundwater was rich in nitrates, not suitable for human consumption. Thanks to this test station, the school was able to use the filtered groundwater to provide fresh water to students and teachers, and the company gained valuable experience whilst developing the product. Which UN Sustainable Development Goal is supported by this technology transfer? Of course, SDG 6 Clean Water and Sanitation!
These are plenty more “spin-off” initiatives, some of them not so striking but equally important, and others in development which will land on the ground in the near future.

As Dr Geoffrey Nicholson (3M chemist, inventor of the Post-It Notes) said, “research is the transformation of money into knowledge; innovation (technology transfer) is the transformation of knowledge into money”. Hence, space exploration is not only offering direct benefits to Humanity, but it has also a positive cross impact on the normal economy, helping it to be more efficient, to consume less resources, and finally to improve our daily life. Investing in space is investing in our future. So, let’s shout even louder our spacepolitans motto: space for all, all for space!

Space 4 Earth

No more lost in blog… again!

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Space for the Earth by Ozric Tentacles (again!).

Quick blog update! Space4Earth is the website section containing all the information shared in the last months in previous posts, which are relevant to understand why space is so important to rescue our planet.

The main page is still about the direct benefits space can offer towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The new additions are in its sub-menu and they include topics shared more recently:

  • Asteroids: Cross And Delight, space rocks could be the enablers of the human expansion or the bearers of the end of the story, this page is all about them;
  • Outer Space Tax, an intriguing proposal about how to share the resources contained in our beloved space rocks amongst all mankind;
  • Mysteries on Mars, everybody talks about Mars in these days, but could it help us in our way to become Spacepolitans?

What about the Spacepolitans Playlist? Don’t worry, it is updated with the most recent entries, together with the YouTube one, for lazy clickers.

So, what’s next on the blog? Very soon we will explore another important aspect of how space is already supporting a better world: technology transfer, the program actively pushing the inventions made for space to the non-space industries.

Don’t hold your breath as you are waiting for it since it may be a while, in the meanwhile have a look at the Space4Earth page to see if you missed any topics. If you are already up to speed, there is only one thing to do, join me shouting out the Spacepolitans Motto: Space for All, All for Space!!!

Mysteries on Mars

A Planetary Time Machine Full of Questions… and Answers!

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Mars, the Bringer of War by Gustav Holst.

The red planet is the body of the Solar System most similar to the Earth. Should we colonize and exploit it to make humans a multi-planetary species? Or should we preserve its status of pristine celestial fossil, barely sampling it by robotic probes? Let’s try to find a possible answer to this new intriguing conundrum.

Humans have always been fascinated by Mars, this shining red dot in the night sky, a symbol of the gods of war for many ancient civilizations. Thanks to the very first telescopic observations by Galileo Galilei in 1610, the scientific interest on Mars started to raise. In 1877, the first detailed map of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli ended up strongly impacting not only the scientific community, but also the collective imagination. Indeed, thanks to an incorrect translation of the Italian word “canali”, Schiaparelli’s work was interpreted abroad as if he had observed artificial “canals” on Mars’s surface, instead of natural “channels”. The incredible Suez Canal had been completed just a few years earlier and it was rather easy to guess that there were intelligent inhabitants of Mars, capable of engineering works like the ones just made by the Earthlings. Then, even if the following observations disavowed the canals interpretation, the Martians myth was already becoming so popular that first tales, then movies were dedicated to it, celebrating the various forms of our cosmic neighbours. The idea of having company in the solar system was so bewitching that scientific discoveries against it were initially just ignored by the general public. In the following decades, the existence of Martians was widely accepted and, in 1938, the historical radio transposition of the novel The War of the Worlds by the great H. G. Wells allegedly caused public panic among listeners who believed that aliens from the red planet had invaded the Earth. It is impossible to establish whether the cause of such mass hysteria was the masterful direction and interpretation by Orson Welles or the tension that preceded World War II, or the widespread Martian myth. Nevertheless, that broadcasting showed how the public was willing to accept such an eventuality.

Today we know that there are no green humanoid conquerors living on Mars’s surface, nevertheless, the Bowiean question “is there life on Mars” (or at least was) is far to be definitively answered, it remains a great scientific question mark. And it is not the only one, Mars is indeed full of mysteries!
Its atmosphere is actually very thin and scientific evidence has demonstrated that it was not like this in the very past. How did Mars loose almost its entire gaseous cover?
In addition, Mars’ mass is less than it should be considering its actual position and assuming it formed from the primordial planetary cloud of our Solar System. Why didn’t it grow like the other planets did?
And again, its surface is clearly divided into three different zones, each of them formed in the three main Martian ages: Noachian, Hesperian and Amazonian. Why didn’t the surface change homogeneously and at the same pace?

In order to find the most likeable answers to these and other intriguing questions, many robotic exploration missions were launched and they brought back invaluable insights to explain what could have been the history of the planet. For example, we solved the mystery about the presence of water, since the first probes found water ice in its pole caps and even in the terrain, in the form of permafrost. It had been found that in its ancient past the conditions of the Martian atmosphere were allowing liquid water presence, allowing the possible development and growth of life forms. And so on…

However, all the experiments run so far were not conclusive about the presence of life and some other enigmas. So, more and more national space agencies are operating probes and sending new spacecrafts toward the red planet, with the common intent of finding answers and clues about the origin of life in our solar system and so on. This is why we are witnessing a record breaking number of active Martian missions these days.
Let’s take a deeper look to understand what they specifically aim for.

[Detailed section alert: jump to the end if not interested in technical stuff]

In orbit there are already six spacecrafts:

  • Mars Odyssey, the most long-lived, in orbit since 2001; this NASA orbiter main objective was to produce the first global map of the amount and distribution of many chemical elements and minerals that make up the Martian surface; nowadays, it is still active and providing relay communication services between the Earth and NASA probes on the surface.
  • Mars Express, a veteran ESA spacecraft, in orbit since 2003; its primary mission objectives were to take high resolution pictures of the surface combined with altitude data and spectroscopic information of the atmosphere; thanks to its radar instrument, it allowed the discovery of salty liquid water lakes under the surface. Unfortunately, its lander, Beagle 2, never answered back after its tentative to survive the landing phase. Still taking great pictures, today the orbiter is playing an important role in communication services for other missions.
  • Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, another NASA old friend orbiting since 2006; its main objective was to get insights on water history on the surface, taking very high resolution close-up (it can get to the dimension of a table); as other orbiters, it is now working as a communication bridge between the Earth ground systems and other robotic probes on the surface.
  • Mars Orbiter Mission, or Mangalyaan-1 (“Mars-Craft”), arrived in 2014, it was the first mission from ISRO, the Indian space agency; its primary objective is to look for methane traces in the atmosphere, an important possible footprint for the presence of life; there is even a movie about it, due to the daring development of this amazing enterprise (Mission Mangal).
  • MAVEN, NASA mission in orbit since 2014, with the main tasks to study the upper atmosphere and to understand why Mars did lose and is still losing gas molecules towards outer space; the spacecraft changed orbits over time to provide different insights; as all other orbiters, it is involved in the Martian communication relay framework for ground missions.
  • ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a joint mission with ESA and Roscosmos, orbiting Mars since 2016, its main goals are to monitor seasonal changes on the surface looking for methane presence and to search for hydrogen concentrations, indicating the presence of water under the surface. Unfortunately, as for the Mars Express mission, its lander Schiaparelli didn’t touch the surface as expected, crashing quite fiercely; part of the ground mission communication relay, it will play a major role in supporting the next ESA mission to the red planet, ExoMars 2022, aiming finally to a successful landing of a European probe on the surface, this time a rover named Rosalind Franklin.

In addition to these six technological jewels, two orbiters have just been added to the Martian fleet in the first days of February 2021:

  • Emirates Mars Mission – Al-Amal (Hope) Probe, the very first United Arab Emirates mission to the red planet; it will help put together many pieces of the atmospheric puzzle, adding more insights on the lower part of Mars’ volatile shell and looking for additional data about oxygen and hydrogen escape into outer space.
  • Tianwen-1 (“Heavenly Questions-1”) , again a a very first mission to Mars, this time operated by the China National Space Agency; it is made of two devices, an orbiter and a small rover, which will try to land later in May 2021. In addition to many technological first demonstrations (reaching Mars and entering its orbit as the very firsts), its main scientific goal is to find the additional water presence under the surface, thanks to a special ground-penetrating radar, mounted on the rover.

On the ground there are two active missions arrived in the past years, both from NASA:

  • Mars Science Laboratory, better known as Curiosity Rover. It is an incredible six wheel robotic vehicle, the size of a big car, full of instruments,capable of drilling little holes, collecting material and analysing it with a real onboard laboratory; the main goal was to find evidence about Mars habitability for microbes somewhere in its past. Wandering the Gale Crates since August 2012, it collected a huge amount of precious information, enabling scientists to find chemical and mineral evidence of past habitable environments on the surface; after more than three thousand sols (Martian days) of operations, it is now heading to Mount Sharp, looking for more and more clues of the planet’s history.
  • Insight Mars Lander, successfully landed in 2019, it plays two main roles, providing information about Mars’ interior thanks to a special seismograph and acting as a complete weather station, to register every variation of temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and so on. Unfortunately, its heat probe, which was supposed to provide information about the inner soil temperature, didn’t work out due to the unexpected poor consistency of the terrain, on which the probe landed.

Another American mission is set to land in the next days, precisely the 18th of February 2021 (less then two days since the publication of this article, stay tuned to the news!): the Mars 2020 Mission and its rover Perseverance. Its main scientific goal is to directly search for ancient microbial life, landing on one of the most interesting places on Mars’ surface, Jezero Crater. Scientists are confident that it was an ancient river delta and, if there had been life on Mars, Jezero Crater would have been a very crowded place! So, it seems to be the ideal site even for a sample return mission, right? In fact, this is exactly one of the rover’s tasks: collect terrain samples and seal them in special containers for a future flight back to Earth. Perseverance will carry also a couple of very promising demonstration technologies: MOXIE, an experiment to produce oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere, almost made of carbon dioxide (could you guess why?), and Ingenuity, the first helicopter to fly over another world, introducing a new generation of probes for planetary exploration. What an amazing mission to follow!

What about the future? At least four projects are already in development phase:

  • ESA ExoMars 2022, will land the rover Rosalind Franklin, already cited above, on the surface. The clue is in the name, it should be launched in 2022.
  • Mars Therahertz Explorer, consisting of an orbiter and a lander, it should leave the Earth in 2022. If successful, it will be first Japanese mission to orbit around Mars, since another spacecraft, called Nozomi, did just a flyby due to a technical failure.
  • Martian Moons Exploration, or MMX, developed by JAXA, will be a first mission aimed to visit the moons of the red planet, Deimos and Phobos; the launch should happen in 2024.
  • Mars Orbiter Mission 2 (MOM 2), also called Mangalyaan-2, will be the second Indian mission to Mars and it will also bring a lander and/or a rover, details are still to be defined; the launch should occur in 2024, however it could easily be delayed until 2026, since it is still in the early stages.

[Detailed section alert end]

Incredible, isn’t it? All these robotic spacecrafts are the maximum expression of the human intellect, involving every aspect of our knowledge and capabilities. We are putting all these efforts in the hunt for evidence about the past of the Solar System and the development of life. This is something that only the exceptional Martian environment could allow to uncover, due to its blocked planetary evolution. Looking at a spot on Mars’ surface is like looking at a site like Pompeii: it shows the signs of what happened during the Martian age, in which it was formed, billions of years ago. Digging into the underground we could find the traces of past biological activity and, why not, we could even find still alive microbes! What a unique planetary time machine!
However, there is an eventual high risk to alter this pristine fossil world, the risk of introducing biological contamination from the Earth. Although all the robotic probes are assembled in clean rooms and kept always aseptic to avoid any kind of undesirable passenger, the presence of humans on the red planet surface would definitely raise the possibility that microbial life from Earth could be transferred unwillingly. Should this very unfortunate event happen, there would be a very high chance to bias the future scientific research, losing the chance to solve the most important scientific questions mentioned so far.
This is why we should consider very carefully any human presence on Mars’ surface. We could start building an orbiting station first, leveraging from the experience accumulated with the International Space Station and with the next Lunar Gateway. We could use this orbiting laboratory to pilot rovers and robots from above, in real time, being able to perform quicker and deeper research. Then we could establish bases on the surface of Phobos and on Deimos, the Martian moons, which are without atmosphere and couldn’t have hosted life in the past. Then, we could consider building a first little scientific base, like the ones in Antarctica, but only when the technology will allow us to live there with almost zero risk of contamination and when the benefits of human presence on the surface will be worth that minimum risk.

I know, this approach doesn’t seem to be that Spacepolitan, does it? Many people would like to conquer very soon the red planet, SpaceX’s plan to colonize Mars is so fascinating! Nevertheless, even if it could seem too cautious, the proposal above is exactly in line with the Spacepolitans’ mission of preserving life in its natural environment. It is not easy to apply it to our planet, however, it must be applied also to all the other worlds, not to repeat again and again the same fatal mistake we are making here! So, in answer to the initial dilemma of this post, we should continue with our excellent robotic missions, getting closer and closer to the red planet, without rushing there only for the sake of being the first humans to press the Martian soil. We could be a multi-planetary species also colonizing inanimate worlds, like moons or dwarf planets without any chance to host or have hosted life. We should become Spacepolitans without risking to compromise life on other worlds!

Outer Space Tax

Nothing serious, just an intriguing proposal

To fully enjoy reading this post, listen to Space Cowboy by Jamiroquai.

In the last two blog entries on asteroids, we went through many topics: past events, scientific discoveries, exploration missions. In the following we will see instead something hypothetical,an idea about how to share the resources contained in our beloved space rocks among all mankind.

This Blog’s Space for Earth section is about the contribution of Outer Space towards the achievement of each of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). You can also find some of the possible future benefits to the SDGs, underlining further the strong link between space exploitation and Earth’s natural environment restoration. In the following, we will give a deeper look at one interesting potential contribution: how the wealth deriving from space resource mining activities could accelerate the achievement of goals like SDG 1 “No Poverty” and SDG 2 “Zero Hunger”.
Basically, how could this idea be implemented? We should start looking at what is already available about space resource utilization in terms of general principles. The widely accepted UN Outer Space Treaty introduces an important concept: “the use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries”. This is stated even more strongly in the UN Moon Agreement, affirming that space resources “are the common heritage of mankind”. In a sense, these two similar principles mean that the wealth generated by space exploitation should be shared between all countries, no one excluded.
This matter is not at all easy to handle, since only a part of the resources in the asteroid belt could be worth trillions of dollars and, as a consequence, they could generate serious issues in the world economy, even worsening the actual situation. A potential solution could be to introduce a tax system, following the way mining companies are paying the countries to exploit the natural resources. We could call it simply “Outer Space Tax”. This framework should include not only mining licenses, but also a set of royalties based on the kind and the quantity of the extracted materials.
Introducing such a tax mechanism would have two positive consequences. On the one hand, the price of resources mined in space could be controlled not to ruin the existing raw material market and the world economy. On the other hand, such taxes could generate a big chunk of money to sustain the SDGs mentioned above, finally sharing the wealth generated by space resources with all humanity.
Who or what should handle such a huge bureaucratic and economic power? As advocated by the Moon Agreement itself, it should be an “international regime”, acting in the name of all mankind and of all the nations. What could be better than the United Nations themselves? Instead of creating a new entity, an interesting choice could be to empower the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), which is already dealing with many space programs and related initiatives. It would be a matter of enhancing its structure, establishing its rights to collect taxes from entities engaged in space mining activities, and enabling it to monitor these activities in space.
Another important question is about the management of this huge amount of money which should not enrich the usual elites. It should enable the SDG Action Plan implementation instead. A possible way forward could be to channel all the proceeds directly towards the various UN programs and agencies, like UNICEF, feeding the SDGs initiatives without intermediaries. It would be important to avoid giving money directly to local governments, and elude possible difficulties related to benefits reaching the population and the natural environment’s restoration. Should politicians be involved at national level? Clearly it won’t be possible to take local actions without their involvement, however UN agencies should hold firmly the purse strings.
About timing, in the first stages the “Outer Space tax” mechanism could be used to track the activities, issuing licenses at little cost for a limited time, until the space mining business picks up. After that and according to its development, licenses and royalties should then be applied. In particular, royalties should relate first to space resources brought to the Earth, so that they can be easily classified and quantified, leaving free the in situ utilization of space resources. This will avoid adding costs to the first space constructions, already expensive as such. When the space construction business also becomes economically profitable, the Outer Space tax should then be applied to all mined space resources. At that stage, UNOOSA would have its own “space force”, a kind of cosmic Blue Helmets, to control space activities and apply the agreed rules.

This general concept could be extended from materials collected in space to all the possible resources available in space for commercial purposes. For example, a tax system could be applied to allow a spacecraft to occupy a specific orbit around the Earth. It could be similar to the one used to regulate the telecommunication frequencies (3G, 4G, 5G). The license could give the owner of the spacecraft the right to occupy an orbit and money earned from it could fuel the SDGs program. This mechanism could also have the possible interesting side effect to mitigate the space debris problem: if a company had to pay money to occupy an orbit for a spacecraft no longer operational, it would be really interested in its removal. Even more, if the spacecraft were to occupy an unauthorized orbit, a penalty could be applied and, once again, the company would have the right motivation to actively work for its displacement. In the end, it would help to regulate the use of Earth’s orbit, avoiding unpleasant overcrowding effects and mitigating the risk of collisions, which is actually not negligible at all.

Coming back to the main topic, nowadays space mining is hardly an engineering exercise, with many scientific studies, private and public initiatives underway, and it is obviously far from being an economic ecosystem. At this pioneering stage, it is more an investment, receiving public money through the national space agencies, than a wealth generator. However, the technology will develop quickly and soon spacecrafts will be wandering in space hither and thither to mine asteroids. This is why we should now start to think about the set of rules for the exploitation of space, starting from the general principles already agreed by the world nations. Leaving the field to the single nations or companies’ initiatives could definitely materialize the risk of transforming Outer Space in the new Far West, instead of providing benefits to all mankind.

Maybe this idea is too simple, or inapplicable. Maybe there are important aspects still to be taken into consideration, since these are just the thoughts of an average individual with no expertise in international law or in tax law. However, the need of set new rules for the new space world is there and it is increasingly important every day. In the end, we should become Spacepolitans, not space cowboys, shouldn’t we?