On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, Jim Windle wrote:
This weeks New York Times Sunday magazine has an article about "space war".
King George II seems intent on drumming up support for a space weapons platform. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it looks likely to drive a massive wedge between the US and its current allies. Nobody who can't afford to put up their own orbiting weapons platform is going to be happy about the US doing so. Second, it pretty much means the US is going to have to withdraw from the space treaty of 1965, which bans space weapons. This latter is actually more interesting to me, because that treaty also bans national claims of sovereignty over off-earth property (or else Neil Armstrong would have been saying the ancient incantation, "we claim this new land in the name of...." when he planted that American flag on the moon in '69) and, more importantly, private claims of ownership on off-earth property. As far as I know there is no direct legislation banning such ownership in the US -- so it looks to me like the US withdrawing from that treaty would allow US corporations to do things like register mining claims or other claims on the moon or other off-earth real estate, or a US expiditionary force to make a national claim of sovereignty over the Moon or Mars or whatever the next time there's a government-sponsored landing on either of those bodies. If someone actually tries it, we'll se an interesting test. Although, perhaps not coincidentally, a space weapons platform orbiting Earth is also exactly what you need if you intend to *defend* claims of national sovereignty on the Moon, asteroids, Mars, etc. Bear