WASHINGTON — A House hearing on space mining turned into a partisan debate about both the viability of the nascent field and the jurisdiction of the committee to examine it.
The oversight and investigation subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee took up the topic of mining the moon and asteroids for the first time at a Dec. 12 hearing, where witnesses argued that space resource extraction could be essential for the future of the United States but required both careful study and government support.
“Humanity stands on a precipice of a new era, one that will be defined by space development and utilization of space resources,” said Eric Sundby, chief executive of mineral exploration company TerraSpace and executive director of the Space Force Association. “Space holds an endless amount of opportunity for America.”
However, he and some other witnesses cautioned that the United States was at risk of falling behind China in extracting space resources. “Any delay in America’s development of space resources, no matter how well intended, will leave the field to that rapacious regime,” Greg Autry, a professor at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, said of China.
Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for Air and Space Law, provided a similar assessment. “Winning requires only getting there first,” she said. Interpretations of the concept of “due regard” in the Outer Space Treaty, she argued, could mean that a spacecraft that lands or even crashes on the moon or other celestial body could create an exclusion zone that would reserve the mineral resources within it. “We must accelerate our efforts to assure continued access to extraterrestrial resources.”
A fourth witness, though, offered a more cautionary view about space mining. “I am not opposed to mining in space. Personally, I think there may be more positive outcomes than…
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