Technology, Connected - Who Owns a Trillion-Dollar Asteroid?

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

This episode of Thinking on Paper uses Space to Grow to examine who has the right to mine the Moon, extract resources from asteroids and build commercial activity beyond Earth.The Outer Space Treaty prohibits national sovereignty over celestial bodies, but it leaves important questions unresolved. Can companies own the resources they extract? Who grants mining rights? What happens when commercial claims, national security interests and international law collide?In this episode, we discuss:Who owns the Moon and other celestial bodiesWhether companies can legally mine lunar resourcesHow asteroid mining could workWhat the Outer Space Treaty says about ownershipWhy the Moon Treaty has limited international supportThe difference between owning territory and owning extracted resourcesWhich companies are trying to build a space-resource economyHow property rights could affect investment in lunar infrastructureThe role of the US Space Force in the commercial space economyHow China’s space programme is shaping strategic competitionWhy anti-satellite weapons threaten civilian and commercial systemsWhether competition for space resources could reproduce conflicts on EarthThe central legal problem is that space treaties were written before private companies could realistically reach the Moon, operate spacecraft at scale or plan commercial extraction.This conversation examines whether existing space law can govern a growing off-world economy, and how resource competition could affect security, diplomacy and the future of human activity in space.Please enjoy the show.--Thinking on paper is a technology podcast on The Social, Environmental, Cultural & Business Impacts Of Technology. --Chapters(00:00) Global Conflict(02:04) Human Nature (03:28) Asteroid Mining(05:53) Space Mining(11:05) The Space Resource Exploration Act(13:01) Space Mining Legislation(17:19) Philosophical Perspectives (20:14) National Security in Space(20:40) Government in Space Innovation(21:34) National Security (23:10) Weaponization of Space(24:47) The Prisoner's Dilemma (26:40) Humanity's Moral Compass (27:03) The Future of Humanity in Space

Global conflict has reached its highest level since World War II. 59 active conflicts, including major wars in the Middle Eastern Ukraine, as reported by the 2025 Global Peace Index. Other reports indicate over 120 armed conflicts with over 60 nations involved. Power, resources, energy, religion. The natural state of this planet is disagreement, division and war. And if SpaceX are going to build a civilization at the South Pole of the Moon, What are the US going to do if they rock up and China have planted a flag in the sea of storms?

Who owns the riches and resources of the solar system? Who owns the precious metals buried on the surface of asteroids? Who has the right to mine them? From the outer space treaty of 1967 to the Moon Treaty of 1979, NASA human politicians and companies like Deep Space Industries and Asteroids have been trying to create a way to avoid taking the power games, subterfuge blame and political, rampant chaos and corruption to put it nicely to space. Will it work?

Should it work? Can it work? We're reading Space to Grow by Matthew Weinstein and Brendan Rousseau. Thinking on paper is the USS Enterprise of the tech podcast. And Jeremy is Spock. So Jeremy, can you find some balance? between cold logic and human emotion, please. What a kickstart, man.

I love that, dude. It got me fired up. As we just weave through this whole book, the only thing that keeps ringing in the back of my head is what can we do as a society to not bring our terrestrial baggage into space? Like, that's the mission, right? That is the mission.

Should you choose to accept it, space industry? But is it easy? No, it's easy to state it's hard to solve. But we talk about humans allegedly being pretty good at coordinating, cooperating, collaborating, collaborating. That's how we succeeded through our evolution. But as things become appealing to grab and control, the better of us is taken rather than the more altruistic version of us. So what is reassuring, though, so. Since the birth of the space industry, property rights and the politics of ownership and sovereignty in space has been at the front of the agenda.

So they are thinking about it. They have been thinking about it. They've been actively working on it to a certain degree since the beginning. I mean, even though the whole space industry was born out of a Cold War, essentially. Right. And a proof that one nation could do something over another. The first to this, it was a signal. It was a power signal in a lot of ways,

even though it was a beautiful scientific achievement to be able to pull this stuff off. But again, it was a signal in this power struggle, too. Yeah, we're going to dive in and out of this, but planetary resources is where we're starting. Six degrees of Peter Diamandis. You know, we've had some XPRIZE folks on the show before. Peter, we would love to have you on the show at some point.

Come on, Peter. Come and think on paper with us. Think on paper with us. But planetary resources was started out with the idea that these jewels are flying about our solar system. And they actually have so much resource potential consolidated in them to the tune of like, if you think about it, I think one was stated to have 10,000, the value of 10,000 quadrillion. which is 100,000 times the global GDP of Earth in 2023. So what happens? That would crash the market. Well, yeah, that just drops down.

Boom. And we have like this flood of platinum and all of these other rare earth metals landing in the market. But again, that could do one of two things. Yeah, sure, it freaks the market out. but also it makes things that we make out of platinum easier to make and lower a cost for people that need medical devices and all of that kind of stuff. So really interesting to think about it from a bigger picture. This is the societal viewpoint, right? Not just, holy crap, we figured out

how to generate enough exit velocity to get off Earth. We've landed on the moon once. We're doing a bunch of stuff in orbit. Really cool, really cool stuff. But then how do we become good stewards of making all of this stuff work for our advantage as humans. As Peter Diamandis, who since his childhood, he wanted to do one thing, be an asteroid miner. That's bonkers to me, right? Like, I originally, as I was reading that sentence, I was like, I wanted to be an astronaut.

And I made sure I had to read it twice. I'm like, no, he said asteroid minor. Like, well, you're a kid? Yeah, I wonder. Well, yeah, well, we'll have to ask him when he's on thinking on paper. So Planetary Resources Inc. He almost got his wish. Was it legal?

Well, is the idea of mining asteroids for platinum and rare minerals resources? Is it legal? Was it legal back then? What was the year? So we're talking... It wasn't initially, but, you know, what does every good company do that, you know, involves a certain aspect of corraling resources or getting permission is that they lobby. They create a attempt to present legislation.

that makes what they're doing a little bit easier. So that's exactly what they did. Their company had a framework in place that they could think about, at least think on the outer space treaty, a binding set of rules forming the basis of international space law passed in the United Nations in 1967. Remarkable that both the US and the Soviet Union were signed on. They agreed that outer space was the province.

The province is right, the province of the province of. of all mankind. But did that include claiming resources on an asteroid? Wasn't really clear, I don't think, was it? Yeah, well, then we get into this whole, like, lick the cookie reference just so no one else would eat it. I don't know, you're thinking of, like, dogs peeing on their, you know, peeing in their backyard to mark their territory.

Yeah, so the root of all this was this outer space treaty. There was some framework. They go, they go to try to present a concept, to bill for new legislation to allow them to mine the asteroids that they somehow can, you know, get to because there's value, right? Number one, how the hell do I get to the asteroid? Okay, that's going to require some money. How do the hell do I make sure the asteroid has stuff worth mining? That takes some money. That takes some science. And then how do I, my, how do I land on the asteroid, mine the stuff and bring it back? That takes some money, right? So, so there's an

idea of like, hey, if I'm, if I'm putting energy into something, this is a lock, this is a John Lockeism, I think. And it was cool to see these old philosophies woven in of how people deal with property rights, ownership rights. But John Locke said that if you put your labor to something and it generates an output, that output is yours. Again, like very, very high level. But conceptually, you know, sounds pretty fair, right? Like, Mark, if you spend $5 billion figuring out how to mine asteroids, you land up there, you're able to do it, you pull it off, you come back, you don't kill yourself, you bring back a pile of money, there's value in what you did and you deserve to reap the rewards, do you not? The gold industry, the diamond industry, the oil industry, every new frontier since the dawn of humanity would say that that's kind of how things work, isn't it? I've spent some time in the writing of specifications.

So specifications for systems. And there was at one point I was on a working group that was trying to decide the system specifications for structure cabling. The type of cable you use, the performance you get, the performance you get when you connect the cable or something, there are all these rules and regs. And I was working for a distributor at the time. So I had no specific affiliation to any one manufacturer. I sold them all. But each of the manufacturers would participate in that working group as well. So when it gets written with the people on the working group,

the products tend to get approved in the specification for the people that were on the working group. It's like it doesn't always work out that way. But their reasoning for being on the working group, is to try to figure out if their products can fit that bill. They'd like their products to fit that bill. So similarly, long-winded analogy, but similarly, there's this first in-time principle that is kind of written into this language of the bill.

Planetary region. You know, it's sort of going to have to stop you there because I can't get Sam Altman out of my head as you're talking about this in the Empire of AI in our book club with Kevin Howe and how Open AI essentially did what you're experiencing. that you did, or the companies that your supplies did, and planetary resources and the mining companies did. If you're there sitting with the politicians telling them what the law should be,

then yeah, they're going to bend to your will and your personality. Well, so in the case of the politicians, they're largely non-technical and potentially uninformed. So they're trusting this Oracle, very charismatic, right or wrong, or just allowing that Oracle language to proceed through because of something behind the scenes. Who knows, right? But this first and principal thing, DSI pushed back a little bit. So DSI was the planetary resource competitor. They pushed back, you're like, hey, this first and principle thing is a little funky because planetary resources, your step one is to put satellites into orbit and do some imaging similar to what planet is doing now, I think, was their first, hey, we'll try to get

some revenue by imaging the Earth or doing some kind of space to Earth, information, grab, consolidation and sell. The idea that DSI was like, well, hey, first in time could mean you saw an asteroid that you think has potential. Of course you're going to see asteroids. You got constellations of satellites written about. So there was that initial pushback. But, you know, fast forward 2015, talk to us about what was actually approved. This is actually titled Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act. It became law granting American citizens note.

The right to engage in commercial exploration for and commercial recovery of space resources free from harmful interference. US companies were now entitled to any asteroid resource or space resources obtained and were allowed to possess, own, transport, use and sell any resources from space, water harvested from the moon, asteroids could contain.

Well, I won't go to that. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, so you have this statement. And before we go into the international repercussions of said legislation, how do you feel about the word utilize, just in general? How do you feel about the word utilize? This lawyer speak for use. I hate the word utilize.

Like, I freaking hate it with a passion. Say use. Lawyers are going to decide, and that's how lawyers speak. Are you trying to sound fancier by saying utilize? No, anyway, it's personal pet peeve, could be right or wrong. But okay, so this comes out, 2015. What does the world say, Mark? How do they feel about it?

I think it depends on where you're from. I think some countries and some companies We're probably a little bit pissed off, angry, jealous, envious, probably angry. Well, it basically pushes out, oh, forget about that whole outer space treaty thing. You're now granting mining rights or granting resource monetization rights to something that was supposed to be a collective commons. But managing said resource as collective commons is a whole other thing. in and of itself, isn't it? Unfortunately, or fortunately, or the collective commons aren't going to mine asteroids.

Very, very few people are going to mine asteroids. Even when it becomes commercially and economically feasible, it's still going to be a handful of companies, at least until our population has reached the trillions and we are living all over the galaxy. At the beginning of this conversation, I said that we are the USS Enterprise, of the technology podcast, and you are Spock.

Is this just logically the best solution that there is to an unanswerable question? I don't think you can go full Spock on this, man. I don't think it can be logic. Empathy is not logic. There has to be empathy to this piece of the equation when you're writing these rules. So let me flip it on its head. I had this. We're famous for our thought experiments on thinking on paper.

Here is one for you, Mark, okay? We are convening the most important working group in the history of humanity. We, you and I are really trying to figure out one thing. Write the rules for who owns space. Bam, done. Most important working group we could ever put together. Let's say we could just knock on some coffins and say, you know, hey, Emmanuel Kant, hey, wake up for a bit.

Rousseau, wake up for a bit. Mr. Hume, wake up. We got some work for you. Oh, John Locke, come together. Let's figure this thing out. Exume the Hume. Exume the Hume. That is a thinking on paper hat or T-shirt,

just like Massage the Hamiltonian. So I was thinking about how these folks would like interact in a room, of course they would all disagree because their points are very counter to one another. I know we're not going to do like a full deep dive into like Locke's philosophy and Kant's philosophy, but in the context of the chapter, how would you envision that

discussion might go? I'd love to see them walk into a room with Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron and Kirstama and then trying to bang out a solution to this problem. I don't know. The answer to that thought experiment. I do know that they probably say that one country should not write the

rule book for all the other countries. But who was it? The Brazil delicate domestic legislation, however well-meaning will often provide us with a poor substitute that falls short of achieving what can only be realized by means of a multilateral instrument that can take into account the interests of the international community. These nations, I love this quote, these nations that make up the global south, i.e. the people not involved in the decision-making, will not be engaged in the extraction of resources in space in the early phases of exploration and exploitation, said Alavo Bittencourt, a leader of the Hague's Space Resources Working Group,

the one that we have now taken over, Jeremy, and we are running. But they will suffer the consequences. Kant says that any rule that is made should universally apply to all the players in it. So the US is able to launch stuff into space. there are very small countries that aren't even going to probably never be able to launch stuff into space, right? So how do you create a rule that serves the U.S. and small country at the same time? Here's the debate, right? And then lastly, Rousseau, and again, this is just me in the context of the chapter,

he almost questions like how the rules are made and who they serve. If the rules are made by powerful people, do they serve everybody or do they serve the people in power? Easy question. I think that's open to the YouTube comments. If you want to answer that for us, I think we could probably guess what you'll say. What do you think gets hammered out with this kind of stuff? With those different philosophies coming together and they're charged with who owns space?

We always talk about human nature, Joe. I mean, this isn't very, very simple. There's a very simple outcome to all of this. And we all know what the outcome will be for all of the grand standing. The first country or company to land on an asteroid and mine it will set the precedent. And then the question is become, how do you make sure that the riches, like it's like with AI, the riches we're promised to truly like it's going to transform the GDP of the world. And it's going to create all of this value and all this production.

And these asteroids are going to create all of this value. How do we make sure that that value is fairly distributed to the global South, which will, to everybody? And maybe we're asking the wrong question. A couple of things that I thought about as I was poking around with this. You know, you said nobody can own space. So maybe it becomes like this licensing structure where, you know, you're a mining company. You know, you want to go to, what was it, Psyche, 16, which is that gigantic one worth $10,000 quadrillion dollars or whatever. you say, hey, I'm going to give this a rip for five years.

So you have a five-year license to jump on the asteroid, yank as much out as you can, and see what you can come up with. So maybe licensing is a way to keep it reasonable. Who you're paying? It's a great question. It's a great question. So another piece of it is like there may be a global consortium, right? which they're in life.

Franchising out the asteroid, you buy an asteroid franchise. That's right. It's exactly right. No, but the idea of that is like, you're not giving someone something forever. You're allowing them to have a run at it for a moment in time under a certain set of rules maybe.

Maybe some of the profit that they make goes into a fund to help the Global South and help other companies. But it's still the same question. Who decides? And if we're blocking it? And if we're blocking China out of that, we have this really nice international agreement, but China's not involved and India's not involved, and Russia is both involved and not involved, and they get there first.

And then, okay, our really nice international agreement about licensing asteroids for five years falls out of the window, doesn't it? Because, again, who decides that? That's just the same problem, but further along. So we are going to bring our shitty baggage to orbit then. This is basically where we're at. I think that's basically what Chapter 11. is afraid to say. And I think chapter 11

merges very nicely with chapter 12 and how we started this show, National Security. And if national security, the military celestial complex, that also answers the question to chapter 11, doesn't it?

Kind of who runs the show? Isn't chapter 12 the answer to chapter 11? The answer to chapter 12 is the answer to chapter 11? Well, does the military, on the internet right now? I don't know if the governments

can turn it off. Ish. Ish. But no, my, so there was a, there was a an excerpt in that chapter. I don't remember and I ended up writing down

DARPA question mark. A lot of things are funded by government. Kickstarted by government because the expectations of or funded by defense, rather, funded by defense because the expectations for immediate return or not there,

but the desire to find the next thing that could blow something else up, and it's fear insecurity. Fear and security powers that machine a little bit, right? But DARPA funded the development of what eventually became the internet. How does that land today? It'd be an interesting case study

that we need longer time to unpack. Without national security, where would the space industry be, probably it would still be on planet Earth. There wouldn't be a space industry. There would be no space industry. Yeah, there would be no space industry. There would there would be no space industry without national security. A few weeks ago, we spoke to Mark Boggart, the CEO of Serafin, a space investment company.

And he said 80% of all space investment at the moment is defense based. not only is the space industry built on national security, the immediate future of the space industry is built on national security. The long-term future of the space industry is a tool for national security. Hotels on the moon are awesome. Orbitals anywhere, awesome. But before that, you've got to blow other people's satellites up. Well, look at this.

I mean, there's just some of the things. these quotes as I'm running through this thing, the weaponization of space is forthcoming. The era of multipolarity with this this fuzzy mixture of peaceful and military significance. Space is no longer a sanctuary. The acting secretary of defense in 2019, Patrick Shanahan said, this is not a future or theoretical threat. This is today's threat. In 2018, this quote, Trump unveiled a new national security strategy in early 2018.

Designating space is a theater of war. Among the other amazing things that said gentlemen has a congress. So if you go back to 1999 and the Rumsfeld Commission and the Rumsfeld Commission concluded that the country was vulnerable to what it called a space pearl harbor. with so few satellites of their own, adversaries can focus on playing offence. Congressman Jim Cooper later wrote, no one today finds US space assets too daunting to think of attacking. The Commission recommended creating a new military organization that would be responsible for the space domain,

just as the Army, Navy, and Air Force oversee land, sea and air, and eventually you get the wonderfully titled Space Force. So we get into another game theory, economic theory device that is woven in here, the famous prisoner's dilemma, right? Do you trust that the other prisoner is going to say something that benefits cooperation? Or is it... Excuse me for my cynical laugh. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, so, all right. So it obviously didn't work between the U.S. and China. they didn't agree to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma exercise. There was a anti-satellite missile that China threw up, shattering us, let's see, 2007, I think. Three years later, Congress passes something called the Wolf Amendment, which forbids NASA to collaborate with China or any Chinese own company.

They get kicked out of the space station. China says, FU, I'm building my own. Does it bode well, guys. Like of all the good stuff we talk about, of all the grand potential that can be harnessed in space, helium three to power quantum computing, mass drivers on the moon to basically create these data center factories in space. We can get all the data centers off the earth.

Like, we're in our, we're going to be in our own way again, Mark. We're going to be in our own way. It's a pressing chapter. Well, that shows we win. We've got to win the space race. We go for one's space to go. The ending, that's the ending of the book, People. The last chapter ends on that note, that warning, that warning of humanity's weakness for power.

And unlike the other technologies we speak about, which can all be used for good or for ill, if we're not careful, space just becomes a weapon, a theatre of war. as Donald Trump put it. And Elon Musk is a very divisive figure. But he says over and over and over again that his mission is for the good of humanity. And all of the companies and all of the people that we've met on thinking on paper,

that we've seen in this book, follow the same moral compass. We ask it every week. on thinking on paper. Like what do we want humans to be and how does technology help us get there? We ask it every single guest. And they all say the same things. They all have the same love and passion for our crazy, stupid, amazing civilization. And I can only hope that those are the people that make the decisions about who owns space such is that that question is so ridiculous. But who owns the resources.

And not the politicians. Another Neil de Gras, Tyson, quote, to maybe land the plane of space to grow. Quote, every time a nation or a company plants a flag in space and says, this is mine, I think about the fact that the atoms in the flag were forged in the cores of dying stars

billions of years before Earth existed. You didn't make the atoms. You didn't make the asteroid. You didn't make the laws of physics that let you get there. You assembled some human ingenuity on top of 4 billion years of cosmic evolution and called it ownership. The universe has heard this argument before.

It is not impressed. And until next time, disruptors and curious minds. Be disruptive. Stay curious. Keep thinking on paper.