A behind-the-scenes lunar resources initiative – seeking to find harmony among various positions surrounding commercializing regolith and other resources – now has legal status.
“We are excited to celebrate the legal formation of the Breaking Ground Resources Trust initiative,” the Open Lunar Foundation, which supports the initiative financially, said on Twitter on Wednesday (Jan. 26). “It is a trust dedicated to formal and effective institutional management of lunar resources between different stakeholders,” the tweet added.
Moreover, the trust – which has been quiet publicly in recent months – will announce more information about its recent activities “in a few weeks,” according to spokesperson Héloïse Vertadier.
The trust spoke with stakeholders (which will be disclosed at a later date) for a “spectrum of solutions” that produced a set of recommendations regarding managing lunar resources. “It’s value-driven, but also very pragmatic,” Vertadier told SpaceQ of the forthcoming recommendations.
Vertadier acknowledged that there are international complications concerning the discussion for lunar resources, but said that her entity seeks a “third way” that does not engage directly with international disputes such as the one ongoing between Russia and NATO concerning military activities in the Ukraine, or U.S. concerns about Chinese space and cybersecurity activities. (Already Russia has come under criticism for performing an anti-missile test in space in late 2021 that generated a cloud of space junk affecting International Space Station activities, for example – and China faced international condemnation for similar activities a few years ago.)
“We are not completely public, not completely private, but an entity in between,” Vertadier said of the trust’s role in navigating such disputes. “We are completely independent from this kind of political conflict, and it doesn’t affect our work. We find actors to work with, and if they want to be involved in our work, then they can always reach out – or we reach out to them and find partners in that way. We’re not really involved or influenced by the context right now.”
What’s more, the Trust has two Canadian connections. The first is Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is chair of the Open Lunar Foundation’s board of directors. Hadfield has been sharing updates from the foundation on Twitter periodically since Breaking Ground’s concept was first announced in December 2020.
We are excited to celebrate the legal formation of the Breaking Ground Resources Trust initiative! It is a trust dedicated to formal and effective institutional management of lunar resources between different stakeholders. Read more: https://t.co/krJDnVPQqR #StayTuned #BGT — Open Lunar Foundation (@openlunar) January 26, 2022
“How we choose to explore and settle the Moon, under which rules, is important for human history,” Hadfield tweeted in December. The retired astronaut also co-authored a Lunar Resources Policy document, available since May 2021 on Open Lunar’s website.
The second connection is Jessy Kate Schlinger, who hails from Toronto and is currently director of the policy and governance at the Open Lunar Foundation. Schlinger was a software engineer for the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing project at the Ames Research Center between 2006 and 2010. Other space projects include finding applications for space exploration policy and governance at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and working as an embedded software engineer for a stealth space company, according to Schlinger’s LinkedIn profile.
Some of the rationale for the Trust can be found in a July 2021 document from the foundation, initially written in December 2020 – shortly after the Chinese Chang’e-5 lander-rover combination successfully touched down on the far side of the moon for the first time.
“Lunar material extraction from the moon will be a regular reality inviting a timely, if not urgent, consideration of the policy and coordination questions we need to agree on, in order to manage space resources for the benefit of all,” the foundation wrote.
Space law is complex and difficult to summarize in a short article, but generally, it proceeds through a series of international agreements (the International Space Station ones are a more famous set) with some foundational documents that are approved through the United Nations’ Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. One of those UN treaties is the Outer Space Treaty, a sort of basic “rules of the road” governing how to operate in space exploration.
In 2015, the United States launched a Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act interpreting the Outer Space Treaty “as allowing the extraction and commercialization of lunar resources, as long as the activity does not involve territorial appropriation,” the foundation wrote. While Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates supported this interpretation in 2017 and 2020, respectively, other countries have not been as supportive, the foundation said.
“This position has brought to light important questions as to how commercialization could or should take place,” the foundation said of the debate surrounding the 2015 U.S. act. “Other questions involve the kinds of rights, protections and guard rails that should be established in order to best support cooperation, development, sustainability and good stewardship of the use of lunar regolith.”
Open Lunar wrote that the trust is meant to “affirm and support” UN COPUOS. “However,” they continued, “we also assert that new kinds of institutions at this middle layer — multilateral and yet not universal — are valuable and help to build practical momentum towards resolution of coordination challenges for space exploration. The trust is also an entity which enables state and non-state views to coalesce into new kinds of governance arrangements together.”
More information on Breaking Ground is available at its own website. The website calls for “new models of resource management that enable both technological innovation and scientific exploration for the benefit of all,” to try to find a legal consensus for resource management.
Notably, in December 2020 the trust signed a memorandum of understanding with Intuitive Machines that “lays the foundations for an ongoing collaboration between the two organizations to pursue their mutual interest in understanding the operational and rights frameworks for long term sustained presence beyond Earth.” Intuitive Machines is one of a set of companies selected for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Services Payload program that aims to send a suite of robotic landers and rovers to the Moon ahead of the Artemis program.
Other prominent names involved in Breaking Ground include Jason Crusan, former NASA director of Advanced Exploration Systems and Hannah Sargeant, a post-doctoral researcher at the United Kingdom’s Open University investigating lunar resources. Future updates about the trust will be posted on Open Lunar’s Twitter as well as the trust website, officials say.