Space

Author: Martina Elia Vitoloni | DCL Candidate Air and Space Law, McGill University

Celestial bodies like the moon contain valuable resources, such as lunar regolith — also known as moon dust — and helium-3. These resources could serve a range of applications, including making rocket propellant and generating energy to sustaining long missions, bringing benefits in space and on Earth.

The first objective on this journey is being able to collect lunar regolith. One company taking up this challenge is ispace, a Japanese space exploration company ispace that signed a contract with NASA in 2020 for the collection and transfer of ownership of lunar regolith.

The company recently attempted to land its RESILIENCE lunar lander, but the mission was ultimately unsuccessful. Still, this endeavour marked a significant move toward the commercialization of space resources.

These circumstances give rise to a fundamental question: what are the legal rules governing the exploitation of space resources? The answer is both simple and complex, as there is a mix of international agreements and evolving regulations to consider.

The article has a breakdown of the laws and further context

The UK Space Agency has launched a major new procurement process to tackle the growing threat of space debris, initiating a £75.6 million tender for the nation’s first mission to actively remove defunct satellites from orbit. This marks a pivotal step in the UK’s efforts to protect vital space infrastructure and ensure the long-term safety of the orbital environment.

At the heart of the proposed Active Debris Removal (ADR) mission, a specially designed spacecraft, equipped with cutting-edge British robotic and autonomous navigation technology, will capture and safely de-orbit two non-functioning UK-licensed satellites from low Earth orbit.

The spacecraft will guide the defunct satellites into Earth’s atmosphere, where they will burn up—eliminating potential threats to the satellite networks that power essential services such as GPS, weather forecasting, and emergency communications.

There are an estimated 140 million pieces of space debris smaller than 1cm, and over 54,000 tracked objects larger than 10cm currently orbiting Earth. Even tiny fragments can cause catastrophic damage to satellites. This mission is a critical step in addressing the threat of space debris, ensuring the long-term sustainability of space operations and protecting the infrastructure that underpins modern life.

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“The mid-latitudes offer the perfect compromise – they get enough sunlight for power, but they’re still cold enough to preserve ice near the surface,” Luzzi said. “That makes them ideal for future landing sites.”

Water and electricity are the basis for a lot of processes such as electrolysis to produce oxygen, and growing plants for food. It is required that when people land on mars, they need to have access to water and electricity.

Water is unevenly distributed across mars, with these two maps providing insight:

The first image displays the hydrogen content of mars rock (regolith); many studies such as this one discuss the technical feasibility of extracting water from that kind of regolith (with positive outcome).

The second map displays the depth that water ice is hypothesized to be buried on Mars, revealing that many areas on mars actually contain water ice close below the surface. This belief is further reinforced by findings such as this one:

This is what phoenix rover dug up in 2008. It displays water ice exposed through a shovel slowly evaporating over a course of 4 days.

Sedna, this reddish dwarf planet follows such an extreme orbit that it takes more than 11,000 years to complete a single journey around the sun. Now, scientists are proposing a new mission to reach this distant world using a revolutionary propulsion technology.

A new feasibility study, posted to the arXiv preprint server, has examined two cutting-edge approaches to technology that would reach Sedna within this narrow window of opportunity. The first involves the direct fusion drive (DFD), a conceptual nuclear fusion engine, designed to produce both thrust and electric power. For the DFD, researchers assume a 1.6 MW system with constant thrust and specific impulse, representing a massive leap beyond current propulsion technology.

The second approach involves an ingenious variation on solar sailing technology. Rather than relying entirely on solar radiation pressure, this concept uses thermal desorption instead. This is a process where molecules or atoms that are stuck to a surface are released when that surface is heated up, and it's this process that produces the propulsion. It would be assisted by a gravity assist maneuver around Jupiter, using the planet's immense gravitational field as a gravitational slingshot.