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As the scarcity of resources on Earth becomes more evident, the financial promise of space mining has recently fostered interests among both private and public actors, raising the issue of property rights in outer space. This article considers this subject matter through the prism of Third World Approaches to International Law and aims to uncover the extent to which a logic of domination currently underpins space exploration. It shows that International Space Law has historically served as an experimenting field for legal concepts that challenge the traditional logic of international law. However, conventional power dynamics have regained control, undermining the original equitable potential of the international legal framework governing property in outer space. This is also evidenced by the rhetoric of space exploration, which tacitly implies Western primacy in resource extraction and marginalises the history of the Third World. Against this backdrop, this paper calls for a new legal regime balancing the needs of the Third World with the investment of spacefaring countries and for a redefinition of space sustainability. This would entail a Copernican Revolution regarding our approach to space exploration – shifting from anthropocentrism to cosmocentrism.
Arthur Morland (Wed,) studied this question.