United Nations Ratifies Historic Legal Accord Regulating Commercial Lunar & Asteroid Extraction
Treaty establishes shared sovereign rights, planetary scientific preserves, and mandatory environmental mitigation beyond low-Earth orbit.
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Following three years of committee deliberations, 142 nations approved the outer-space resource covenant, closing a sixty-year regulatory vacuum in celestial property law.
NEW YORK — In what historians are already comparing to the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Celestial Resource Stewardship Accord by an overwhelming majority on Friday afternoon.
As private aerospace corporations and national space agencies prepare commercial prospecting missions for lunar water ice and platinum-group metals on near-Earth asteroids, the treaty establishes binding licensing registries, prohibits national sovereignty claims over celestial bodies, and mandates that 15% of resource extraction royalties fund global climate mitigation programs.
"The cosmos cannot become the unregulated domain of whichever nation plants the first automated drill," articulated UN Secretary-General for Disarmament and Outer Space Affairs Amina Al-Sabah. "We have established that celestial heritage belongs collectively to all humankind."
The accord enters into force immediately, with the International Space Resource Authority headquartered in Vienna tasked with overseeing orbital extraction permits starting in 2027.
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