Problem
The last quiz we talked at about the NASA Artemis mission. NASA and SpaceX have been working towards landing missions on the moon, Mars, and asteroids, with one of the purposes to develop space mining. To give you an example of economic value of this, the minerals found the in Asteroid Bennu are assessed around $670 million, and another asteroid 2011 UW158 is assessed at a whopping $5.7 trillion. (These asteroids contain minerals that are extremely rare on Earth).
There are no real international space treaties that deal with mining on other solar system bodies, but we are now moving forward where space mining is a reality, and the early entrants into this new economy are likely to retain monopoly and huge economic advantages over Countries or companies who come later - similar to how large tech companies control the tech business. The global space economy today is worth around $360 million and is estimated to grow to trillions by year 2040.
US, Russia, China, Japan, Australia, Euro Space Agency (ESA) and even a small wealthy country like Luxemburg, which has 10 registered space mining companies, are already in the race. In contrast to this, India accounts for a meager 3% of the global space industry today. What this means is that wealthy developed nations will benefit economically from space mining, while countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, and other economically developing nations will not. Note that by year 2050 the population of Earth is anticipated to grow to 9 billion people, with 20% of the population in developed nations like US, China, Europe, etc, and 80% of the population in economically developing nations like India, Indonesia, African and Latin American nations.
Do you think there should be international space treaties sharing the mineral wealth of the solar system with all inhabitants on Earth, or should private companies like SpaceX be allowed to fully capitalize on their investments?