I think we should go with a Nevada-style mining claim system. Individuals can stake claims, but they have to go to the site in person to stake it, and if they fail to develop the claim, they lose it.
Maybe.The way the American West was opened up is not a horrible model, in that it emphasized being there in person to stake your claim, and that limited the amount that one person could own (indeed the Homestead Act has struck me as one of the few sorts of laws that conservatives, libertarians, and progressives would all find to be a positive thing). But I don't know that it would translate well, given the high technological barrier to going there in person: it might run the risk of the first category, where the regulations wind up preventing anyone from developing - because it really will benefit from economies of scale. And that's part of the problem - given how I foresee technology going, space mining will develop much more efficiently if a single entity (or a small number of large entities) does most of the development. (There are only two Lagrange points. And only a few reasonable places for space elevators. And so on.)
We of course have to deal with the international nature of the endeavor, anyway.
There are five Lagrange points. But in the case of the Earth-Moon system, there's nothing to mine in most of them. Nothing that we know of, anyway -- they've been looking for Earth trojans in the L4 and L5 point for a good while and have so far turned up little larger than dust.
I'm naively assuming a Larry Niven-style belter civilization where individual exploitation of Belt resources is do-able. Given that we don't actually have the extremely efficient engines needed to make singleships workable, that's, well, kind of unrealistic.
And, of course, if I did have my way with Comstock-style claims, what would stop a corporation from sending employees out to stake claims and then buying them off them? As you say, limiting the amount one entity would own would be key. With shell corporations, though, you could get around that. Few authors have really managed to capture the corporate insanities of the early 2000s.
Only two Lagrange points are dynamically stable, though. And I didn't mean what's already there; I mean that people are expecting to use it as a deposit point for the asteroids they collect.
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We of course have to deal with the international nature of the endeavor, anyway.
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I'm naively assuming a Larry Niven-style belter civilization where individual exploitation of Belt resources is do-able. Given that we don't actually have the extremely efficient engines needed to make singleships workable, that's, well, kind of unrealistic.
And, of course, if I did have my way with Comstock-style claims, what would stop a corporation from sending employees out to stake claims and then buying them off them? As you say, limiting the amount one entity would own would be key. With shell corporations, though, you could get around that. Few authors have really managed to capture the corporate insanities of the early 2000s.
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