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Who Owns an Asteroid?

Against the black backdrop of space, a rocky asteroid with a shape like a rounded diamond is seen. Next to it is a space probe and a measurement: 492m from top to bottom. TEXT: On December 3, 2018, the robotic NASA spacecraft named OSIRIS-REx arrived at asteroid Bennu. This unpolished jewel of an asteroid is one of the tiniest worlds we’ve visited. But size isn't everything: within a few days of its arrival, OSIRIS-REx already revealed the presence of water molecules on Bennu.
Two women, one white with red hair and a black woman with short cropped hair excitedly discuss the asteroid. Behind them is a telescope observatory. In the text bubble above them is a field of asteroids within which the words float: The geology of Bennu is part of the story of Earth's origin. Asteroids are leftovers from the early Solar System, when small chunks of material clumped together make larger bodies, from small comets up to the big planets. Some of Earth's water may even have come from asteroid bombardment. That’s a major reason why scientists are interested. In the next panel, two white men excitedly plan to harvest the asteroids, which have dollar signs floating around them. Their text reads: For others, though, asteroids like Bennu are interesting for what can be done with them. They contain substances like platinum, gold, and uranium that are valuable on Earth.
A space probe peers at an outline of Bennu, which has a question mark in it. "Of course, Bennu may not be mineable, and that's part of what OSIRIS-REx will find out." Most small asteroids are "rubble piles": mixtures of materials, rather than one with seams of different types of ore. Even water might be challenging to get from Bennu, if it's mixed in with minerals rather than existing as aquifers. The previous outline is revealed to be a clump of rocks.
Technical challenges aside, asteroid mining raises crucial questions. Several men in suits argue and jeer at each other. Red in the face or laughing like a child. "Experts disagree if mining on another world is even legal under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, or whether anyone could enforce the treaty if the United States allowed mining companies to operate. " On the table is a pile of torn treaties with a cigar butted out on one of them. "(Also, ask Native Americans how they feel about the protective value of treaties….)"
Two astronauts stand facing each other on a stark rocky landscape. Their defensively poised counterparts reflected in their helmet visors. "Behind the issue of mining lurks a tricky question: Who owns an asteroid? ls Bennu "ours" to exploit—however we define "ours"?"
To understand this question, let's ask a harder one: Who owns Mars? A space suit boot crunches in the rocky red soil of mars. In the distance, another astronaut waves, standing in front of a small shelter. Unlike an asteroid, Mars has enough gravity and atmosphere to be potentially livable by people. Mars is also far more likely to harbor native life forms than any asteroid.
NASA and other entities have announced plans to send humans to the Red Planet for anything from short-term visits to permanent habitations. A timeline of space organizations like NASA, ESA, ROSCOSMOS, and SPACEX leads to Earth, which has several speech bubbles coming from it showing a mushroom cloud, a dry desert, and a skull. A comical rocketship flown by Elon Musk is in the lower corner. Some think of Mars as a refuge in the event of global disaster on Earth: asteroid strike, nuclear war, or catastrophic climate change. Many think it's inevitable that humanity will become an interplanetary species, spreading to Mars and beyond in the next centuries.
An old faded map of the world serves as the backdrop for the next passages: As discussed at the workshop, terms like "colonization" and "settlement" are fraught with history. Native Americans, Africans, Australians, and others rightfully resent invasion and occupation by Europeans and European-Americans with subsequent erasure of cultural heritage.
An aboriginal couple stands outside at sunset, Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock) is in the background. As the panel pans right, the sunset changes in the red orange Martian sky. The rock replaced by a Mars settlement and rover. Colonizers and their descendants justify violence against and enslavement of aboriginal peoples using the language of "spreading civilization", all the while extracting resources in occupied lands for their own enrichment. Colonial invaders considered Australia "terra nullius"—land owned by no one—despite being inhabited by Aboriginal peoples for thousands of years. Mars isn't directly analogous to North America, but much of the language used to describe humans living there is borrowed from colonialism. Conquest. Expansion. Colonization. Settlement.
Another space boot steps into the red soil of Mars. In its boot print, thin filaments grow resembling the fruiting bodies of mold. lf Mars does have its own life forms—most likely microbes—then ethical considerations come in big-time. Humans on Mars would bring our own microbes, contaminating every experiment and ruining the chance to study Martian life and chemistry on its own terms. We can't undo that kind of contamination.
Bennu is seen again, floating in space. The text asks: Bennu is probably lifeless, so it’s simpler in that respect. However is the value of a world tied to whether it might have life? What if Bennu didn't have exploitable natural resources? Are the only things of value those which we can harvest for our use?
On a clear day, a mountain stands vigil over a golden field. Its furrowed slope is reflected in the water of a nearby lake. ln 2017, New Zealand granted human rights to Mount Taranaki, a reflection of the Māori belief that the mountain is an ancestral figure. Other mountains and rivers in New Zealand have been granted similar legal status, meaning they have no ownership and are protected from violence much as a human is. Euro-American culture normalized the concept of private land ownership and its ancillary belief that the natural world—both living and nonliving— exists primarily for human use. A hand holding a bible aloft quotes scripture: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
This concept carried over to American "manifest destiny", and finally to the space program. Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin sits wearing a "Destination Mars" t-shirt. He holds his hand up as he speaks: "We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way…." For many people, it's inevitable that we'll settle on and exploit the resources of other worlds, with the tacit assumption that nobody else has claimed 'em, so they're ours.
The night sky over Antarctica glows with the aurora borealis. As the panel shifts right, the snowy plains turn into the rocky surface of the moon, the aurora replaced by the distant Earth. However, recognition of the intrinsic value of places like Antarctica, or granting special heritage status to Mount Taranaki and other sites, points to other possible ways of thinking freed from exploitation. Bennu is an ancestral relic of the Solar System, from long before Earth became the planet it is now.
At the center of the whirling streaks of stars encircling the peak of Mount Taranaki is Bennu. Asteroids may not be sacred to anyone's religion, but they're part of our cosmic heritage, a way of learning our shared past. Maybe for that reason we assign them intrinsic value, beyond petty thoughts of ownership and exploitation.

Description

Celestial bodies like Bennu, a small near-Earth asteroid that passes close to Earth about every six years, could help us tell Earth’s origin story. Or they could be strip-mined for resources. Humanity must come to terms with its exploitative colonialist past before bringing that mindset to worlds beyond our own.