“Well, space is there, and we’re going to mine it” : The prospect of regulatory governance for Outer Space Mining

International law has lagged behind in addressing rapid technological and political developments in space. Among these developments are the legal justifications for space mining and attempts to create custom for resource extraction activities. The scholarship has focused extensively on analyzing the governance gap and the attempts by the United States and other countries to push their legal interpretations, though most of it fails to provide solutions to the issue. Outer space mining could result in trillions of dollars in profit, but international law governing extractive actions is set to be developed by countries dominated by corporate interests. If this continues, countries unable to achieve access to resources in outer space could miss out on trillions of dollars in resource value and technologies developed from them. This study seeks to fill a small part of this gap by conducting an updated analysis of international space law following the continued support for the United States’s interpretation, along with an overview of regulatory governance theory and its potential as a foundation for a comprehensive governance framework on outer space mining. Its findings advance an interpretation of space law based on the principle of global benefit, and argue against allowing a few corporatized states from reaping all of the benefits from outer space mining.