On March 6, 2020, I attended Returning to the Moon: Legal Challenges as Humanity Begins to Settle the Solar System at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.
It was the last conference I would attend for a long time. Within two weeks the country shut down.
The subject was the part of space resources nobody puts on a rendering: who is allowed to take what, who decides, and what happens the first time two parties want the same rock. I was there because I had started to understand that the law is not an obstacle to this business, it is the business. Water you cannot legally sell is not a resource.
I met Prof. Mark J. Sundahl there. Mark is a Professor of Law and directs the Global Space Law Center at Cleveland State University. He has served on the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, advised the U.S. delegation to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and served on NASA’s Regulatory and Policy Committee.
He is now iGO’s Chief Legal Advisor.
I also met Dennis O’Brien there. Dennis is an attorney and a member of the International Institute of Space Law, and in 2017 he founded The Space Treaty Project. He gave me a copy of his novel Major Tom and signed the first page.
What he wrote was this:
Josh, thank you for your essential encouragement, the best of luck in your efforts on behalf of humanity.
I had a name, a logo, and a graduate program. I had no funding, no hardware, and no company anyone had heard of. A man who had been working on these questions since before I was born wrote that I was encouraging him, and that what I was doing was on behalf of humanity.
I have kept the book. On the days when this looks like a thing I made up, I go and read that page again.
