Telepossession - A Financial Leveraging Technique for us all

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by SpaceTourist on April 7, 2008 at 9:23am

Pedis Possessio is an interesting and belated (For Project Apollo) legal device. As to the Attachment: FORGET the UN. Their space treaty COPUOUS is an anathema for all of us. We don't need them. Ignore them.
As to a space-based transponder for claims. I like it. I wonder about claiming orbits and other "necessary" passage. If someone claimed the Pacific Ocean just because they had sailed there first, I wonder how the world might look now.
I doubt I would honor a claimed block to my free passage to space. The high seas, the vast space is not claimable.
George T

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Richard M. Westfall on April 7, 2008 at 10:15am

Good Morning, Telepossession is not intended to be used to exclude others from orbits or to claim entire large bodies of water like the Pacific Ocean, or the Vast Space. You miss the point. It is directed at the mining claim or the small asteroid or any other resource that is to be developed for use by space colonization efforts. Telepossession is not to claim the Moon, but maybe to set forth a small claim for mining and manufacturing with a minimal protective area, like maybe 500 feet or meters security zone. Any attempt to claim the Moon or Mars or an Orbital location are just not what this is about.
In the case of an asteroid, like 2004GU9, it is a 200 meter diameter body that will be used as a feedstock in space mining and manufacturing. Some larger asteroid like Eros would not be claimed, however a mining claim on its surface may be pursued.
The use of Telepossession here on Earth has been done for things like the shipwreck the S.S. Central America. Telepossession of the entire Atlantic Ocean, was never contemplated.
To use Telepossession - the claim of ownership must follow standards of modesty, such as in a precedential way were spelled out in the 1862 Homestead Act, or the 1872 General Mining Law. No claim for the entire western United States was ever contemplated or recognized.
I hope this corrects the incorrect perspective of Telepossession as something other than a limited tool that could provide for leveraging of financing to develop a specific and defined resource.
Richard Westfall richwestfall@comcast.net

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Raymond D Wright on October 27, 2008 at 3:12pm

I think that the issue of posession of celestial bodies or areas of them is going to be that you can have what you can defend. I hope we are not going to have war on the Moon between, say India, China, the USA, Russia and European community, perhaps over any water resources that there may be at the poles, but I rather think that will happen, unless it can all be sorted out amicably through the UN. The COPUOUS may seem restrictive, but it was put together with the idea of avoiding war in space.
P.S. Gregory W Nemitz already has laid claim to the whole of Eros, though I doubt he has the means to defend it! (see http://www.erosproject.com/ for a good laugh)

▶ Reply to This