 Andy Thomas, an Australian astronaut, is promoting a $150 million project designed to turn the Woomera rocket range into an international spaceport for tourists. He contends that the project is in Australia's best long term interest. Under his scheme, the Australian Federal Government will spend $150 million over 10 years to upgrade Woomera and build a new infrastructure. In fact, Thomas believes that by pursuing this project, Australia would be doing what the State of New Mexico in the United States of America already is undertaking. New Mexico has allocated $150 million to build a facility for space tourists near the White Sands missile range. The space tourism adventure market is worth billions of dollars and is being led by Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson, who has formed the company Virgin Galactic to send tourists into space in what he hopes is the not too distant future. There are other companies working towards advancing the space tourism industry including US based Space Adventures, which recently announced plans to build spaceports in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. In fact, Space Adventures has sent three civilians into space already, including Dennis Tito in 2001, Mark Shuttleworth in 2002 and Greg Olsen in 2005. Each man paid $27 million to stay on the International Space Station for several days.
Space tourism is a flight, paid from private means, into space or into a near-earth orbit with entertainment or research purposes.
According to estimations, polls and studies of the public opinion, many people have a strong desire to fly into space. According to the opinion of experts, this desire, in an intermediate perspective, and can become an important source for further development of astronautics.
Flights to ISS
Dennis Tito was the first space tourist, who paid for the flight into space in 2001.
At present, the International Space Station (ISS) is the only destination of space tourism. Flights are conducted with the help of the Russian spaceship “Soyuz” to the Russian segment of ISS.
ROSCOSMOS (Federal space agency of Russian Federation) and Space Adventures are brokering the flights of tourists. Space Adventures has been in collaboration with “ROSCOSMOS” since 2001. With the help of his company, already five tourists (data by the end of 2007) have traveled to space.
The preparation of space tourists is done in “Zvezdny Gorodok” or “Star City” near Moscow and also in small aircraft, simulating the weightlessness.
Even though the price tag of a visit to orbit is around 20-23 million dollars, the number of people wanting to travel to space is steadily increasing. From July 2007, the price of space travel was increased from 20 to 30-40 million dollars. Apart from this, the price of a new service was identified, the exit permission of space tourists into free space — 15 million dollars.
The possibility of property ownership in space is strictly limited to man-made space objects. The situation is totally different with the heavenly bodies. In 1980, the notorious American Denice Hope proclaimed the Lunar Republic and started selling plots on the Moon and other planets. Two legal entities, LLC "Lunar Embassy" and "Lunar Consulate", officially represented Hope’s business worldwide. They offered plots on the Moon and Mars for quite “affordable prices”. On the websites of these organizations, it was claimed that Denice Hope had "lawfully registered ownership of the Moon, Mars, Venus and other celestial bodies in our solar system except the Earth and the Sun". It is reported that the “original documents – the Property agreement, Lunar constitution and maps of the lunar surface, indicating the place, where the property is located" were issued to the buyer. By 2008, Denice Hope “sold” space land to over 120,000 people. The business of Denice Hope on extraterrestrial real estate is far from unique and not the first of its kind.
A simple question, "Can one buy the moon or land on it?" with its exoticism it puts even the most experienced lawyers in a fix. It was pointless in making attempts to find an answer in the Civil Code or other legislation acts. The land on the Moon, of course, was not referred in them. The issue is solved only at the level of international space cooperation and national civil laws.
The Universal Space Treaty of 1967 did not contain phrasing that literally prohibits the purchase of property on the moon and other planets. Article II states that: "Outer Space, Including the Moon and other celestial bodies, does not belong to any nation by claim of dominion on them, by means of use or occupying nor by any other means”. Hope particularly refers to this omission by justifying his claim on the moon: the agreement bans national appropriation but not private ownership.
However, even a first-year student at law college knows that two prerequisites are necessary for having the right to the property of anything: first, the norms of internal civil law, regulating the reference of property and secondly, the specific legal facts, directly leading to the appearance of property rights, for instance, they can be a creation of property, a sale deed or an acceptance of inheritance etc.
|
