The establishment of the priority right in space resources activities

Abstract

The commercial exploitation of space natural resources is becoming feasible, however, there’s no specific and practicable international regime of space resources activities in lex lata yet. One of the to-be-settled key issues is how to confirm the right over the prospected or abstracted resources to the relevant space actors. The “Building Blocks for the Development of An International Framework on Space Resource Activities” drafted by the Hague International Space Resources Governance Working Group in 2019 provides the concept of priority right to space resources, which leads to a hot international debate. The common heritage of humankind principle in lex ferenda should be served as the jurisprudential basis of priority rights to space resources. The space law in future should not adopt the concept of priority right to seek for or prospect space resources. Priority right should include two aspects: priority right to mine/recover and priority right to the abstracted resources. In the process of designing this priority right, the specific mechanisms like share conversion, transition of priority right should be considered. There could be more than one state or space actor who have priority right to various extent and in different stages in context of the exploitation of the same resources, and the allocation of priority rights and the approaches to implement these rights should be considered on a case-by-case basis, according to the extent of the investment and contribution of each actor and the principle of balanced interests from the international perspective.