Abstract :
The Moon and the deep seabed (including their natural resources) are the only environs in international law explicitly proclaimed as the common heritage of mankind. This would seem to necessitate a specific approach to the utilization of their natural resources, too, but this must be one that takes into account the fact that both domains are increasingly affected by commercialization and privatization. The premise of this paper is that a productive analogy can be drawn between the regulation of activities in these two areas, one that benefits space law in particular. The only directly relevant space treaty in this regard, the so-called Moon Treaty of 1979, was drafted in a quite different world; moreover, only 10 countries have ratified the Treaty, and none of these can be considered a major space faring nation. The law of the sea has been far more successful in solving such problems in its area than space law has in its own. Particularly noteworthy are the innovative amendments to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which were able to accommodate the concerns of the industrialized states and could thus yield guidelines for the future development of the law of outer space where natural resource utilization is concerned. While utilization of the resources of celestial bodies of course mostly still lies ahead, the increasing pace in the development of human space activities suggests that now would be an ideal time to make legal rules governing the activities, which may be a reality sooner than we can ever expect.
