Fortunately, that 1982 convention, like the 1979 Moon Agreement, have not been signed and ratified by the principal spacefaring nations. There is still time to correct the situation and their compelling requirements. The strategy we propose here for consideration is twofold: • at the very least, amend the Moon Agreement so as to establish a legal framework for a Lunar Port Authority as a regulatory, bonding and management administration for lunar industrialization and settlement; also create within the United Nations an International Lunar Planning Office (ILPO) as was proposed in 1990 by the International Academy of Astronautics.... • or preferably, replace the Moon Agreement with a new treaty that leads to the formation of a space Metanation to assume governance of space as a territory under U.N. Trusteeship provisions. This would obviate the sanctions described by replacing them with a constitution, a legislature, a court system, and the police power of the orbital state to protect and guarantee our common heritage and our free passage in space, as well as promote the development of that frontier. The political void resulting from the present "open space" approach seemingly originated in large part from a studied effort by allied commanders-in-chief to promote military espionage. Even before the Sputnik incident in 1957 and continuing through the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Kennedy Administrations in the United States, civil uses of space were orchestrated in order to mask the clear military strategy of free fly-overs by spy satellites and aircraft. It is believed by military insiders at the highest levels that military strategy materially caused and maintained our open space policy [5], The Common Heritage of Mankind had almost nothing to do with it - the role of humanity in space was simply a lofty idea that was accommodating to military planners. Today with the end of the Cold War, there is little strategic need to preserve the open space model for espionage purposes; the orbital science of surveillance is advanced and, as a result, the risk of war has receded substantially by its practice. The ongoing political void in space is unnecessarily laced with potentially cumbersome negative documents to which the Moon Agreement in its present form would only contribute. Furthermore, the open space model is doomed eventually because spacefaring settlers will, in time, not permit themselves to be bound by terrestrial or foreign treaties. There is a strategic advantage if earthkind anticipate this well in advance of colonization by spacekind. As Robinson and White so aptly advised us, international law would be a weak model for governance in space: Meanwhile, despite the lessons of the free city-state experiments on Earth, an international system that is weak politically and legally is a perilous scaffold upon which to build the kind of space policy that will be required to protect the most precious, fundamental, meta-legal essences of life and intelligence in reality is that much of international law is scarcely positive law at all. It is meta-law in the sense that the realm in which it functions is theoretical, ethical and ideological. [6]
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