As Space Exploration Takes Off, Governance Struggles for Lift

Space agencies around the world — from the United States and 35 other countries, including Canada — have indicated they need space resources for their planned missions to Mars, deep space and the Moon. Russia and China are also interested in space resources, as are commercial actors.

But all of this activity, Valerie Oosterveld points out, “hides an important fact: existing international space law provides no detailed guidance on whether, when and how space resources can and should be extracted.” Oosterveld writes that discussions in the UN Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities, while at an early stage, “are crucial for creating a much-needed governance regime for space resources.”

“Recent polling showing Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden in the race for the White House has reanimated anxiety over what a second Trump administration could entail across a range of policy areas.”

Among these concerns, James A. Haley writes, is the threat that would be posed to North American free trade should “an imprudent, impetuous president with strong nativist convictions” be re-elected in November. Indeed, Haley says, that possibility may already be costing the North American economy.

Reanne Cayenne writes about the crisis that communities across Canada are grappling with: how to house record numbers of asylum seekers. The latest in “a series of hurried touch-and-go solutions from the federal government” is “no substitute for the policy changes necessary to tackle this problem long term.” What’s peculiar, she notes, is how small a part data has played in the conversation.

Cayenne proposes that “a centralized and easily accessible space for data sharing on asylum seeker housing across Canada could embolden cooperation among various levels of government, direct funds to where they’re most urgently needed, and establish pathways for the development of sound policy through enhanced and comprehensive record keeping over time. Canada has an opportunity to be a marked innovator in this space.”

Apr. 25 – 3:00 p.m. EDT (UTC–04:00): Join us online for a discussion on ⿻數位 Plurality with E. Glen Weyl and CIGI President Paul Samson.

While digital technology threatens to tear our free and open societies apart through polarization, inequality, loneliness and fear, on a delicate, diverse and politically divided East Asian island things are different. In the decade since the occupation of Taiwan’s parliament, this island of resilience achieved inclusive, technology-fuelled growth, and entrusted the people to tackle shared challenges such as environmental protection, while capitalizing on a culture of innovation to “hack the government.”

Tickets are free; find out more and register here.