“Don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.”

—Wernher von Braun

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On January 27^th, 1967, the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies — commonly known as the Outer Space Treaty, or OST — was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson after being drafted in the UN. In remarks at the signing, the president indicated that without the treaty, nations might place weapons of mass destruction in space:

We have never succeeded in freeing our planet from the implements of war. But if we cannot yet achieve this goal here on earth, we can at least keep the virus from spreading.

We can keep the ugly and wasteful weapons of mass destruction from contaminating space. And that is exactly what this treaty does.

This treaty means that the moon and our sister planets will serve only the purposes of peace and not of war.

It means that orbiting man-made satellites will remain free of nuclear weapons.

While the goal of universal peace is laudable (never mind that we need nukes in space to destroy large, life-ending comets or asteroids), other provisions in a treaty ostensibly meant to promote the exploration and use of space have resulted in the exact opposite. Though we did manage six Moon landings, and have sent unmanned probes much farther, the treaty has generally encouraged our species to confine itself to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and led to (let’s be honest) a fairly anemic rate of exploration throughout our solar system via those unmanned probes.

There are two problematic aspects of the treaty, which I’ll detail below: it bans national claims of sovereignty and ownership, and it enacts extreme protections on planetary resources. The first can be found primarily in Articles I & II, which read as follows:

ARTICLE I, paragraph 1

The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.

ARTICLE II

Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

Essentially, these two Articles establish universal ownership of all the scientific and — more importantly — material benefits of outer space exploration and development (in other words, space communism). On a practical level, this disincentivized us from moving beyond LEO in the over half-century since our brief foray to Moon, from which we quickly retreated. At the time it was passed, the OST didn’t just set rules — it removed every incentive that normally drives frontier expansion. Because no nation could own land, extract resources, or establish territorial claims, governments had no economic justification to invest heavily. When it was passed, private companies capable of doing so didn’t exist yet, and had at best ambiguous legal footing under the OST. The only safe bureaucratic choice was to keep human spaceflight symbolic, scientific, and close to home, which is exactly where we stayed.

The second issue lies in Article IX. It hasn’t caused many problems yet, but certainly will once manned exploration and colonization begins in earnest.

In the exploration and use of outer space […] States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose.

For the “planetary protection” crowd (self-appointed space “hall monitors” who think rocks and alien microbes have more rights than humans), this Article is holier than the Bible. At their core, they want to stop manned exploration anywhere in the Universe, except for perhaps a few handpicked scientists taking extreme precautions against contaminating lifeless (or mostly lifeless) rocks like Moon or Mars. Colonization would be banned (if not directly by law, then by overregulation). The planetary protection movement, given free reign in this Article of OST, is essentially space communism with a strong totalitarian streak.