ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses contemporary developments in space resources law. It argues that the advent of a commercially dominated regime for regulating space resource extraction signals neither an escape from terrestrial jurisdiction nor a failure of international law, but a predictable evolution of its expansionist logic. From this perspective, the contemporary jostling over the legal regime that should govern space mining is less a sideshow to the main event of compounding environmental and economic crisis, than a symptom of a systemic counter-response to that crisis which perpetuates the extractivist imaginary that produced it. The chapter gives an overview of the Cold War-era space law regime, and of contemporary developments in space resources law. It then considers the analytical frameworks that might productively be brought to bear on these developments, with a focus on Marxian accounts of the spatial fix and of the neo-extractivist turn in global capitalism. The chapter concludes that these concepts require supplementation with scholarship in the history of international law, if the longer term implications of current negotiations over the regulation of space mining are to be fully grasped.
