The Guardian view on owning the heavens: the perils of letting capitalism colonise the cosmos | Editorial

In 2015, a rare moment of US congressional unity passed the Space Act – to mine asteroids as if they were open seams of ore and harvest planets like unclaimed farmland. Space had been humanity’s last commons, shielded by a 1967 Outer Space treaty. Mr Trump declared it dead in 2020, signing the Artemis Accords and enlisting 43 allies, including the UK, in the legalisation of heaven’s spoils. Reviving cold war lines in the stars, Russia and China defend space as common property against western-style celestial land grabs. There is no viable commercial model for the extraction of space resources and their return to Earth for sale.