Guest: Thomas Gangale. Topics, property rights in space, lunar commerce, space law, treaties. Thomas Gangale was our guest for this show regarding his new book, "The Development of Outer Space: Sovereignty And Property Rights in International Space Law." This book is available on the One Giant Leap Foundation website page for Amazon partners, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0313378231?tag=onegialeafou-20. If you buy the book through the OGLF link, Amazon makes a contribution to The Space Show/One Giant Leap Foundation so we appreciate your purchasing Tom's book through this OGLF Amazon partnership. As soon as the specific OGLF URL is available, it will be added to this paragraph. In segment one, Tom told us that researching and writing this book represented a personal journey of exploration into international space law. As a result of his research, he came to change his mind about the Moon Treaty as Tom was a member of L5 and had actually worked to prevent acceptance of the Moon Treaty back in the day. Listen to him describe his journey and process. In addition, we spoke about the need to lower the costs for space access to facilitate commerce. We talked about using commercial rockets for Earth to LEO, freeing NASA to do deeper exploration from LEO and beyond. The issue of the Moon Treaty language came up, common heritage of mankind as well as benefit sharing. Tom explained the significance of this language, some listeners challenged him but in the end its an important discussion. In his book, its addressed in far more detail. In the second segment, Tom discussed natural law, common law, and customary law along with property rights as understood in the Outer Space Treaty (OST). He also put forth the argument for an international legal framework to support commercial space development. We talked about mini treaties and alternatives to treaties given how hard it is in today's world to get treaties accepted and ratified. During this segment, Tom received a listener question about his days with SDI. You will want to hear what he had to say about that experience. Toward the end of this segment, a question came in about bioprospecting on Mars. This produced a most interesting discussion, don't miss it. In the third and final segment, we talked some more about the common heritage of mankind issue, capitalism as the dominant paradigm, and what needs to be in place to support a stable framework for commercial space development. The Augustine Commission was discussed relative to property rights and space policy. Natural law was brought up as was John Locke and the Lockean view with regards to property rights. Toward the end of the program, I asked Tom if he had an Action Plan or time line for establishing the type of framework needed to support space commercialism. He said first that the government needed to blaze the frontier development and NASA needed to get out of Earth to LEO transportation. We must drive down the cost, we likely needed new propulsion and even structural air frames and more. Tom suggested we are treading water right now. Another thing he called for was for the cessation of bashing NASA and to always include a positive with the criticism. Prior to the end of the show, Tom took us through some 1950's space history and went through the facts showing us that the US did not rush to ratify the OST! If you have a question or comment for Thomas Gangale, you can email him at teg@ops-alaska.com.
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