Space Resources and the Anatomy of Consensus at COPUOS

[Dr Güneş Ünüvar is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter and a Board Member and Legal Advisor of the Moon Village Association (MVA). The MVA is a permanent observer at COPUOS. The author writes solely in his personal capacity.]

In conjunction with its intersessional meeting on 24 September, the first of six planned before the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) Legal Subcommittee’s April 2027 session, the Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities (the “Working Group”) published a consolidated version of the draft Initial Recommended Principles on Space Resource Activities (the “September draft”), prepared by its Chair, Emeritus Professor Steven Freeland. It is the first public document since a series of April 2026 drafts released during and shortly after this year’s Legal Subcommittee session. Since March 2025, the Working Group has been refining these non-binding principles to lay the groundwork for what may well emerge as the foundations of international space resources law. A succession of drafts has followed: some relatively tidy, others heavily bracketed working documents that may have been difficult for those unfamiliar with the process to decipher. In the September draft, earlier alternatives have been selected, combined or removed. In a previous post, I examined the evolution of the Working Group’s 2025 texts. The present draft, while still subject to revision and negotiation by Member States, calls for a different but complementary exercise: identifying the formulations around which agreement is emerging and examining how they work together as a coherent framework.

The text is considerably shorter than some intervening working versions, but this can be misleading. That is precisely what Member States had asked for, and it is hardly surprising that a multilateral process based entirely on consensus should produce a general framework. Earlier versions also contained bracketed alternatives, extensive drafting changes and competing provisions for the same principle. Much of the contraction therefore reflects streamlining rather than substantive rollback, although there are important exceptions. Read provision by provision, the September draft reflects both a clearer framework and the compromises on which it rests. This blogpost presents a consolidated analysis of where the Working Group’s work stands today.

The Preamble and Definitions

The preamble records several compromises concerning the legal force of the recommended principles. Its statements that exploration and use “shall” benefit all countries and that States “shall” act in accordance with international law reproduce the Outer Space Treaty (OST) verbatim, placing that language in quotation marks. This responds to a persistent dispute over modal verbs. The United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have opposed the use of “shall” in these non-binding principles; yet replacing an existing treaty obligation with “should” would be legally incoherent. Quotation marks allow the September draft to state the obligation accurately while signalling that its binding force comes from the Treaty, not the principles.

Principle 1(B) effectively embeds that compromise into the operative text and avoids a document full of quoted reiterations of OST obligations: where the September draft reflects existing obligations, its non-binding character does not alter those obligations. This makes recommendatory drafting possible without appearing to downgrade the Treaty. It also does something less obvious but more consequential: the inclusion of space resource activities within “space activities” expressly places them inside the existing international legal framework. After decades of controversy over the permissibility and legitimacy of extraction, that categorisation is itself a historic normative benchmark.

Other preambular language records distinct compromises as well. The statement that resources “in place” constitute part of outer space, advocated strongly by Russia, guards against treating commercially valuable material as legally detached from Article II before extraction. It does not impose a moratorium on use (which Russia had suggested at an earlier stage); it resists ownership claims attaching too early. The paragraph on non-governmental entities combines a Chinese emphasis on international responsibility with a substantially softened US proposal. The US proposal originally celebrated the “essential role” of commercial entities and an enabling environment for investment and entrepreneurship (see the preamble of the 19 April version). The September draft acknowledges their role, but only after recalling that States remain internationally responsible for national activities.

The definitions similarly synthesise competing positions. Space resources “include”, rather than “are”, accessible and valuable minerals, liquids and gases. The category is therefore non-exhaustive, while “accessible and valuable”, another phrasing proposed by Russia, introduces a relative threshold: accessible using whose technology, and valuable to whom? “Space resource activities” must be “directly related” to resources, although the listed examples already cover exploration, extraction, exploitation, utilisation, processing and transportation. What relevant activity would be merely indirect is left unclear. The permission to develop additional principles later prevents these concise definitions from closing the framework prematurely.

Permissibility, Operational Conditions, and Benefit Sharing

Principle 2 contains the legal foundation of the September draft. It provides that States, international organisations and non-governmental entities may conduct space resource activities consistently with Principle 1(A) (which stipulates compliance with international law), while free access and non-appropriation must be preserved. Extraction compliant with the Outer Space Treaty “does not inherently constitute national appropriation”. This provision interfaces with Article II of the Outer Space Treaty in particular, which prohibits national appropriation of outer space (which, according to the preamble of the September draft, also includes space resources in situ) “by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” The formulation recalls Section 10 of the Artemis Accords and is not new, but its focus has shifted markedly. Earlier versions up to the latest April draft used compliance with the principles themselves as the benchmark. The September draft instead places the legality test directly in the Outer Space Treaty.

Read with the reference to resources in place, Principle 2 rejects two absolutes. Commercial value does not remove resources from the legal status of outer space; but extraction is not, without more, appropriation. Of course, this does not answer every property question: it neither defines title to extracted material nor gives rights created by national legislation international effect. It nevertheless supplies the basic legal premise without which the rest of the framework could do little work: to adapt the famous formula in Article 1 of Luxembourg’s 2017 Space Resources Law, resource extraction is capable of being lawful.

Principle 3 stays close to established rules on safety, rescue and assistance. Principle 4’s reference to COPUOS’ Long-Term Sustainability Guidelines gives an existing COPUOS instrument a specific role in resource activities. The requirement to assess potentially significant adverse impacts before proceeding retains the substance of proposals on environmental impact assessment without prescribing a formal EIA. The earlier suggestion that EIA material should be reported under information sharing has disappeared; the underlying concern is now embedded within the sustainability principle. The draft further provides that extraction methods and quantities should be “reasonable” in relation to lawful objectives; hazards and debris should be addressed; affected areas should be “remediated” when activities end. These are useful legal hooks, but not self-applying or self-evident ones. Reasonableness depends on the objective against which extraction is measured, while remediation might mean restoration, clean-up or something less — though given the highly context-dependent nature of both terms, their lack of specificity is unsurprising. The repeated qualification “to the greatest extent feasible and practicable” is highly deferential and makes future State practice especially important, especially given the current absence of an objective standard of conduct.

The disappearance of the prioritisation of scientific research and investigation missions in “developing, planning and conducting” space resource activities from Principle 5 is a significant improvement for an eventual compromise. Rather than creating a categorical hierarchy between scientific and other lawful uses, States should prevent their resource activities from impairing or hindering research by others and should disseminate relevant scientific results. This is more than declaring science important (which, on its own, would have been largely rhetorical), but less than positioning it against commercial activity. It also recognises (or at least permits the view) that scientific and non-scientific purposes may coexist within the same operation.

Principle 6 requires information on the expected start date (but not the duration, which is absent), objectives, and planned type and quantity of resources. Type and quantity may themselves be unknown: a prospecting mission may exist to determine whether water ice is present. The duty to report significant modifications partly accommodates that possibility. Principle 7 then moves beyond one-off consultation by asking States to “coordinate” through practical and voluntary mechanisms. Principle 8 also adds something to familiar OST Article VI language: authorisation and continuing supervision should be established through national laws or regulations. The Treaty does not prescribe the domestic instrument; significantly, Principle 8 encourages legislation and provides a route for this framework to acquire national effect.

Principle 9 separates benefit sharing from information sharing and couples it with international cooperation. Its non-exhaustive examples include scientific exchange, knowledge, training, technical assistance, infrastructure and access to samples. Material or commercial benefits are neither expressly included nor excluded. More importantly, States are asked only to consider sharing benefits voluntarily and “as appropriate”. The concept has been retained, but without a distributive settlement.

A Framework Designed to Evolve

The contrast with the Moon Agreement is telling. The latter anticipated an international regime when exploitation was about to become feasible and made equitable sharing one of its purposes. It thus attempted, through binding and comparatively ambitious commitments, the foundational task now pursued through non-binding principles. Participation remains limited to seventeen parties. Article 11 alone, which contains many of these rules, cannot explain this limited participation, but it remains a warning about States’ appetite for rigid anticipatory obligations in a domain where they seek legal and operational leeway.

That lesson also explains the September draft’s closing review clause, which appears, ironically, to have been inspired by the Moon Agreement itself. States may exchange information on implementation, incrementally modify these principles, develop new ones, consider an international monitoring mechanism and assess benefits in light of OST Article I. Space resource activities remain largely prospective; neither negotiators nor operators yet know which operational pressures, regulatory gaps or distributional conflicts practice will reveal. The framework is designed to learn from them.

The September draft is likely to be criticised as insufficiently specific. Yet specificity is not a neutral benchmark: a document of this kind is not necessarily better simply because it is more detailed. Moreover, the generality must be judged against COPUOS’ institutional setting. The Committee was made permanent in 1959 and now brings together 110 Member States. Its work proceeds by consensus. This method confers broad multilateral legitimacy, but it also means that a single instrument must accommodate States with fundamentally different legal positions, technological capacities and economic interests.

Accordingly, calling the resulting text “too vague” is not, by itself, a sufficient assessment. Consensus does not excuse every operational ambiguity, and terms such as “reasonable”, “practicable” and “as appropriate” will have to acquire content through implementation. However, expecting an excessively detailed legal framework on resource extraction before sustained resource operations begin is unrealistic and counterproductive. If adopted, these principles would be COPUOS’ first consensus instrument devoted specifically to space resource activities. They would establish common and much needed legal reference points while preserving room for further development.

The September draft is the product of five years of sustained multilateral work, including more than sixty meetings among Member States and hundreds of pages of written submissions. Its apparent “incompleteness” must be understood in light of that extensive record: the September draft concentrates deliberately on those propositions that, after extensive discussion, appear capable of commanding consensus at this juncture. The result offers more than a hundred States a concrete common framework while leaving room for it to evolve as practice develops. In this field, iteration is not the alternative to regulation; it is the means by which genuinely multilateral regulation may finally become possible.