**5.1 Space mining laws on earth**

'*Space mining*' as a concept was born out of the 1990s. It practically kick-started when President Obama signed what is now coined as the '*Space Law*' on November 25th, 2015. It was later ratified by the US Congress, giving it an independent life. The fast pacing development of private-public partnerships to reach space is reaching an ever reducing cost and repetition of launch per week by the same launchers (SpaceX), and even now the development of suborbital launchers from standard airplanes (Virgin Orbit), lastly one stage airplane to suborbital apogee (Dawn). Companies with clear interest in asteroid mining are among many others: Deep Space Industries, Orbital Sciences Corporation, Mars One, Bigelow Aerospace, etc.

In 2016, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg announced the creation of Space Resources, an initiative to generate a long term investment in space resources extraction and use. Initially received with mixed belief and with a concentrating focus on astromining, it nonetheless attracted 50+ companies with a mandate to do astromining. One of the most impressive gesture it had, was to sign the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, later (October 2020) reinforced by the Artemis Treaty. Luxembourg, in 2017, modified its own constitutional laws to allow local companies to exploit space resources. At the time of the writing of this chapter [36], the Grand Duchy is joining NASA in the hope to develop businesses that can provide Artemis Base Camp with extraction and processing of vital in situ resources like oxygen and fuel (H3 , Thorium, etc.).
