Allocation Issue of Asteroid Mining: A Symbolization of Global Equity

Abstract

Nowadays with the advance of the space exploration and the large-scale utilization of mineral resources, many nations begin to put their eyes on ‘Asteroid Mining’. In fact, the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty was signed 55 years ago. But with new problems about global equity and interest protection popping up, it’s quite essential to update the original treaty. In order to structure a solid fundamental for our analysis, we firstly build a definition model to define the ‘Global Equity’. We use great amount of indicators searched from OECD and integrate them into four main factors:‘ Resource’, ‘Society’,‘ Economy’ and ‘History’. Through ‘AHP’ and ‘TOPSIS’, we work out the weights of every factor and their sub-indicators. We successfully build the Equity Assessment Model (EI model) and the importance of each factor appears immediately. Then we calculate the EI value of each nation which shows the overall condition of the nation in the course of resources allocation. Based on the data we get, we classify the nations into three grades: ‘Top Qualified Countries’, ‘Rest Qualified Countries’, ‘Unqualified Countries’. The explanation will be given later. So how are the mineral sources allocated in the market? We think the mining countries should get rewards to cover the cost of researching and exploring. Also, the ‘Unqualified Countries’ should be aided and given some welfare and discount. The rest countries purchase their share of minerals regularly. Different countries have different shares of mineral resources they can purchase based on the Allocation Model we build. We use the Regression Analysis of input-output and Copulglas functionto help build the model. The share scheme and welfare scheme are two features of our analysis. After that, we jump to the conclusion that the economy and even the whole world will get better after the asteroid mining is implemented.