[LibertarianInExile]

Who will enforce those laws after private industry gets there? Will the U.N. shoot them down? Ditto the seabed and LOST. And Antarctica. When the point is reached that it makes sense to exploit those places, or there is commercial opportunity in doing so, private industry will do it. Until then, public research funding is simply someone's pork. NASA is just an extreme example of how we in America took the Soviets' purely military aerospace effort, and turned our response into a pork-laden 'research' effort, one that cannot be killed now since so many Senators and Representatives get a chomp on the bacon.

[RightWhale]

The answer to your question is very simple and staring us all in the face. Understanding how all this came about is not simple as it is the result of a few thousand years of the history of civilization and over 500 years in the new World and 220 or so years of the history of America and the expansion West. The philosophy of property did not exist until about 1820 and even now it is not widely acknowleged even though it is mentioned as an aside by Plato and especially Aristotle and his contemporaries.

How should it go in outer space? At best it will go as the movement West in America. At worst it will go as the rape of the New World by Spain.