Certainly it has elements of chicken & egg. If there were reasonably cheap avenues to the Moon right now, maybe it wouldn’t matter. Without the existing transportation methods, it may be limiting money funding the development of those methods.

Like most of these things, I suspect we’ll never know the real reasons. Historians can figure it out for Masters thesis in 50 years.

I hope.

Josh, Ferris,
Exactly.

~Jon

Your reasoning is correct in my opinon and I think I’ve argued something similar earlier here or possibly elsewhere.

Thus until the first self-sustainable non-terrestrial population appears (but to various degrees even after that) I don’t think the question is one of property rights or not but rather about many possible various forms and degrees of property including what I would call “sovereign property”.

I see it as tradeoffs and compromises (or not) between an owner (private individual, company, or otherwise) and a government (or several) in relation to two main issues of ownership:
- controlling (defending, manouvering if applicable, etc.) the property “up there”.
- being free from government interference to do so from “down here” (and at some point in the future from interference “up there” as well).

There are lots of working combinations of answers and solutions to those two main issues and all other issues which relate to/stem from them.

As an example among a host of possibilities we might see owners “flagging out”* asteroids they wish to claim as sovereign property to legal entities in nations allowing such property to exist.

An internationally agreed upon set of space property rules would in all likelihood severly limit the scope and diversity of solutions. I’m afraid it wouldn’t be beneficial.

* this might be a purely norwegian expression, it means adopting a flag of convenience as is common within maritime shipping.

Getting a mining/extraction system working and on the moon is much more challenging than the little bit of paperwork needed to claim the fruits of that labor.