Dolman´s Astropolitik vs. Space Legal Regime

Space activities have been gaining attractiveness in recent years. In the spotlight are the benefits that individual actors and thus the whole of humanity can gain through investments in space technologies and resources of outer space. The renewed interest of states in space programs is supported by innovations from the commercial sector. For the first time in history, space activities must be carried out in a way that rewards individual actors with an investment return or even financial gains that have a high potential to attract new actors and their financial resources, thus ensuring further technological development of the whole industry. Space mining is one of the often-discussed concepts in the future utilization of outer space and its commercialization. In 2015 was approved by the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act 2015 (shortly Space Act of 2015) enabling commercial space mining of natural resources in space, which has the potential to become one of the impulses to start a boom of space activities, but also to be the cause of changes in world geopolitics, international relations, and space law regime. One of the latest events in this area is the signature of the treaty called Artemis Accords. For geopolitics, the main theoretical basis is provided by Dolman's work Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age, in which the author deals with the influence of the legal regime on the form and development of space activities. Among the stated premises belong that the current space regime (e.g. Outer Space Treaty) effectively maintains the status quo between space powers, but at the same time hinders the dynamic development of space technologies and space activities. The logical implications are that the disruption of the current state of international relations and the change in the behavior of space actors, such as the increase in commercial activities in space, should occurred in connection with the change of legal regime.