Jokes aside, mineral rights have been a contentious issue for centuries. What kind of regulations are companies like Planetary Resources dealing with?
Whether the treaty will mean anything in the future to come, however, is an open question, I guess.
It was also an interesting question for me with the asteroid mining startups. If you land on an asteroid and extract its platinum, can you keep it?
It's something else entirely to say that if you spend billions of dollars to pull platinum out of an asteroid you can't sell it for profit. I don't think the two things are necessarily mutually exclusive.
For a very simplistic example, I doubt we would have been to the moon yet if not for those silly lines.
> Apollo stimulated many areas of technology. The flight computer design used in both the lunar and command modules was, along with the Minuteman Missile System, the driving force behind early research into integrated circuits. Computer-controlled machining was first used in the fabrication of Apollo structural components.