Back in the Good Ole’ Days, when the Soviet scourge threatened all that was good in the world, the Chinese were busy with the Cultural Revolution, all the countries of the world got together to at the UN and pushed some “benevolent and “peaceward” treaties though the General Council. Among these were two “hands-off” treaties.. One declaring no government entity (country) could claim ownership of any part of the other planetary bodies in the Solar System, the other declared essentially the same thing for Antartica.
Fast Forward to the 21st century: The Soviet Union is dead, the United States Of America is the sole standing Super Power (for now), and China is the second largest power on Planet Earth (and gaining steam)… At last count there were 7,300,000,000 human mouths to feed down here on the surface, and the race to claim resources necessary to retain/gain power and prosperity is in full swing. One need only look at the population clocks of the top twenty countries, to obtain a picture of the players jockeying for position. Some countries are aggressively driving to secure those resources. With technology and the access to information derived from it, we have more visibility into those resources than ever before. To this end, many countries on Earth are eagerly awaiting the “end of the Antartica Treaty (2048)”.
Though there is no “expiration” of the Outerspace Treaty per se, the governmental gyrations to stand up permanent stations on Earth’s moon indicate a lot more is intended than research.
The next couple of decades should provide a good ‘view’ from which we will have more resolution to project who will come out on top. In no way can we determine at this stage, if the established spacefaring nations will be able to build upon their decades of experience… or if newcomers (like China), willing to be disruptive to the status quo will win the day.
Or maybe it will be private enterprise…who will once again demonstrate the overwhelming effectiveness of private business, individual innovation, capitalism, and free markets… Most likely, it will be a combination of the large capital prizes available through government initiatives like DARPA projects, or possibly private foundation efforts like the X-prize, which will ultimately succeed.
In any case, lock down your harnesses and helmets, we are in for a wild ride.