Space Colonies: How close are we to making them?

[Mimeblade]

With the recent news of the Juno Probe observing Jupiter, I've been tracking NASA activities, that including the Space Station we've got orbiting above us.

I guess it's wishful thinking yet, because of supplies and resources, but how would you even begin to build a space station with renewable resources that could exist outside the Earth's orbit?

Frankly, I hardly know how they're constructed, let alone how people could live in such a harsh environment for an extensive amount of time.

But with scary thoughts of Global Warming and overpopulation, you'd think people would be more motivated to build something like a Colony.

In fact, it seems to be a recent fad in Gundam lore to start off with some kind of Orbital Elevator, though I don't know what kind of purpose one would serve.

So can someone please explain to me why this would or would not work?

[Brave Fencer Kirby]

The space colonies are probably the most scientifically plausible part of Gundam. There's no reason why they couldn't work (unlike, say, giant robots, which are impractical for a variety of reasons -- to say nothing of effects that rely on fictional branches of science, like Minovsky particles or N-jammers), we just haven't actually built any yet.

The main colony design in the UC timeline is called the "Island 3" colony or the "O'Neill cylinder". Both of these names come from a book called "The High Frontier", written by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in the '70s, which laid out a plan for a permanent human presence in space. (The Island 1 and Island 2 designs were variants on existing proposed space colony designs, while the Island 3 was created entirely by O'Neill.) The tldr version is that he proposed using the lunar regolith (ie, the "soil" on the surface of the moon) to make a kind of concrete, which would then be sent to the appropriate location via mass driver launch, where it would be assembled into the colony cylinder. This is done because the moon's gravity is much less than Earth's, so it's much cheaper to launch things from the moon than from Earth.

Island 3 colonies were designed to be completely self-sufficient. The main colony cylinder provides residential and commercial space, while agricultural and industrial facilities are in separate, much smaller cylinders in order to avoid the pollution from farming and manufacturing from spreading. (These smaller blocks aren't usually portrayed in Gundam, though there's an early episode of Zeta where some Hizacks use one as a sniping platform.) Power is provided via solar energy; either normal photoelectric cells, or a sort of geothermal (astrothermal?) energy where fluid on the sunward side of the colony is heated up and allowed to flow to the cooler shaded side of the colony. Air and water is present in large enough quantities that it can be recycled indefinitely, just like it is on Earth. The only thing that would need to be imported is raw materials for anything intended to be exported. This is all entirely scientifically plausible, and could be done at our current technology level (though it would require massively increasing our surface-to-orbit infrastructure in order to send all the equipment and personnel necessary into space, and it would be fantastically expensive).

Which brings us to the subject of orbital elevators (also called space elevators). A space elevator is a concept for lowering the cost of moving things from Earth's surface into orbit. Since anything going from surface to orbit has to overcome Earth's gravity to do so, it's very expensive to move payloads around -- moving around once you're in orbit is comparatively much cheaper. A space elevator is a structure that extends from the surface to a satellite in geostationary orbit, which allows for things to be moved from surface to orbit (and vice versa) without the use of expensive rockets. This would, in theory, make moving cargo around much cheaper and easier.

The problem with space elevators is that they'd need to be absurdly strong and light in order to extend as far as they need to. There's currently no material in existence that's up to the task. Carbon nanotubes may theoretically be strong enough (though they also may not), but we're nowhere near able to build 30,000 km and change worth of them (which is what would be necessary for a space elevator). Still, space elevators are fairly reasonable as long as you assume technological advances have allowed for a suitable material to be created.

[Areku]

You make space elevators sound so easy, BFK!

It's true that finding a strong material is the single greatest hurdle in making a space elevator possible in the first place, but you've significantly undersold the applicable parameters. Geostationary orbit (GEO) is at an "altitude" of 35,786 km, or about 9.3% of the distance to the moon. To help put that in perspective, the Space Shuttle normally orbited at about 320 km, very occasionally going as far as 620 km.

Problem is, your material needs to go much further than even that. The center of mass of a completed SE needs to reside beyond GEO, and a significant portion of its mass needs to reside much farther out to balance the structure. For a perfectly uniform structure (the most material-efficient possible design, sadly), this extends out to 144,000 km (~38% of the way to the moon) just to achieve balance directly on GEO (because of the non-linear changes in gravitational and centrifugal forces with respect to altitude), but more creative designs should be able to shorten the required distance (imagine a bullwhip-shaped tether, with the narrow end connected to the ground station).

This is because you need to balance the SE at a point somewhere around the GEO, with more modern theoretical designs balancing slightly beyond GEO to maintain a net-tensile structure. You'd start by placing a massive construction satellite (really more of a space station) in GEO above your eventual ground station, then slowly build the tether and extend it downward. By itself, this action would cause your satellite to fall below GEO, so you'd need to increase the orbital altitude of the main satellite so that the center of mass of it and the tether returns to GEO so that you keep the whole thing above your ground station. However, most of your structure would be experiencing dissimilar external forces, so you'd need some form of constant propulsion pushing the satellite and tether away from each other to keep the whole thing straight.

Once you've overcome the difficulties of initially connecting your ground station to your satellite (and there are many), you can then further elevate your satellite so that the effective center of mass lies beyond GEO so that there is a net-tensile force throughout the structure, giving you more wiggle room to move loads up and down without causing an imbalance. At that point, your ground station is effectively holding your satellite in place, as it's traveling much faster than what will normally achieve a stable orbit at that altitude. If the effective center of mass were ever allowed to fall below GEO, there would be a net-compressive force through the structure, and the effect would be it falling to Earth.

Assuming you have a strong enough material to achieve this, what I've described so far is certainly possible, but it's had some massive hurdles. First off, construction of a SE requires a massive space-side infrastructure; you'd need the equivalent of a few hundred Space Shuttle missions (even with lunar facilities) just to connect your tether to the ground, arguably defeating the entire purpose of building a SE until several decades into its life. You'd also need a litany of propulsive systems distributed along the structure to ensure it's straightness is maintained, especially when raising and lowering loads. There's also the trouble of counteracting forces of wind, solar wind and the gravitational effects of the moon.

There's also the problem of the Van Allen belts and other sources of radiation. Particularly with the Van Allen belts, human passengers traveling along the elevator would be traveling through the Van Allen belts much more slowly than the Apollo astronauts (the only humans to do so to date), meaning that they'd need very significant amounts of radiation shielding to avoid hazardous exposure. This could be achieved efficiently by transferring them with "innate" shielding such as water, oil and polyethylene, but it's likely that frequent travelers would need to travel by rocket instead of elevator to reduce their long term risks. Alternatively, there is some promise in HiVOLT's idea of draining the Van Allen belts of the charged particles that make them hazardous.

Then there's the single greatest obstacle for us ever actually building a SE: space debris. Kessler syndrome, which inspired both Planetes and Gravity despite its apparent un-sexiness, describes the cascading nature of the hazard of space debris. Unfortunately, between a SE's size and inherent fragility, it would be highly susceptible to space debris, perhaps moreso than any other structure we've ever considered building in space. By the time we're technologically capable of building a SE, the conditions of our local space environment may make it impossible for us to do so without exotic and active defensive countermeasures against space debris, and almost certainly impossible for the SE to haul enough load to justify its construction before its inevitable destruction.

[Areku]

From what I can find on the Orbital Elevator System depicted in 00, it would seem they were built using magic or anti-gravity technology that numerous characters have clearly indicated they did not possess.

As for the main shafts, the Orbital Elevators only extend to 50,000 km, which would only be far enough for a uniform design to alleviate ~2.8% of the down-force of the elevator lying below GEO. At that distance, you'd need a counterweight ~5.35 times as massive as the rest of the main shaft, and the stations affixed to the ends of the shafts don't look anywhere near that large.

Okay, maybe the Rings will provide enough lifting force... Nope. Assuming any given kilometer of the Inner Ring has as much mass as any given kilometer of the Outer Ring, the total Inner Ring pulls down on the structure ~8.08 times as hard as the total Outer Ring lifts it up. Overall, the Rings seem to weigh down the main shafts by an additional ~87.6% of the down-force that needs to be counteracted to keep the thing balanced, further increasing the required mass of the stations affixed to the ends of the shafts to a factor of ~10 times the mass of a main shaft.

Without additional information to clarify mass distribution within the Orbital Elevator System, it would seem the whole darn thing should come crashing down.

[MythSearcher]

From what I can find on the Orbital Elevator System depicted in 00, it would seem they were built using magic or anti-gravity technology that numerous characters have clearly indicated they did not possess.

As for the main shafts, the Orbital Elevators only extend to 50,000 km, which would only be far enough for a uniform design to alleviate ~2.8% of the down-force of the elevator lying below GEO. At that distance, you'd need a counterweight ~5.35 times as massive as the rest of the main shaft, and the stations affixed to the ends of the shafts don't look anywhere near that large.

Okay, maybe the Rings will provide enough lifting force... Nope. Assuming any given kilometer of the Inner Ring has as much mass as any given kilometer of the Outer Ring, the total Inner Ring pulls down on the structure ~8.08 times as hard as the total Outer Ring lifts it up. Overall, the Rings seem to weigh down the main shafts by an additional ~87.6% of the down-force that needs to be counteracted to keep the thing balanced, further increasing the required mass of the stations affixed to the ends of the shafts to a factor of ~10 times the mass of a main shaft.

Without additional information to clarify mass distribution within the Orbital Elevator System, it would seem the whole darn thing should come crashing down.

If I recall right, the inner ring is much thinner than the outer ring, and the outer ring seems to be much more solid than the elevator shaft and the inner ring, which usually is shown as having a lot of space inside the shell.
The outter ring also consist of multiple structures like the actual solar panels for generating power. There might actually be a few layers of outer ring.

Radiation wise a lot of the charged particle ones can be blocked by a humble 50 micro-Tesla EM field, while the gamma rays could be blocked by a 5 Tesla EM field+plasma. Of course 5 Tesla is no easy feat, but still possible sooner or later.




Returning to the original question, we are pretty far from building space colonies, probably at least into 3 digits years from now.
The main problem is not technological, but economical and political.

Even if we stick with O'Neil's plan, have unlimited funding and start building now, we'd have a hard time getting enough trained professionals to work in space to do much work. We'd probably be first starting a training program and get a few hundred thousand of people to participate, filter out the unfit and find those good enough to build a lot of rockets and those good enough to work in space, then have around a few thousand of them go to the moon, while others stay on Earth to do all the logistics(like getting the food and water). Build a self sustainable moon base with these people and start to collect all the material for the colony will probably take around 30 years at the very least.
After that, you probably need at least 2~3 more generation of workers to work on the colony itself and people to work on the moon base to support them.

All of these will likely be spending money rather than having moeny in return.
If you look for civilian economical support, obviously no one in their right mind will pay this much(likely 10~20 times of building your own mid-sized city on Earth) without asking for a return.
If you look for government support, than it'd be using tax-payer's money and you have to go through congress, which becomes political.

[Areku]

If I recall right, the inner ring is much thinner than the outer ring, and the outer ring seems to be much more solid than the elevator shaft and the inner ring, which usually is shown as having a lot of space inside the shell.
The outter ring also consist of multiple structures like the actual solar panels for generating power. There might actually be a few layers of outer ring.

Radiation wise a lot of the charged particle ones can be blocked by a humble 50 micro-Tesla EM field, while the gamma rays could be blocked by a 5 Tesla EM field+plasma. Of course 5 Tesla is no easy feat, but still possible sooner or later.

I seem to remember the Inner Ring also having solar panels, but I can't find any evidence of that so I'll be generous and let it slide. Heck, I'll even assume that the Outer Ring is massive enough to balance the entire structure.

However, there are still two gigantic issues with the Orbital Elevator System as it's been depicted. First off, how the heck did they install the Rings in the first place? To remain at rest relative to the main shafts, the Outer Ring would experience 0.006g's of acceleration outward. That's not too terribly significant, but it's pretty apparent that the Ring would need to be constantly propelled to remain in place until it was attached to the shaft. Maybe it was constructed at GEO and then interlocking segments were extended and the entire segment was moved all at once to its higher altitude. Of course, this would require all three segments to be moved in unison, otherwise you'd cause dramatic imbalance on the main shafts. No matter how you approach it, installing the Outer Ring would be a staggeringly difficult undertaking, and it begs the question of how the main shafts were balanced prior to the attachment of the Outer Ring.

The Inner Ring experiences similar problems, but with a much more dramatic .143g inward acceleration. Additionally, if the Outer Ring is massive enough to provide significant balance for the whole System, as we've surmised above that it must be, the Inner Ring would need to be attached very shortly afterward to alleviate tensile strain on the shafts. It's beginning to sound like most of the Orbital Elevator System would need to be assembled in an unrealistically short period of time. That's the end of the first problem.

The second problem is that the Rings wouldn't actually be rings. Those g-forces I listed above? They still exist, and apply to all masses at those altitudes, causing the Outer Ring to have a more pronounced outward bow and the Inner Ring to drastically sag toward Earth. I'm willing to make a lot of assumptions in favor of the OES and its existence, but creating 34,287 km and 97,119 km structures experiencing .143g's and .006g's laterally without bowing and sagging? I'm sorry, but I just can't see that happening without suspension bridge-like supports that clearly aren't there (or extremely wasteful propulsion), even with miracle unobtainium.

[Brave Fencer Kirby]

You make space elevators sound so easy, BFK!

It's true that finding a strong material is the single greatest hurdle in making a space elevator possible in the first place, but you've significantly undersold the applicable parameters.

Well, yes. Books can (and have) been written on the subject, and I was giving an extremely brief overview. tldr; it's theoretically possible, but really hard. If your point is that "it's theoretically possible, but really really really really hard", then I'm not going to disagree with you. I just wasn't going into that much depth in my post.

The upshot is really that we could actually start making Island 3 colonies today if we wanted to -- it would take decades to actually complete even a single one (much less the hundreds of them that Gundam has), but we could do it. Space elevators, on the other hand, we couldn't -- you need some significant scientific breakthroughs in order to have a material strong enough to actually make one.

[Amion]

If things got political then the race to build one would somehow become one to produce a colony not for living in but for smashing Zeon-style on a rival government. We humens just couldn't resist that kind of temptation.

[Dendrobium Stamen]

In some ways, ridiculous as it is, I feel as if the Outer Space Treaty removed a lot of the impetus to develop substantial space infrastructure. While a perfectly good and sensible piece of international law - tl;dr no nation can claim extraterrestrial objects as their sovereign territory; nor can they install, use, or test weapon systems in space or on said extraterrestrial objects - it also provides a massive, massive disincentive to pretty much every major nation toward the large-scale exploitation of space.

If countries can't claim part or all of a planet or asteroid as their own, nor make use of outer space for military purposes, it loses a lot of its appeal; given the sheer size and scope of the military-industrial complex in both the NATO and Warsaw Pact nations during the Cold War, a treaty that declares all of outer space off-limits to them gives defence contractors no incentive to build cool space stuff, as the countries concerned can't and won't be buying any cool space stuff.

Tie that in with the fact that the United States "won" the Space Race with Apollo 11, and that both America and the Soviet Union hugely scaled back their space programs once the race for the Moon was won... and you end up where we are today. We have a fair bit of cool space stuff, but far less than we could have had were there some incentive to throw money into space research.

...So in short, it's a question of international law doing a good thing, but in turn removing the major reasons anyone goes to new places: conquest and profit. From a technological point of view, we could have started building a space colony in 1980 or so, following the plans of Gerard K. O'Neill, but without a decent number of major world governments backing it, it'd be damn near impossible.

[Areku]

Outer Space Treaty

The OST, and related treaties, are almost humorously arbitrary and out-of-date. For one thing, it does allow for the militarization of space, as long as such militarization does not involve the use of weapons on the moon or other significant celestial bodies (pretty much anything large than an asteroid of a vaguely worded size) or the stationing/training of forces or weapons on those bodies. It also prohibits the use, deployment or storage of WMDs anywhere in space, but is peculiarly worded to allow the surface-to-surface use of nuclear ICBMs even though nearly all ICBMs are designed to travel much higher than the 100 km altitude recognized as the boundary to space.

As far as current international law is concerned, two nations can go nuts shooting at each other with space battleships or attack satellites as long as they stay away from celestial bodies that aren't Earth and don't carry WMDs. Meanwhile, everyone's forbidden from dragging a mineral-rich asteroid to orbit and mining it unless they're willing to share the resources with anyone who pulls up alongside said asteroid.

[Amion]

And with that said, I would bet my life and its net worth that if colonies on Mars or the Moon grew substantially big enough, and then sued for independence from Earth's international community, the strongest nation or alliances would immediately say "you can't do that" and use military force to put down the "rebellion". On the grounds of them breaking the treaty by their claim of independence, of course, and thus break that treaty themselves while they uphold it.

[MythSearcher]

I seem to remember the Inner Ring also having solar panels, but I can't find any evidence of that so I'll be generous and let it slide. Heck, I'll even assume that the Outer Ring is massive enough to balance the entire structure.

However, there are still two gigantic issues with the Orbital Elevator System as it's been depicted. First off, how the heck did they install the Rings in the first place? To remain at rest relative to the main shafts, the Outer Ring would experience 0.006g's of acceleration outward. That's not too terribly significant, but it's pretty apparent that the Ring would need to be constantly propelled to remain in place until it was attached to the shaft. Maybe it was constructed at GEO and then interlocking segments were extended and the entire segment was moved all at once to its higher altitude. Of course, this would require all three segments to be moved in unison, otherwise you'd cause dramatic imbalance on the main shafts. No matter how you approach it, installing the Outer Ring would be a staggeringly difficult undertaking, and it begs the question of how the main shafts were balanced prior to the attachment of the Outer Ring.

The Inner Ring experiences similar problems, but with a much more dramatic .143g inward acceleration. Additionally, if the Outer Ring is massive enough to provide significant balance for the whole System, as we've surmised above that it must be, the Inner Ring would need to be attached very shortly afterward to alleviate tensile strain on the shafts. It's beginning to sound like most of the Orbital Elevator System would need to be assembled in an unrealistically short period of time. That's the end of the first problem.

The second problem is that the Rings wouldn't actually be rings. Those g-forces I listed above? They still exist, and apply to all masses at those altitudes, causing the Outer Ring to have a more pronounced outward bow and the Inner Ring to drastically sag toward Earth. I'm willing to make a lot of assumptions in favor of the OES and its existence, but creating 34,287 km and 97,119 km structures experiencing .143g's and .006g's laterally without bowing and sagging? I'm sorry, but I just can't see that happening without suspension bridge-like supports that clearly aren't there (or extremely wasteful propulsion), even with miracle unobtainium.

I always thought "building" of the rings are not really that hard, "keeping" them there is.

Building is simple, first you start with just a cable, at the correct orbital speed at various connection weights, form a thin ring, but don't connect them yet, start building on top of it, connect the sections, change spin speed when you finish all the main structures.(so materials stay next to the ring when building)
Inner ring can be similar, or you can lower the centre cable and all the material from the outer ring.

BTW, the ring need not be completely in sync with the elevators, you can have the majority of it spining around Earth at the correct orbital speed while having separate sections connecting to the elevator moving a long side the ring.

The problem always comes after you finish connecting the sections and it forms a full ring. It is not a stable structure at all.
You don't really get an equalibrium by a simple ring structure, any slight force will start moving the structure to it's doom unless you constantly correct it.

[Areku]

I always thought "building" of the rings are not really that hard, "keeping" them there is.

Building is simple, first you start with just a cable, at the correct orbital speed at various connection weights, form a thin ring, but don't connect them yet, start building on top of it, connect the sections, change spin speed when you finish all the main structures.(so materials stay next to the ring when building)
Inner ring can be similar, or you can lower the centre cable and all the material from the outer ring.

BTW, the ring need not be completely in sync with the elevators, you can have the majority of it spining around Earth at the correct orbital speed while having separate sections connecting to the elevator moving a long side the ring.

The problem always comes after you finish connecting the sections and it forms a full ring. It is not a stable structure at all.
You don't really get an equalibrium by a simple ring structure, any slight force will start moving the structure to it's doom unless you constantly correct it.

If you did it that way, you'd have multiple 97,119 km-long structures "careening" past your elevator (they'd be traveling slower than the elevator, but that'd be a minor detail in a collision). Then you'd need an absurd amount of extremely precise thrust to bring it to relative rest (without changing altitude) and gently slide it into place while all of those thrusters are still firing to keep it at relative rest. There's so much that could go wrong that it's almost inevitable something would go wrong, meaning that at the very least you'd need duplicate, independent systems in place for the attachment maneuver, further increasing the complexity of the task.

Honestly, the only sane place to install a fixed* ring on space elevators would be at GEO. You could construct the ring at that altitude at relative rest to the elevators, without the need for constant propulsion, and you could go about connecting it at your leisure (compared to at other altitudes). It also would only need to use stability thrusters reactively, responding to imbalances, rather than proactively (constantly) to hold it in place.

*You could try a Birch orbital ring, where the ring is at LEO and rotates much more rapidly than the elevator, but good luck with that.

[Deathzealot]

Island 3 colonies were designed to be completely self-sufficient. The main colony cylinder provides residential and commercial space, while agricultural and industrial facilities are in separate, much smaller cylinders in order to avoid the pollution from farming and manufacturing from spreading. (These smaller blocks aren't usually portrayed in Gundam, though there's an early episode of Zeta where some Hizacks use one as a sniping platform.) Power is provided via solar energy; either normal photoelectric cells, or a sort of geothermal (astrothermal?) energy where fluid on the sunward side of the colony is heated up and allowed to flow to the cooler shaded side of the colony. Air and water is present in large enough quantities that it can be recycled indefinitely, just like it is on Earth. The only thing that would need to be imported is raw materials for anything intended to be exported. This is all entirely scientifically plausible, and could be done at our current technology level (though it would require massively increasing our surface-to-orbit infrastructure in order to send all the equipment and personnel necessary into space, and it would be fantastically expensive).

Don't forget the recent Gundam Origin episode which has a Salamis Class ship impacting one Side Three Colony's Farming area.

[MythSearcher]

If you did it that way, you'd have multiple 97,119 km-long structures "careening" past your elevator (they'd be traveling slower than the elevator, but that'd be a minor detail in a collision). Then you'd need an absurd amount of extremely precise thrust to bring it to relative rest (without changing altitude) and gently slide it into place while all of those thrusters are still firing to keep it at relative rest. There's so much that could go wrong that it's almost inevitable something would go wrong, meaning that at the very least you'd need duplicate, independent systems in place for the attachment maneuver, further increasing the complexity of the task.

Honestly, the only sane place to install a fixed* ring on space elevators would be at GEO. You could construct the ring at that altitude at relative rest to the elevators, without the need for constant propulsion, and you could go about connecting it at your leisure (compared to at other altitudes). It also would only need to use stability thrusters reactively, responding to imbalances, rather than proactively (constantly) to hold it in place.

*You could try a Birch orbital ring, where the ring is at LEO and rotates much more rapidly than the elevator, but good luck with that.

I was talking about a Birch ring, the idea is similar, just that it locates in 10,000km and 50,000km.

The problem is that I still don't see the method of keeping the ring stable at all, no matter the orbit.
Once it forms a ring, it doesn't really matter what speed you are spinning it at, the net gravity the whole thing is experiencing is not even in orbit(should be some where inside Earth) Nothing is balancing it at all. You cannot view it as separate parts since they are interconnected, any external force applied will push it away from the orbit(Including the photonic pressure from the Sun, and to a lesser extend, the Moon and other celestial bodies), any deformation causes a shift in the CoM and imbalances the gravitation pull.

This is a similar problem as the Dyson Sphere Shell type. The bubble type are there in balance by the solar wind, but once you connect them, the forces cancels each other and now nothing is holding them in place.

Come to think of it, making the elevator structure a big O surrounding the ring with a VERY powerful EM field stabilizing the ring towards the centre of the O might be able to keep it in place if you have enough elevator shafts, but then of course you are creating more points of failure and more problems.

[Mimeblade]

You guys' knowledge on the subjects is astounding, as always.

As far as the Outer Space Treaty is concerned though... doesn't that only apply to Countries that exist on Earth? (i.e. Earthnoids?)

What if you really wanted to move to space and be independent?

I mean it's not like it's unusual for people to border cross in to Canada/Mexico or even just move to America and become American, so why not space?

[Areku]

As far as the Outer Space Treaty is concerned though... doesn't that only apply to Countries that exist on Earth? (i.e. Earthnoids?)

What if you really wanted to move to space and be independent?

I think that's technically correct, but it's something of a paradox. If you have created a settlement or space-based population sufficiently developed and self-sufficient enough to plausibly be considered a nation independent of Earth-side nations and organizations, the act of creating such settlements is already in violation of the treaties in their current forms (unless you do not enforce your borders and boundaries in any way whatsoever and simply give your resources to anyone who asks). If you aren't such a large, self-sufficient prospective space-nation without ties to Earth-based political and national bodies and you seek to not have the associated treaties apply to you, you'll promptly be labeled either a mutineer or a space pirate.

So by current treaties and international law, it is technically possible for there to be an independent space-nation that plays by special rules, but there's no plausible way to actually make it happen.

[MythSearcher]

I think that's technically correct, but it's something of a paradox. If you have created a settlement or space-based population sufficiently developed and self-sufficient enough to plausibly be considered a nation independent of Earth-side nations and organizations, the act of creating such settlements is already in violation of the treaties in their current forms (unless you do not enforce your borders and boundaries in any way whatsoever and simply give your resources to anyone who asks). If you aren't such a large, self-sufficient prospective space-nation without ties to Earth-based political and national bodies and you seek to not have the associated treaties apply to you, you'll promptly be labeled either a mutineer or a space pirate.

So by current treaties and international law, it is technically possible for there to be an independent space-nation that plays by special rules, but there's no plausible way to actually make it happen.

I don't think a nation that did not participate in signing the treaty itself will be able to violate the treaty in any real sense.
Think about it, two companies signing their own treaty stating they have to fight fair in their own game doesn't really involve any other companies fightings at all.

Of course once the nation is formed, unless you create it to be like a form of say, North Korea, and shut out most diplomacy, you have to concern about other countries and you might get into trouble if you keep on expanding. But if you are acknowledged as a nation, and your diplomats are good at it, I'd say you can at least claim some kind of exemption in a treaty that you didn't sign.

[Areku]

I don't think a nation that did not participate in signing the treaty itself will be able to violate the treaty in any real sense.

The issue is that any major space-faring nation that doesn't ratify the OST will quickly find themselves faced by international sanctions or otherwise held to its standard.

For example, Iran. Iran signed the OST in 1967 but never ratified it; they didn't develop a space agency until 2004, so it wasn't of much concern at the time. The sanctions that had been placed on Iran for decades weren't directly related to their space program, but they dealt heavily with sectors and behavior that would have facilitated a plausible violation of the OST. The nuclear deal that was signed with Iran this year again doesn't deal directly with their space program, but it still deals heavily with related industries and behavior. Now that the prior sanctions have been lifted and Iran has a functional space program, there's been an increase in pressure on Iran to ratify the OST, with future sanctions possibly being in the works; the current nuclear agreement with Iran indirectly addresses the most urgent concerns of the OST (WMDs), but it doesn't restrict them from things such as claiming the moon.

In short, things are on track for Iran being pressured into ratifying the OST or facing new sanctions, and you can be sure that any action they may take that would violate the OST regardless of their ratification status wouldn't be taken well.

As for future space-nations, my main point (which I don't think I properly conveyed) is that current space-law does not accommodate the formation of a space-nation; even non-signatory nations would be heavily pressured into ratification long before their space program came anywhere close to robust enough to make a space-nation a feasible reality. It's far more likely that space-law will be radically changed, including a new OST that replaces the existing one, before a space-nation becomes a technological/infrastructural reality. To illustrate how inadequate the OST is in its current form, no major space-faring nation has signed the Moon Agreement, a treaty that does little more than spell out some of the obvious ramifications of the original OST's wording.

[MythSearcher]

To illustrate how inadequate the OST is in its current form, no major space-faring nation has signed the Moon Agreement, a treaty that does little more than spell out some of the obvious ramifications of the original OST's wording.

That's why I wonder.
In the current situation, the nations with the best possibility to claim any space for themselves is already the most powerful on Earth, which pretty much means that sanctions might not really be that effective to them(that is, it is more likely to hurt yourself than the target nation)

Say, USA is the most likely candidate to be able to colonize space, but it doesn't look like sanctions against the USA is a good idea to any nation on Earth at all.

China might come next, not that it is that technologically advanced, but because they don't really care about the safety features and have a known history of violating or at least pay little respect to international treaties. Which is a cultural reason, you can't really change that in the short, say 500 years, term. The far East history makes it so that they don't really understand the term "treaty" in a international sense. No disrespect, I am from HK, and understand the culture. They will sign and claim they ractified the treaties, but never really care about it if it is them that needed to do anything not fully advantagous. They will try their best to take advantage from other nations in it though. Sanctions also does not really go well against China.

Russia, pretty much the same idea.

European countries, who developed the national treaty idea to start with, might be the only ones that really have trouble not following the treaties. Japan, Australia and Canada might be similar, though Canada and Australia are self sustainable enough with little interest in space development anyway.

Other smaller nations in the world don't seem to be able to win the space race, so I'll ignore them for the time being.