By Chuck Black

A proposed new bill introduced into the US House of Representatives by Scott Tipton (R-Colorado) and Ed Perlmutter (D-Colorado) is calling for the US to encourage space mining activities and for NASA to assess the usefulness of establishing a space resources institute.

But the bill is beginning to raise " off-the-record" eyebrows in Canada among space mining advocates who feel the US legislation could create barriers for international cooperation and damage the potential for making any sort of private sector profit from space based resources.

The legislation, known as the Space Resources Institute Act (H.R.1029) was first presented to the 116th Congress on February 12th, 2019, but languished until referenced by the Washington DC based National Space Society (NSS) in their April 24th, 2019 NSS press release, " National Space Society Endorses the Space Resources Institute Act (H.R. 1029)."

          By Henry Stewart

It looks like Canadian Space Agency (CSA) President Sylvain Laporte will be spending time in Hartford, Connecticut next month to speak at a conference organized by the Commercial Service of the US Department of Commerce and focused (officially at least) around sharing technologies, data, contacts and intelligence from the US, UK, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian space agencies.

But the five countries participating in the event also comprise the membership of the " 5 Eyes" anglophone intelligence alliance and are signatories to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation and the sharing of huge amounts of legally (and sometime illegally) acquired electronic " signals intelligence" and private sector telecom data.

In fact the event has an explicit intelligence connection and the event organizers aren't shy about promoting this...