Initial Media Reactions to CEI’s Space Property Rights Paper

On Monday, CEI published an Issue Analysis on a possible new approach to establishing private real estate off planet under the existing international treaties, and yesterday, we held a press briefing on the Hill. There has been no reaction to the latter yet (some photos of the event can be found here), but there has been some coverage of the issue itself, some better than others.

On Tuesday, the Daily Caller had a story on it. It also included some always-useful commentary on the ongoing bipartisan porkfest that the NASA budget has become. Over at the Space Politics site, there is a lot of discussion of it, as is the case at NASASpaceFlight.com and my own blog. In all three cases much of the discussion is by people who have clearly not read the proposal, but for some reason don’t let that slow them down from weighing in with their opinions on it. What has Al Gore’s Internet come to (yes, that was sarcasm)?

Yesterday, there was a reasonable story on it at Wired (for which I and space-lawyer Michael Listner were interviewed. But the most amusing story so far has been the one based on the Wired piece, telephone-game style, with the hilariously (in the inimical style of the publication) hyperbolic headline at the Daily Mail: “Billionaires should be allowed to BUY up planets and rip up an out-of-date space treaty, claims expert.”

Well, that’s not exactly what I claimed.