Luxembourg and the Outer Space Treaty

Debra Werner wrote a great piece for SpaceNews last week on Luxembourg’s continuing interest in space resources:

Luxembourg also attracts less suspicion than a superpower would if it called for revision of the Outer Space Treaty. With its 1,000-person military force, it is “unlikely that Luxembourg is going to be regarded as a threat to anybody,” Worden, a member of the SpaceResources.lu advisory board, said during the April 12 panel discussion.

This is a really intriguing and important point. Having a country like Luxembourg—without the type of tangled international affairs the US, Russia, and China have—pushing forward on this issue is really promising.

You would have a hard time painting Luxembourg, a country with an area less than 1,000 square miles, as expansionist in any regard. And I don’t think they’d be looking to put any of their 1,000 military members on a base somewhere out beyond Earth. And they don’t have any nuclear weapons.

As their high per capita GDP proves, all they care about is economic return.