Professor Mark Sundahl recently participated in the Hague Space Resources Governance Working Group at Leiden University to draft the “building blocks” of a new international regime for regulating natural resource extraction on celestial bodies. The Working Group is funded by the governments of Holland and Luxembourg to address the legal issues that promise to arise as private companies (as well as governments) move forward with plans to harvest precious metals from near-Earth asteroids and extract water and other natural resources needed to support a permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars.  The Working Group plans to publish a first draft of the building blocks for public comment by the end of the year.