Space law professor Frans von der Dunk spends a month on camera building a case that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty can no longer govern what is coming: a commercial rush to mine asteroids for water, metals, and platinum. The film opens with the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run, hundreds of covered wagons racing to stake claims on open ground, and uses it as the template for what von der Dunk fears space is about to become. Companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Six Industries plan to extract asteroid resources for use both in orbit and on Earth, and the United Arab Emirates appears as a state betting on platinum to diversify away from oil. Buzz Aldrin and former space policy advisor Peter Marquez sit for interviews on how far spaceflight has moved from government monopoly since Armstrong's landing. Von der Dunk, teaching at the University of Nebraska, is shown drafting what he hopes becomes the first real legal manual for outer space, trying to write rules before the claims start being staked.