Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) held a high-level meeting that tried to produce a consensus on a framework of laws for the sustainable development of outer space, but it also failed to do so when S. Neil Hosenball, who is the NASA General Counsel and chief US negotiator for the Moon Treaty, decided that negotiation of the rules of the international regime should be delayed until the feasibility of exploitation of lunar resources has been established. However since rights to economic benefits are claimed to be necessary to ensure investment in private missions to the Moon, private companies in the US have been seeking clearer national regulatory conditions and guidelines prompting the US government to do so, which subsequently legalized space mining in 2015 by introducing the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015. Similar national legislations legalizing extraterrestrial appropriation of resources are now being replicated by other nations, including Luxembourg, Japan, China, India and Russia. While the "national" treaty explicitly allows commercial mining, other experts argue that these new national laws are inconsistent with the Moon Treaty and customary international law. Implementation agreement The controversy on claims and on mining rights for profit have dominated the discussion around the laws governing the Moon. Experts though have affirmed that the Moon Treaty does allow commercial mining, since it allows extraction after the international regulatory regime, that the Moon Treaty asks for, is put into place. Therefore it is concluded, that the Moon Treaty is incomplete and lacks an "implementation agreement" answering the unresolved issues, particularly regarding resource extraction. Legal status While the treaty reiterates the prohibition of sovereignty of "any part" of space, the current imprecision of the agreement, being called unfinished, generated various interpretations, this being cited as the main reason it was not signed by most countries. The treaty proposes that the exploitation of resources shall be governed by an international regime (Article 11.5), but there has been no consensus establishing these laws. The agreement has been described without fruition and possibly a failure if it remains ratified by few countries, particularly those active in space. Only one country (India) with independent spaceflight capabilities has signed (but not ratified) the treaty. Echoing legal experts S. Neil Hosenball, who is the NASA General Counsel and chief US negotiator for the Moon Treaty, decided in 2018 that negotiation of the rules of this international regime should be delayed until