Skimming this bit of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, I have to wonder whether a similar regime will be established should useful quantities of helium-3 be found on the Moon and the technology required to employ it in commercially viable fusion power generation be demonstrated.
For a resource that was trendy in the 1970s and appears to have fallen off the radar since, the LoS expresses an amount of interest in seafloor nodules that is obsessive to the point of sickness. Given the far greater economic potential of a fuel for clean fusion, one can imagine how much more greedy interested the “common heritage” crowd would be regarding He3 exploration and extraction.