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Space mining

While property rights on the Moon sit in a legally blurry area, the rights to exploit or mine materials is a whole different ball game. As private interest in space exploration has expanded over the past decade and the US government updated its commercial space legislation in late 2015 to allow for the exploitation of“ space resources.”

The legislation entitled Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship( or SPACE) Act explicitly allows for US citizens to commercially explore and gather off-Earth resources. The act was as much directed at the burgeoning commercial sector interested in asteroid mining as it was the Moon, but some legal scholars expressed skepticism at whether the United States even had the power to enact such a legislation.

If a nation state cannot make a sovereign claim over celestial objects according to the Outer Space Treaty, then it may not have a legal right to extend an allowance to private entities to gather those space resources.

This returns us to a Wild West scenario where the universe is up for grabs. It’ s just a question of who can get there fi rst. Unless of course, someone already owns the Moon...

The Moon is mine

Individuals have been making claims to ownership of parts of the Moon for many years, from a German pensioner who claims that his family was bestowed the Moon by a proclamation from a 17th century Prussian king, to James

Mangan from Chicago, who in 1949 laid claim to the entirety of outer space by founding the Nation of Celestial Space, a nation-state that encompassed literally everything that wasn’ t the planet Earth.

In fact, there have been so many weird and wacky claims to Moon ownership over time that author Virgiliu Pop compiled an entire book on the subject entitled, Unreal Estate: The Men who Sold the Moon.

Perhaps the most profi table Moon-seller in history has been American entrepreneur Dennis Hope, who has been selling plots of land on the Moon since 1980. After perusing the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, Hope discovered that there was no obvious legal hurdle to claiming the Moon as his property, so he fi led a claim of ownership with the United Nations.

Hope interpreted the UN’ s lack of response to his claim as a tacit form of approval and began selling plots of land on the lunar surface.

Over the last 35 years, Hope has sold thousands of parcels of Moon real estate to customers allegedly including former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, as well as scores of large corporations, including the Hilton and Marriott hotel chains. It’ s estimated that Hope has generated over US $ 10 million dollars from his Moon sales.

The Moon( copyright)

As private companies, such as Moon Express, race to the Moon with an eye on its resources we are well and truly into a new, 21st century space

FEATURE

race. This time, though, it’ s not guided by governments or nationstates, but rather commercial private entities that intrinsically will be demanding a return on their investment.

As President Trump gears up to announce a public policy direction for the United States’ off-Earth activities, an intention to explore the economic potential of the Moon will not at all be a surprise. His intention to run the country like a business is clearly reiterated in the documents outlining his NASA plans. For good or ill, there is a strong possibility that over the next few years the world will fi nally grapple with the issue of private off-Earth property rights.

So who owns the Moon? No one … yet.

LIFE TODAY MAGAZINE Issue 2, No. 003 / 17 / March 2017 23