Who owns the moon?
That orb in the sky has fascinated our species for thousands of years, and to this day remains
a coveted but unreachable fantasy for hopeless romantics.
What do you want?
You want the moon?
Just say the word, and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.
But what if someone could actually own the moon?
You’ve probably seen this video before.
It’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first people to walk on the moon.
Here they’re planting the first U.S. flag on the crater-covered world.
Although this sight filled many Americans with pride in 1969, it scared the hell out
of others.
Why?
Well, because in the past when a nation planted its flag in a foreign land, the idea was that
it was claiming that territory.
Was the United States claiming the moon as its own...and if so, could it do that?
The United States knew that planting its flag on the moon might raise some eyebrows.
Tensions were high in the ‘60s during the Cold War, and the Soviet Union had been beating
the U.S. to many first-time feats in space.
In order to prevent any backlash it might face, the U.S. set aside differences with
the USSR and helped establish the 1967 Outer Space Treaty along with dozens of other nations.
Both superpowers agreed that European colonization was a low point for human history, and they
didn’t want to repeat that cycle of conquest and suffering.
I talked to a space lawyer to find out more.
My name is Frans don ver Dunk.
I am a professor of space law at the University of Nebraska, and I own my own private consultancy
company in matters of space law and policy, which is called Black Holes.
It was a very interesting treaty because the Americans were very much afraid that if
there were no rules of the game whatsoever that the Russians would benefit most from
a lawless outer space.
The space treaty consisted of 17 articles, each intended to make space accessible,
and beneficial to all humans.
Partly as a consequence of article 2, no one can own the moon, or actually more precisely,
all states together own the moon.
So a state cannot occupy a piece of outer space and say, 'This is now part of my territory.'
So there you have it.
No one owns the moon.
It’s more like a “global commons” which is accessible to anyone with good intention.
That was pretty easy to solve...so is space law even necessary?
There are other issues which are important.
You get discussion on, well, can somebody just walk over Neil Armstrong's footprints
on the moon, which are in a sense historical venues, but space mining and space tourism
is one of the main issues.
Space mining on the moon and asteroids is a big issue because some countries, like the
United States, think that private, properly licensed companies should be able to extract
natural resources from them and make money from it.
However, countries like Russia and Brazil think that any money made from such exploitation
should benefit humanity as a whole.
Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty is one of those articles which is now very much outdated.
Because of the sort of open nature of article 2 when it comes to actual commercial exploitation
it gives rise to the possibility of various interpretations, and then of course you see
countries taking the interpretation which suits them best.
Space law will only get trickier as nations begin sending humans beyond the moon to places
like Mars.
We’ll have to set up robust rules to protect the Martian environment and maybe one day
think about letting people on the Red Planet form their own legal system if they do decide
to live on Mars.
It may seem like I’m way ahead of myself, but NASA wants people on Mars in the 2030s,
so these are all questions space lawyers could be thinking about in just a few years.
Perhaps we may even have to set up a new space treaty: One that sets better and more detailed
guidelines for space exploration as we settle into the unknown.