In a December 2015 interview with GQ, billionaire inventor Elon Musk predicted that we will
be able to send humans to Mars roughly within a decade.
The idea of human space travel has been a popular topic since the first satellite was
launched in 1957, and today movies like The Martian keep the public’s interest engaged.
But with Musk's talk of going to Mars for fun or for profit, questions arise about who
will own any planets we someday inhabit.
So, to start off, let’s look at where we’ve already been.
Who owns the moon?
Well, historically speaking, new land was claimed by the first powerful country to set
foot on it (although any indigenous population would likely disagree).
In this sense, Neil Armstrong was the first to step onto its surface, and did so on behalf
of America.
So, is that it?
Does the United States own the moon?
Thankfully, no.
About two years before the US successfully put a man on the Moon, a treaty was drawn
up between the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union, which created the foundation of international
space law.
The Outer Space Treaty, as it is known today, bans things like nuclear weapons testing in
space.
But most importantly, it designates outer space as the ‘province of all mankind’.
This treaty has been signed by 102 countries including China, Iran, Brazil, India, and
so on.
The Outer Space Treaty prohibits any country owning any celestial body or portion of space,
calling it a “common heritage of mankind”.
That said, manmade objects launched into space and onto, for example, the Moon are still
allowed to be owned.
So something like a hotel on the moon could technically be property of whoever owned that
hotel, though it's still a matter of legal interplanetary debate.
In fact, as humanity gets closer to commercializing space, questions about who owns what have
started to become more important In 2014, one company, Bigelow Aerospace, applied for
commercial licensing to mine natural resources from the moon.
Then, in 2015, US President Barack Obama passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness
Act.
It was intended to encourage private space companies to invest in exploration by essentially
giving away mining rights on asteroids.
Some are saying that this legislation will be the basis for future space economies, and
that future may not be too far off.
NASA has already explored the possibility of capturing an asteroid and bringing it into
moon orbit, for scientific study and potentially robotic and human exploitation.
However, Obama’s new law only lets you own what you pull out of the ground, and doesn’t
give you actual ownership over the celestial body itself.
Although humanity landed on the Moon almost 50 years ago, there is no question that we
are still in the burgeoning stages of space travel.
As we get closer to being able to mine for space rocks and setting up bed and breakfast
hotels on Mars, the laws on planet ownership will certainly become more complex.
But until they do, we all own the moon.
Many of us have seen stunning images of the planets — but, those images don’t always
show the planets’ true colors.
To learn more about what gives planets their hue, check out this video by DNews.
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