For now at least, the moon is like the sea: everyone can use it, but
no one can own it. In 1967 the U.S. and the Soviet Union negotiated the
Outer Space Treaty, which states that no nation can own a piece of the
moon or an asteroid. “You have a right to go up and take the lunar soil,
but you don’t have any right to draw a square on the surface of the
moon and say, ‘That square is mine,’” says Stephen E. Doyle, a retired
lawyer who served as NASA’s Deputy Director of Internal Affairs. If the
Space Settlement Institute—which lobbies for private industry to develop
land on other planets—has its way, new laws will allow space colonists
to stake moon claims and start a colony.
Alan Wasser, the Space Settlement Institute’s chairman, says that a
private company should build a “spaceline,” similar to an airline,
between the Earth and moon. And because a corporation is not a nation,
the Outer Space Treaty would not apply. Corporations have settled new
worlds before. The London Company was a joint stock enterprise that
established the Jamestown Settlement in 1607,providing transportation to
pioneers in return for seven years of labor in America, where they
cultivated tobacco and other crops for the company’s profit.
Wasser says that land ownership—and the promise of profits based on
it—is a necessary incentive to invest in space settlement. He is
lobbying for legislation that would commit the U.S. government to honor
future moon claims. But anyone can buy a deed to land on the moon right
now. The Lunar Registry (“Earth’s leading lunar real-estate agency”)
sells such deeds on its website for about $20 an acre. Doyle says that
some kind of lunar governing body is necessary to recognize and enforce
property rights, but no such body exists. So as it stands, the claims
are not much more than fancy pieces of paper.
Doyle says that future moon settlers could look to the Antarctic
Treaty, which designates the continent as a scientific preserve and
prohibits military activity or mining; 28 countries maintain research
stations subject to review by the Council of Managers of National
Antarctic Programs, which oversees best practices of scientific research
on the continent. “Anybody who understands the implications of imposing
a national law on celestial bodies,” Doyle says, “understands we are
better to treat it like Antarctica and the high seas than we are to
treat it like Manhattan.” If not, he says, we would “take all the
problems and contests we’ve had on the surface of the Earth for 5,000
years and extend them to outer space.
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