Who Owns the Moon? Competing Frameworks for Governing Lunar Territory

By 2030 NASA plans to have astronauts living on the lunar surface. Meanwhile, private companies like Intuitive Machines and ispace have already landed commercial spacecraft on the Moon, and Helium-3 — a rare isotope worth an estimated $5 billion per ton — sits in the lunar regolith waiting to be mined. There is just one problem: no country, company, or court has clear legal authority over who can extract it, protect it, or sell it. Space lawyers around the world are racing to figure this out before the next lunar land rush begins.

By the end of this lesson you will be able to: • Explain the core provisions of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty • Describe why the 1979 Moon Agreement failed to gain wide adoption • Analyze how the Artemis Accords take a different governance approach • Compare competing proposals for permanent lunar governance institutions

The Outer Space Treaty (OST), signed by 115 nations including the United States, Russia, and China, is the constitutional document of space law. Its key provisions are: Article I: Outer space is the province of all humankind — exploration and use must benefit all countries. Article II: No nation may claim sovereignty over the Moon or any celestial body by claim of use or occupation. Article VI: States are internationally responsible for national space activities, including those of private companies. Article IX: Activities must avoid harmful contamination of celestial bodies. The treaty established that no government can own the Moon — but it was silent on whether private entities can extract and sell resources found there. This ambiguity is the central fault line in modern space law.

Frustrated by the OST's silence on resources, the UN negotiated the Moon Agreement in 1979. It introduced the principle of the Common Heritage of Mankind (CHM) — a legal concept stating that the Moon and its resources belong to all of humanity and cannot be exploited for private profit without an international sharing mechanism. The result: only 18 countries have ratified it, and not a single spacefaring nation — not the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India, or any ESA member state — is among them. Without the major spacefaring states, the treaty has no practical authority. The Moon Agreement's failure is itself a lesson in international law: a treaty that advances collective rights but threatens powerful states' economic interests will not gain binding membership.

Rather than negotiating a new multilateral treaty — a process that takes decades — the United States launched the Artemis Accords in 2020: a set of bilateral agreements between the US and partner nations on norms for lunar activities. Key Artemis Accords principles: • Transparency: nations share science data and mission plans openly. • Interoperability: systems must be designed to work with other nations' equipment. • Safety zones: nations may designate areas around their operations where others must not interfere — creating de facto exclusive zones without calling them sovereignty claims. • Resource extraction: extraction of space resources is explicitly declared consistent with the OST. As of 2025, 43 nations have signed. Russia and China have refused, arguing the Accords are a US attempt to set rules unilaterally rather than through the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS).

Scholars and policymakers have proposed several models for permanent lunar governance: Moon Village Authority (MVA): Proposed by the European Space Agency's Jan Woerner, this would be a voluntary international body — similar to the Antarctic Treaty System — coordinating missions, sharing resources, and resolving disputes without a formal ownership regime. Lunar Registry: Modeled on deep-sea mining law under UNCLOS, an international agency would issue licenses for specific extraction zones, collect fees, and redistribute revenue to developing nations. National Legislation Approach: Several countries (USA, Luxembourg, UAE, Japan) have passed domestic laws allowing companies to own extracted resources. This sidesteps international consensus but risks a fragmented patchwork of conflicting national rules. Legal scholars debate whether any solution is workable without Chinese and Russian participation — together they account for a significant share of planned lunar missions in the 2030s.