Who Owns the Moon?
Well people have been claiming to own the moon for the past hundreds of years
Although the United Nations' 1967 Outer Space Treaty specifies that the space speculations of “non-governmental entities” need to be regulated by a member state, before this treaty took effect–and, indeed, before humans had even landed on the Moon–there was a vogue for declaring yourself master of space and landlord of lunar property. Some putative owners have sold shares, while others have kept the whole thing for themselves, but regardless, over the course of history the Moon has served dozens of masters.
The Jürgens family of Germany may have the oldest claim; they say the Moon has been family property since 1756, when the emperor of Prussia awarded the satellite to the Jürgens patriarch as a gesture of gratitude and stipulated that it would be passed on to his sons. But there have been many challenges to the Jürgens' ownership in the ensuing 250 years.
In 1936, a man named A. Dean Lindsay claimed not only the Moon but all celestial objects, registering them with the Irwin County courthouse in Ocilla, Georgia. In 1949, a public relations worker and self-help author named James T. Mangan laid claim to everything Lindsay had not: the actual space part of outer space. Mangan wrote to the secretaries of state of 74 nations to announce that he was forming the Nation of Celestial Space, or Celestia, which would encompass all of space outside of Earth. Eleven of those nations “informally recognized” Celestia, according to Mangan, including Ecuador, Ireland, Cuba, Norway, the UK, the USSR, and the United States of America. Mangan planned to sell Earth-sized portions of his new territory–which would be a tax-free democracy–for a dollar each, obscenely cheap even by 1949 standards.
So who's the real owner of the Moon? The Jürgens, because they were first? Dennis Hope, because he's one of the first companies to actively selling it? “The law is actually silent on this,” says Dennis Burnett, a board member of the International Institute of Space Law. Whether the Outer Space Treaty has a loophole where it doesn't apply to individuals, as Hope claims, is the wrong question, according to Burnett: “Treaties are between nations; they never apply to individuals,” he says. “The question would be, is there any law that would prevent him from doing what he wanted to do? And the answer is no. But there's no law allowing him to do it either.”
Lunar Loophole to answer Who Owns The Moon?
The UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 stipulates that no government can own extraterrestrial property. However, it neglects to mention individuals and corporations. Therefore, under laws dating back to early US settlers, it is possible to stake a claim for land that has been surveyed by registering with the US Office of Claim Registries.
BEWARE of other phony 'Lunar' companies selling Moon property. They may seem legitimate, but the Lunar Land company has been THE WORLDS MOST RECOGNIZED CELESTIAL REAL ESTATE AGENCY to possess a legal trademark and copyright for the sale of extraterrestrial property within the confines of our solar system for decades.
Moon "Just Another Continent"
One of the main hang-ups with the 1979 treaty is how countries would share the wealth. Some scientists think stores of helium-3, for example, could make the moon the next Persian Gulf. The gas, which is rare on Earth, has been tagged as a clean, renewable energy source of the future. For billions of years the moon, unprotected by an atmosphere, has been showered with particles from the sun. This includes an as-yet undetermined amount of helium-3, which is now trapped in the moon's soil. Its use as a fuel, though, hinges on developing a reliable process for fusion, a form of power generation that's "like a controlled hydrogen bomb explosion," said Peter Kokh, president of the nonprofit Moon Society.
Other more immediate uses for the moon include mining moondust for lunar construction, launching satellites, and setting up solar-power collectors, Kokh said-projects for the first wave of moon settlers. The moon "is just another continent across a different kind of sea," he said. "We foresee a future in which people will be living on the moon and producing materials for solving Earth's problems."
United States of the Moon?
Kokh personally thinks that the best possible future is one in which the people of the moon rule themselves. The process of colonizing the moon's challenging landscape will change the needs and wants of the society that settles there-just as the desires of English colonists changed when they got to the New World. "Lunar Land Owner settlers may want to bring the American way of life to the moon, but they will leave Washington, D.C., at home," he said. "In the meantime it'd be better to have UN stewardship," Kokh said. "Right now [the world has] a working international relationship in the International Space Station ... and that's a good precedent." Space-law expert Masson-Zwaan agrees, saying that the first bases built on the moon should be cooperative projects. "I don't think we'll have people putting in their flags and saying, This is my little square, and I'm going to build a base here,"