If a company says it’s selling land on the moon, should we believe it? What about the planets? Is Martian land for sale? Is Venus available? Here’s the story so far.
Celestial Entrepreneurs, Then and Now
In 1949, an ambitious soul by the name of James Mangan recorded a claim to all of outer space, and registered it with the Cook County, Illinois Recorder of Deeds. Not without drama, as Vice reports:
…Mangan made sure that he was followed by television crews and reporters from LIFE magazine when he went to present the “Charter of Celestia” to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. The Recorder, in true Cook County fashion, told Mangan that he couldn’t record this, and ruined Mangan’s big moment.
After Mangan went to the Illinois Attorney General and managed to get a statement that the charter was recordable, Mangan finally got it recorded. Mangan also set out to sell Earth-sized “lots” of space for a dollar each, with the stated hope that wars would stop once people acknowledged we all share a planet in a vast cosmos.
Several more space empresarios would follow. One of the most diligent was Dennis Hope, who still sells “the cheapest real estate in the universe” through an entity called Lunar Embassy. Buyers of moon acreage get a deed, a map, and a copy of the Codes, Covenants & Restrictions for their lunar land. (See an image of the lunar real estate documents here.)
Dennis Hope’s company is its own register of deeds. Hope even claimed to establish a government, to ground the Lunar Embassy in international law. If that seems absurd to you, hold on. More sophisticated exploits will play out in the not-too-distant future. Other-worldly real estate matters will begin to attract serious attention as billionaires create a commercial space flight industry.
Looking for the Law of Space
To get a handle on extraterrestrial real estate matters, we first look for law. And so far, there’s not much of it. Celestial settlers have yet to go to court over property disputes.
But we do have a starting point. Let’s look at international law.
1967: The Outer Space Treaty
The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (the “Outer Space Treaty”) was negotiated by the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain. The parties intended to outlaw the testing of nuclear weapons in space. They also declared that extraterrestrial scientific discoveries would belong to all of humankind. The treaty, overseen by the United Nations, says outer space is not subject to national appropriation.
But it doesn’t explicitly rule out private ownership. The Outer Space Treaty was understood as a sort of speed bump, slowing the arms race. It wasn’t regarded as a stance on corporate ambitions, or on the making of celestial real estate.
1979: The Moon Agreement
Some U.N. member nations proposed to strengthen the Outer Space Treaty with the new Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (the “Moon Agreement”). The agreement regards the moon as the “common heritage of mankind.”
Can a common heritage be subject to proprietary projects? Countries with the ability to reach the moon must think so. Several countries, the United States included, intend to establish moon bases. In 2020, NASA headed a controversial international agreement called the Artemis Accords. The document explicitly allows for commercial mining of extraterrestrial land.
To the Moon! Companies Gear Up
London-based Foster + Partners conceptualized 3D printing techniques for the construction of lunar housing. What prompted this idea? The European Space Administration announced plans to create an international lunar village by the 2030s. Foster + Partners proposed taking moon surface material to produce the hard exteriors of lunar building structures. Inside would be inflatable rooms designed for human comfort.
☛ The application of 3D printing techniques to housing construction is already a happening thing. Here is a look at the use of 3D printer tech for housing right here on Earth.
Among a slew of other corporations with lunar ambitions is the Japanese car company Toyota. The JAXA company is collaborating with Toyota to produce fuel-cell-powered Lunar Cruisers (named after the Toyota Land Cruiser SUV) for ground transportation.
But perhaps the most prominent company, and the one that has captured many people’s imagination, is Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. SpaceX is developing Starlink, an outer-space reception system intended to supply internet to everyone, in every nook and cranny on Earth.
The company also envisions setting up a lunar base under the Artemis Accords. “We need,” in Elon Musk’s words, a “permanent base on the moon — again, like a big permanently occupied base on the moon. And then build a city on Mars to become a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanet species.”
Sounds like the making of real estate, whether or not there are laws on the Moon and Mars to address this.
A Legal Crisis Looming
Five years ago, Jackson Landers, writing for the Smithsonian Magazine, pointed to an article by a team of writers including astrophysicist Martin Elvis. The writers urged policy makers to revisit the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and start developing some kind of lunar real estate law that deals with today’s realities. A big issue, they wrote, is that setting up bases for science and industry could constitute a “land grab” in defiance of international agreements.
On the moon, high spots close to the poles receive sunlight most of the time. So that’s a key potential power source for industrial actors. Here’s what writers Martin Elvis, Tony Milligan, and Alanna Krolikowski said about the way these high-value areas could be appropriated, giving certain countries advantages over others.
Under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, the moon and other celestial
bodies are “not subject to national appropriation…by means of use or
occupation, or by any other means.” Under Article XII, anyone who establishes a
base has to let other nations visit; the land cannot be exclusive, so it’s
can’t be real estate. But the visit should not disrupt “normal operations” of
the party being visited. And that could be a loophole that allows the posting
of a keep-out sign. If actors of one nationality make a credible claim to need
continual light and energy for the activity being carried out, they could use
that claim to set up exclusive lunar territories.
Today, humans seem to be approaching something like the scenario these authors imagined. So…
We won’t be surprised if courses like Celestial Real Estate and Moon Law are offered by schools any day now.
Key References
Matt Williams for Phys.Org’s Universe Today: Can You Buy Land on the Moon? (Oct. 7, 2016).
Lakeside Title: Are People Buying Real Estate on the Moon? Here’s What You Need to Know (Aug. 28, 2020).
Ben Richmond for Motherboard/Vice: The Outer Space Country That the United Nations Ignored (Apr. 15, 2013).
Jackson Landers for Smithsonian Magazine: Can There Be Real Estate on the Moon? (Jul. 13, 2016).
Cristian van Eijk, Völkerrechtsblog: Sorry, Elon: Mars Is Not a Legal Vacuum – And It’s Not Yours, Either (Nov. 5, 2020; doi: 10.17176/20210107-183703-0).
Photo credits: Kindel Media and SpaceX, via Unsplash.