Who owns the moon? How the lunar frontier could become the new Wild West 

As a flurry of recent news reports have shown, interest in the moon is increasing dramatically as China, India, and a number of private companies are racing to establish bases on the moon and to put a lunar space station in orbit around it. Why? Because the moon turns out to have valuable resources needed on Earth – some of them currently in increasingly short supply – and hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in getting at those resources, with the expectation of big profits and big advantages. 

The resources in question include chlorine, lithium, beryllium, zirconium, uranium, thorium, and the rare-earths needed for mobile phones, computers and wind turbines, as well as basalt, iron, quartz and silicon. But above all, the ‘regolith’ – the surface dust and rubble of the moon – is a source of Helium-3, needed for the upcoming nuclear fusion industry which promises huge amounts of clean energy for Earth. Helium-3 is worth US $4bn a ton – that’s US $2,000 per litre. A handful of moon dust is worth more than a handful of diamonds. 

These facts explain the huge investment being poured into moon resource exploitation. And there is much to applaud about it: better to mine the moon than the already over-damaged Earth; many new technological spin-offs can be expected; and human imagination and perspectives will be enlarged. 

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But there are also dangers for peace on Earth – and these are not being taken seriously enough. There is only one outdated international treaty applicable to the moon, the UN’s 1067 Outer Space Treaty, which forbids using the moon for military purposes, but which otherwise declares the moon an open resource which anyone can do what they like on, if they can get there: an open frontier, a Wild West, a place that invites the ‘gold rush’ phenomenon that has been a source of so much trouble in Earth’s own history. 

The trouble with the Wild West aspect is that competition and rivalry for the moon’s resources could too easily result in conflict, and the conflict could rebound on Earth. It is a potential source of trouble unless regulated. But no-one is talking about the regulations necessary. Think of it: with so much money invested, and such big profits to be made, rivalry could easily become acute, and resulting conflicts will not be confined to the moon or space, but will affect international relations, even to the point of yet more war, on our planetary home. 

There is another problem. Without international agreements governing activity on the moon (and eventually Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, for which the moon will be the base as the current century unfolds), the future of space is being decided by people, private corporations and governments whose record has shown them to be ‘bad actors’ more often than ‘good actors’. Ultra-rich entrepreneurs and totalitarian China will shape the future of life and activity in space; instead of the rule of law there will be employment contracts and highly-controlled regimes deciding who can go and what they can do on the moon and in outer space. This is obviously undesirable. 

As politics everywhere has moved rightwards in recent decades, the idea of national enterprise based on tax revenues has become less attractive to governments. The US government no longer sees space as a national domain; NASA does not build and fly missions any more, but commissions them from private companies. The profit motive, not exploration and science, is the driving force now. 

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The US’s NASA has put together a group of three dozen countries into ‘the Artemis Accords’ for cooperation and investment in lunar and space development. In part this is a cost-sharing exercise, in part it is to pre-empt the UN introducing new efforts for a global agreement. China and Russia – the latter returning to space activity after a long break, and serving as a junior partner in this arrangement – have set up their own rival accord. This, menacingly, reprises the old east-west Cold War stand-off. Without a robust international agreement on what happens on the moon, Earth’s worst habits will be repeated there. 

Who owns the moon? Non one – and therefore it will become the property of anyone who can get there and claim that they have ‘special interests’ (a disguise for ‘sovereignty’) over those parts of it they are operating in. 

To repeat: this is a source of potential trouble. We should be thinking right now about taking seriously what the idea that ‘no-one owns the moon’ really means: we all do – all humanity. 

Who Owns the Moon? by AC Grayling is out now (Oneworld, £16.99).

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