Lunar property rights emerge as key to 2028 moon economy

NASA aims to land astronauts on the moon by 2028, but a Wall Street Journal opinion argues landing first won't matter without private lunar land rights — the missing piece for a self-sustaining moon economy.

"To be self-sustaining, a lunar economy needs paying customers beyond the governments footing today's bills, along with entrepreneurs to serve those customers and investors to fund the entrepreneurs," John Chisholm, a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education, and Dan Garretson, founder of the nonprofit Orbital Progress, wrote in the Journal.

The existing legal patchwork protects hardware and extracted resources but avoids land rights. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty shields equipment launched to or built on the moon; the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act protects ownership of extracted resources. The 1979 Moon Agreement, never ratified by a major spacefaring nation, disallowed lunar land rights, while the 2020 Artemis Accords' "safety zones" guarantee free access to all areas of celestial bodies — the opposite of private property exclusion.

The stakes are commercial. NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, launched in 2018, began buying delivery services from providers that own their landers and bear the risk, and Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost achieved the first fully successful commercial moon landing in 2025. But government procurement alone doesn't make a self-sustaining market, the authors argue.

The authors propose a private consortium and registry to confirm first possession and continuous use, resolve disputes, and let governments adopt the registry into law later — the same path 19th-century Western mining camps took before Congress codified their rules into the General Mining Act of 1872. First possession needs no novel theory, they note, because it underlies common law, civil law, Islamic law and African customary law.

China's Institutional Weakness

The argument cuts against China. Because Chinese law grants the state ultimate ownership of natural resources, no Chinese firm can assure investors it will own extracted lunar resources, let alone land. Beijing can fund state enterprises lavishly but can't manufacture a track record of restraint, the authors write. Its weakness is institutional, not technological.

The authors also warn governments to show restraint — no threatening expropriation, no rewriting rules after investments are made. Capital can retreat before assets are seized, as when Russia dismantled oil giant Yukos with back-tax claims in 2003, prompting investors to mark down other companies that could be next.

The 2028 Timeline

The timing matters. NASA's Artemis III mission, set to launch next year, will test commercial lunar landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX in Earth orbit before Artemis IV attempts the first crewed lunar landing in 2028, according to Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. China plans its own manned landing by 2030.

Property rights in space benefit nonspacefaring nations too, the authors argue. Without durable, enforceable rights, only states with existing launch infrastructure can operate on the moon, with no path for anyone else to buy in. A well-defined property framework would do for lunar development what economist Hernando de Soto showed formal land titles did for Peru's economy: let everyone participate.

Congress should recognize the private land registries lunar developers will inevitably establish and clarify jurisdiction and remedies for interference with equipment, extracted resources, improvements and continuous operations — without asserting sovereignty over lunar land, the authors recommend. The U.S. and its partners should expand the Artemis Accords' safety-zone coordination from nations to private operators and strengthen it with registration, priority for active operations and enforceable responsibility for interference, all built to survive changes of administration.

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