Can You Buy Land on the Moon? What the Law Says About Lunar Deeds

Search for “buy land on the Moon” and you will find websites offering an acre for the price of a dinner, complete with a deed, a map and a certificate of mineral rights. People buy them as gifts, as jokes and occasionally as what they think is an investment. The legal question is simple and the answer is no: there is no lunar land registry, no court that would enforce the deed, and an international treaty rule that stands in the way of anyone creating one.

The more interesting story is why the deeds keep selling, what they are legally, and what the law does now allow people to own on the Moon.

The rule: no one can appropriate the Moon

The starting point is Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty: “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

Land ownership is a creation of a legal system. A title to land means that a State, through its courts and its land registry, will recognise you as owner and stop others from using the land. On Earth, the State that grants title also has territorial sovereignty over the land. On the Moon, Article II prevents any State from having that sovereignty, whether by planting a flag, building a base or passing a statute. Without a sovereign, there is no one to grant a title in the first place. I set out the treaty background article by article in our Outer Space Treaty explainer.

Article VI closes the door on doing it privately. It makes States internationally responsible for “national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities”, and requires that private activities have “authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party”. If a State’s courts enforced a citizen’s title to a crater, that State would be doing through its legal system exactly what Article II forbids it to do directly.

The loophole argument, and why it fails

Sellers of lunar deeds rely on one argument: Article II speaks of “national” appropriation, so it binds States, not individuals, and an individual’s claim is therefore valid.

The argument confuses two things. It is true that treaties bind States rather than people, and an individual cannot breach the Outer Space Treaty in the way a government can. But that does not make a private claim valid. A claim is only worth something if some legal system recognises it, and every legal system on Earth belongs to a State bound by, or at least operating against the background of, Article II. As Dennis Burnett of the International Institute of Space Law put it to Atlas Obscura in 2015, “Anybody can assert anything, that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

The 1979 Moon Agreement was drafted to remove any doubt. Article 11(3) provides that “Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person.” Placing equipment or stations on the Moon creates no ownership of the surface either. The difficulty is that the Moon Agreement binds only its parties, 17 as of 1 January 2026, and the United States, China and Russia are not among them, as our piece on why almost no one ratified the Moon Agreement explains.

Where lunar deeds come from

Claims to own the Moon are older than spaceflight. According to the 2015 Atlas Obscura account, a Chilean lawyer and poet, Jenaro Gajardo Vera, registered a title deed to the Moon in 1953, and in 1955 a company called the Interplanetary Development Corporation sold one-acre plots for $1 each to about 4,500 customers before the New York District Attorney investigated it for fraud.

The best-known seller today is Dennis Hope, who runs the Lunar Embassy. He says he wrote to the United Nations in 1980 declaring himself owner of the Moon and several planets, unless the UN could give a reason why he could not, and that the UN never replied. He has sold lunar plots full-time since 1995, at about $20 a parcel according to the same report, and claimed in 2013 to have sold 611 million acres of the Moon.

Silence is not consent in law. The UN has no power to grant or refuse title to celestial bodies, so its failure to answer a letter has no legal effect. Nor does the letter amount to the kind of effective occupation that once supported territorial claims on Earth, which in any case Article II now rules out.

The one court that ruled on it

The only court decision I know of on the sale of lunar land came from China. In October 2005 a Beijing company, Beijing Lunar Village Aeronautics Science and Technology Co., began selling lunar acres as the Chinese agent of the Lunar Embassy. NBC News reported in November 2005 that it sold 49 acres to 34 buyers within three days, at just under 300 yuan an acre, before the Beijing commercial authorities suspended its business licence on 28 October for speculation and profiteering. The company sued, arguing that no Chinese law prohibited selling land on the Moon.

It lost. In March 2007 AFP reported, citing Xinhua, that the authorities had revoked the licence and fined the company 50,000 yuan, and that a Beijing intermediate court had rejected its appeal, stating that no individual or country could claim ownership of the Moon. The case was decided under Chinese commercial regulation, not the Outer Space Treaty, but it is the clearest judicial statement on the point.

What you can own: resources, not land

The law has moved, but in a different direction. The question States have been answering is not who owns the Moon but who owns what is taken from it.

The United States answered first. Under 51 U.S.C. section 51303, added by the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, a US citizen engaged in commercial recovery of a space resource “shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell” it. The same Act, in section 403, states that the United States “does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body.” The rock you dig up can be yours. The ground you dug it from cannot.

Luxembourg followed with its law of 20 July 2017 on the exploration and use of space resources, whose Article 1 provides that “Space resources are capable of being owned”, subject to a written mission authorisation from the government. Section 10 of the Artemis Accords takes the same line internationally: its signatories “affirm that the extraction of space resources does not inherently constitute national appropriation under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty.”

NASA has already put the theory into a contract. In December 2020 it selected four companies, Lunar Outpost, Masten Space Systems, ispace Europe and ispace Japan, to collect space resources and transfer ownership of them to the agency, under contracts worth a combined $25,001. The point was the precedent, not the price. Whether this resources-only approach is consistent with Article II is the live debate, which I covered in who owns what on the Moon.

Safety zones are not property either

The nearest thing to exclusive control the current framework offers is the “safety zone” in Section 11 of the Artemis Accords: an area around an operation where the operating signatory gives notice and coordinates with others to avoid harmful interference. The Accords say safety zones should be sized on “commonly accepted scientific and engineering principles”, that they “will ultimately be temporary, ending when the relevant operation ceases”, and that signatories respect the Outer Space Treaty principle of free access. A safety zone is a coordination tool, not a title, and it cannot be sold or inherited. Our Artemis Accords explainer covers how they are meant to work.

So what does a lunar deed get you?

A certificate. Nothing in it can be registered, mortgaged, enforced against a trespasser or passed on with any legal effect beyond that of the paper itself. If you buy one as a gift, you have bought a novelty, and there is no harm in that as long as everyone understands what it is. If you are offered one as an investment, or told that a future lunar government will honour it, treat the offer the way the Beijing regulators did.

The one sense in which money buys a stake on the Moon today is by funding or contracting with an operator that holds a State’s authorisation to go there and extract resources. What it buys is a share in a licensed activity, never a share of the surface.

What I would watch

The first is the UN. The Legal Subcommittee’s Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities published a consolidated draft set of initial recommended principles in July 2026 and has intersessional meetings scheduled for 22 October and 17 December 2026. Whatever it says on ownership of extracted resources, and on any limits to exclusive use, will be the closest thing to a global statement on the issue.

The second is the first real extraction. Once a company returns or uses lunar material under a national authorisation, the resource laws stop being theory, and the line between owning the regolith and controlling the site will be tested in practice.

The third is the Moon Agreement. If more Artemis signatories conclude that Article 11 and the Accords cannot both be honoured, I would expect further withdrawals like Saudi Arabia’s. If instead the remaining parties persuade others that the two can coexist, Article 11(3)’s express ban on private ownership of the surface will gain weight.

The fourth is consumer protection. Apart from the Beijing case and the 1955 New York investigation, I am not aware of regulators taking on lunar deed sellers. As commercial lunar landings become routine news, I expect regulators elsewhere to look harder at sales that imply the buyer is acquiring a real interest in land.

Anuj KumarEditor-in-Chief

Anuj Kumar is the founder of Legal Desire Media and publishes Fashion Law Journal and Space Law Journal.

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