The short version

• Nobody can own the Moon. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty is unambiguous about the place itself.
• Four states have legislated that companies can own what they extract: the United States in 2015, Luxembourg in 2017, the UAE in 2019 and Japan in 2021.
• Seventy states have now signed the Artemis Accords, whose Section 10 records the view that extraction is not by itself national appropriation.
• The COPUOS working group on space resources is due to prepare draft principles during 2026, with adoption targeted for 2027.

The question gets asked at every space conference and it is almost always asked badly. “Who owns the Moon” has a clean answer: nobody, and nobody can. The interesting question is narrower. If a company lands a machine on the Moon and it fills a hopper with regolith, who owns the regolith?

That question is genuinely unsettled, and the way it gets settled will determine whether lunar and asteroid mining is financeable.

What Article II settles

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.

Outer Space Treaty, Article II

That rules out territory. No flag plant creates a claim, no continuous occupation ripens into title, and the closing phrase “by any other means” was drafted to catch creative attempts.

Article VI then closes the obvious loophole. States are internationally responsible for the activities of their non-governmental entities in space, so a company cannot do what its state cannot do. The idea that a private company could claim lunar territory where a state could not has no support in the text.

Everyone agrees on all of that. The disagreement starts one step later.

The consistency argument

The case that extraction is lawful runs like this.

Article II prohibits appropriation of the celestial body. Regolith removed from the surface is no longer the celestial body, in the same way that a fish taken from the high seas is no longer the high seas. Under UNCLOS Part VII no state may appropriate the ocean, and yet harvested fish are unambiguously owned. The analogy is not perfect but it is close, and it reflects a very old distinction between a commons and the resources taken from it.

Article I independently protects “use” of outer space, and extraction is a form of use. The drafters chose broad language and did not carve out resource activity.

Finally, Article II’s list of prohibited means, sovereignty, use, occupation and any other means, is aimed at sovereign claims. On this reading, Section 10 of the Artemis Accords does not change the law. It states it.

The inconsistency argument

The case against is not merely a policy objection.

Article VI attributes non-governmental activity to the licensing state. If a state authorises and continuously supervises a mining operation, and confers property rights in the output, the state is doing through a licensee what Article II forbids it to do directly.

Commercial scale extraction is not a fishing boat passing through. It requires a fixed installation, exclusive access to a site with the right illumination and volatile content, and that exclusivity has to be defensible over decades. The Accords make this explicit through the Section 11 concept of safety zones, which critics read as territorial exclusion under another name. There are only a handful of permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole with useful water ice, and the first operator to occupy one has, in practical terms, taken it.

There is also a process objection. A group of states is generating interpretive practice through a non-treaty instrument, outside COPUOS, where the consensus rule gives every state a voice. Russia and China have not signed and have objected publicly to the approach.

What the national laws actually say

The US provision, at 51 U.S.C. 51303, entitles a US citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid or space resource to possess, own, transport, use and sell what they obtain, in accordance with applicable law including US international obligations. Section 403 of the same Act adds that Congress does not thereby assert sovereignty or exclusive rights over any celestial body.

That disclaimer is doing careful work. The statute is drafted to confer a right against other US persons in US courts, not to assert a claim erga omnes.

Luxembourg’s Article 1 is the shortest and most quoted provision in the field: space resources are capable of being owned. The rest of the law is an authorisation regime, requiring prior written mission authorisation, a Luxembourg-law company or an EU company with a Luxembourg branch, and disclosure of shareholders and management.

Japan’s version is the most procedurally integrated. A permit is granted alongside a satellite launch authorisation, the applicant files a business activity plan, the Prime Minister decides in consultation with METI, and approved permits and plans are published. The person holding the permit owns the resources exploited in accordance with the approved plan.

Where the Accords have got to

The Artemis Accords opened for signature on 13 October 2020 with eight founding signatories. As at August 2026 there are 70, with Serbia signing on 16 July 2026 and Mauritius on 17 July 2026. Eleven states signed during 2026 alone.

The relevant text is Section 10, which notes that extraction of space resources does not inherently constitute national appropriation under Article II, and commits signatories to conduct extraction consistently with the Outer Space Treaty and to inform the UN Secretary-General, the public and the international scientific community of their extraction activities.

The Accords are a political commitment, not a treaty. They create no new binding obligations and are not registered under Article 102 of the UN Charter. What seventy signatures do create is state practice, and state practice is one of the ingredients of customary international law. That is precisely why the number matters and why the states outside it have objected.

The multilateral track nobody talks about

The COPUOS Legal Subcommittee established a Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities in 2021, with a five year workplan running from 2022 to 2027.

Information gathering and legal analysis ran from 2022 to 2024, including an international expert conference in Luxembourg on 26 March 2024. Views on preliminary recommendations were exchanged during 2025. Draft principles are to be prepared during 2026, with finalisation and adoption by the Committee targeted for 2027. The most recent circulated draft of the initial set of recommended principles is dated 17 December 2025.

This is the counterweight story, and it gets a fraction of the coverage the Accords do. If COPUOS produces a consensus set of principles in 2027, the Accords will look like an early expression of a broader position. If it does not, the Accords will be the only text in the field, and the divide between signatories and non-signatories becomes the governing structure by default.

What a financier should take from this

For anyone underwriting a lunar or asteroid venture, the honest position is that ownership of extracted material is well supported in the domestic law of the four legislating states and unsettled in international law.

That is not necessarily fatal. Most of the disputes that would actually arise, over offtake, over trespass on a site, over financing security, would be litigated between private parties in national courts applying national law. The international question bites at the margin: if a non-signatory state disputes the operation diplomatically, or if the operator needs recognition of its title in a jurisdiction that rejects the position.

The gap that has no answer at all is priority. There is no international registry of claimed extraction sites, no first-in-time rule, and no forum to resolve two operators wanting the same crater. Safety zones under the Accords are a notification and consultation mechanism among signatories, not a title system.

The short version

• The Liability Convention has two regimes. Absolute liability for damage on Earth or to aircraft in flight, fault liability for damage in orbit.
• It never defines fault, and there are no orbital rules of the road, which is why it has never been formally invoked for an on-orbit collision.
• Only one claim has ever been brought under it, by Canada against the USSR over Cosmos 954 in 1978, and it settled.
• In practice, debris risk is managed through licence conditions and insurance, not through the Convention.

In February 2009 a defunct Russian military communications satellite, Cosmos 2251, struck the operational Iridium 33 at a closing speed of around 11.7 kilometres per second. Both were destroyed. The event produced thousands of trackable fragments, many of which are still in orbit.

It was the clearest possible test case for the international liability regime governing collisions in space. No claim was brought.

Understanding why is the fastest route to understanding what the regime actually does.

Two regimes, one convention

The Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects entered into force on 1 September 1972 and had 100 states parties as at 1 January 2026. It gives content to Article VII of the Outer Space Treaty, and it splits damage in two.

Article II. Absolute liability. A launching state is absolutely liable to pay compensation for damage caused by its space object on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight. No fault is required. If a stage lands on a farm, the launching state pays.

Article III. Fault liability. Where damage is caused elsewhere than on the surface of the Earth to a space object of another launching state, the first state is liable only if the damage is due to its fault or the fault of persons for whom it is responsible.

The logic is defensible. People on the ground did not choose to be exposed to falling rockets, so they get strict liability. Satellite operators voluntarily entered a shared environment, so they get a fault standard.

The word the Convention never defines

Article III turns on fault. The Convention does not say what fault means in orbit.

There is no duty to manoeuvre. There is no right of way. There is no rule about which of two converging objects should move, no obligation to maintain propulsion for collision avoidance, no standard for how often an operator must screen conjunctions, no defined probability threshold at which action is required, and no obligation to respond to another operator’s contact attempt.

Compare that with the sea. The COLREGs run to a detailed code of who gives way to whom in what circumstances. A court assessing fault in a shipping collision has a rulebook to apply. A Claims Commission assessing fault in an orbital collision would be inventing the standard as it went.

For Cosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 the difficulty was even starker. Cosmos 2251 was a dead object with no manoeuvring capability. It could not have moved. Fault, if any, would have to attach to launching a satellite without end-of-life disposal capability decades earlier, or to the quality of conjunction warning at the time. Neither is a comfortable claim, and neither state wanted to establish a precedent it would later be measured against.

Who counts as a launching state

The Convention defines a launching state four ways, and they can all apply at once. A state that launches, a state that procures the launching, a state from whose territory an object is launched, and a state from whose facility an object is launched.

Under Article V, where two or more states jointly launch, they are jointly and severally liable. A claimant can pursue whichever is most convenient, and the launching states sort out apportionment between themselves.

For a modern mission this can be a long list. A satellite manufactured in one country, owned by a company incorporated in a second, procured by an entity in a third, launched from the territory of a fourth on a vehicle operated by a company from a fifth. The Convention has no tie breaker.

The Registration Convention was supposed to make this tractable by requiring launching states to register objects with the UN. It has 77 parties and compliance for smallsats has been inconsistent, so the register is not a complete answer to “whose object is that”.

The one claim ever brought

In January 1978 Cosmos 954, a Soviet radar ocean reconnaissance satellite with a nuclear reactor on board, reentered over the Northwest Territories and scattered radioactive debris across a wide area of northern Canada.

Canada presented a claim to the USSR in 1979 for approximately CAD 6 million, covering the cost of locating and recovering the debris. It relied on the Liability Convention and on general principles of international law.

The USSR disputed the basis. The matter settled in April 1981 for CAD 3 million, in a protocol that did not admit liability under the Convention.

That is the entire case law. One claim, on the absolute liability side, settled without a determination.

What happens instead

The regime that actually manages debris risk is national licensing, and it has moved fast while the treaty layer has not.

• The FCC now requires post-mission disposal within five years for spacecraft in low Earth orbit below 2,000 km, replacing the old 25 year guideline. We set out the detail in our piece on that rule.
• The FAA imposes debris analysis requirements through Part 450 and financial responsibility through Part 440.
• ESA has moved to a five year expectation in its own debris mitigation policy, and the proposed EU Space Act would put debris mitigation and end-of-life disposal into a binding EU instrument.
• The IADC guidelines and ISO 24113 supply the technical baseline that most of these regimes draw on.

The enforcement point is worth emphasising. A debris mitigation plan filed with a licence application becomes an enforceable condition of that licence. That is how the FCC reached DISH Network in October 2023 over a geostationary disposal failure, in the first ever orbital debris enforcement action. We cover it in our case note.

Insurance does the rest. In-orbit cover responds to loss of the satellite, and third-party liability cover responds to claims by others, which for a US licensee is sized to a maximum probable loss determination.

Would a claim work today?

Suppose a functioning European satellite is destroyed tomorrow by a fragment traceable to a specific state’s object. Would a Liability Convention claim succeed?

The claimant state would need to establish, first, that the fragment came from the respondent’s object, which is genuinely hard for anything below about 10 centimetres. Second, that the respondent was at fault, against a standard that does not exist. Third, it would have to want the precedent, because the standard the Commission articulated would then apply to its own operators.

Article XIX(2) supplies the last disincentive. The Claims Commission’s award is final and binding only if the parties have agreed that it will be. Otherwise it is a recommendation.

None of this means the Convention is worthless. It supplies the strict liability rule that makes launch insurance pricing tractable, and it establishes that states are answerable, which shapes how they license. But anyone expecting it to function as a compensation mechanism for orbital collisions is reading a different document.