The final item in the September 29 space roundup looked like a routine report line: Albania, Croatia, Côte d’Ivoire, and San Marino had joined the Artemis Accords, bringing the number of signatories to 76. Presented in the spirit of “growing commitment to peaceful and responsible exploration.”
It is a pleasing figure, and so it raises no questions. Seventy-six states under a document that is not a treaty. Meanwhile, international law has one agreement devoted to precisely the same question — who owns lunar resources. Fewer than twenty states have ratified it, and not one of them is capable of getting there.
I deliberately did not ask whether mining on the Moon would be permitted or prohibited: the question is useless. What is more interesting is exactly how they get around the wording written in 1967 — and what came of it once before, on the seabed.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty rests on two articles that together create a loophole. Article II prohibits national appropriation of outer space and celestial bodies “by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” Article VIII, conversely, preserves a state’s jurisdiction and ownership over spacecraft it has launched — wherever they may be.
In other words, the treaty permits movable property and forbids territorial property. Nothing happened along that boundary for forty years, because no spacecraft came back with cargo. Then money appeared, and with it the need to call what had been extracted a rock rather than part of a celestial body.
The dispute is not over whether you can pick up a rock. It is over where extraction ends and appropriation of the patch from which the rock was taken begins. Lawyers disagree here on principle. Belgium framed its objection to mining advocates more bluntly than anyone else: it is pointless to prohibit appropriation of celestial bodies while allowing those same states to unilaterally determine the use of their resources — that is, their most valuable part. Professor Bin Cheng argued that the prohibition in Article II extends to private property as well, and therefore to non-state companies.
Everything else follows from this unresolved fork in the road.
The 1979 Moon Agreement tried to settle the matter radically. Article 11 declares lunar resources the “common heritage of mankind” and places their extraction under a future international regime that was to emerge “as such exploitation is about to become feasible.” That regime has not been created to this day, and over forty-seven years it has become clear that “as soon as” is an open-ended formula.
Formally, seventeen states are listed as parties to the agreement. They include neither the United States, nor Russia, nor China. An April 2020 executive order by the American president gives the number with mocking precision: the Moon Treaty had been ratified by eighteen countries, including “only 17 of the 95 members of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.” It also records the crucial point: the United States “does not view outer space as a global commons,” while the Moon Treaty itself is called a failed attempt to place free enterprise under control.
Then it gets interesting. Of the seventeen parties to the Moon Treaty, twelve have signed the Artemis Accords: Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Peru, the Philippines, Türkiye, and Uruguay. Türkiye joined the Accords on August 31, 2026; Morocco did so in April of the same year. Both are parties to the 1979 agreement — meaning they participate in a document that declares resources the common heritage of mankind, and in a document that says extracting resources does not in itself constitute appropriation.
Australia appeared on both lists back in 2020, and the legal literature contains a restrained observation on the matter: “it would be desirable for Australia to clarify its position and address the issues arising from its simultaneous participation in both instruments, thereby preventing unnecessary disagreements with third States” — wording that conceals a complete absence of an answer.
But the cleanest document in this story is the Saudi one. Saudi Arabia joined the Moon Treaty in 2012. It signed the Artemis Accords in July 2022. In January 2023, it notified the UN of its withdrawal from the Moon Treaty, and a year later the withdrawal took effect. It was the first withdrawal from any of the five space law treaties in their entire history.
The Space Review’s analysis of this episode explains the motivation this way: parties to the Moon Treaty had begun insisting on the agreement’s legitimacy — not in order to create an international regime, but to establish the very norm of the “common heritage” through customary international law. The silence of the United States, Russia, and China — which had not merely failed to ratify the treaty but had said nothing about it — worked in favor of that scenario. In the author’s assessment, the 2020 executive order was not technical regulation but a “lawfare maneuver” with a political effect — its purpose was precisely to halt the accumulation of customary law. The Saudis, it seems, read the situation the same way Washington did and preferred to leave before the norm took shape.
The Artemis Accords were written so as not to look like a treaty rewrite. Section 10 says so outright: the extraction of space resources “does not inherently constitute national appropriation under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty.” Formally, this asserts the absence of a violation rather than a new right — a device lawyers analyze separately, because denying a violation is easier to push through than claiming a right.
Section 11 goes further and enters the gray zone. Signatories undertake to respect “safety zones” — areas where operations or an accident might “reasonably cause harmful interference.” A party establishing such a zone must notify the UN Secretary-General, while other signatories must notify and coordinate before entering. The zones are declared temporary, and the obligation of free access to all areas of celestial bodies is expressly reaffirmed within them.
The problem lies in paragraph 8: the basis for delineating a zone is provided by a party “in accordance with the national rules and regulations applicable to each Signatory.” National, not international.
The legal dismantling of this mechanism comes down to breaking property rights into a set of components: access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, alienation. Alienation — selling or leasing a patch of ground — is not conferred by a zone; that follows from Article II. The right to exclude is more complicated: prevailing interpretations of free access and the right of visitation mean exclusivity is treated as akin to appropriation. Hence the elegant compromise proposed by the authors: a zone may confer the right to occupy an area and extract resources from it, but not to manage it — management remains with the state, because under Article VI of the treaty, it is the state that bears responsibility for national activities in space.
Chris Johnson offered the most cautious solution in this debate: a safety zone is needed as an information-sharing standard that allows others to make their own decisions, and it should be nothing more. And his conclusion diverges from current practice: the regime should invite all international actors to agree to specific zones before they are established. Including those who have not signed the Accords.
This is where the legal part was decided, not in declarations. In December 2020, NASA selected four companies to collect lunar regolith. The total value of the contracts was $25,001 for all four. Colorado-based Lunar Outpost agreed to collect a sample for one dollar. Tokyo’s ispace, for five thousand. Volumes: from 50 to 500 grams.
The payment scheme explains why the sum was so small. They paid only for collection, not for developing the spacecraft or delivery: 10% upon award of the order, 10% upon launch of the collector, and 80% upon confirmation. For the one-dollar contract, that meant three payments — 10 cents, 10 cents, and 80 cents. The NASA administrator personally handed Lunar Outpost’s chief a check for 10 cents, complete with a commemorative photograph.
The point of the deal was not the money, and they said so out loud. Space expert Sinead O’Sullivan: “The nominal amount of even one dollar is an important precedent that NASA is setting. The innovation here is not in the financial value, but in the creation of business and legal norms for a marketplace of buyers and sellers beyond earthly constraints.” The key condition had nothing to do with the amount: once collected, ownership of the material passes to NASA.
So the state was not buying rocks — in those years, no one could collect rocks. It was buying a transaction, structured as a commercial deal. For that construction to work, it needed a national law, and it had one: the 2015 amendment to American space legislation grants a U.S. citizen the right to “possess, own, transport, use, and sell” extracted space resources, including water and minerals. Luxembourg went further in brevity: Article 1 of its 2017 law consists of one line — “Space resources are capable of being appropriated.” Japan adopted its law in 2021, the UAE in 2019, and the formula is the same everywhere: there is a right to what has been extracted, not to the patch it came from.
Then comes the unpleasant part that press releases do not mention. The one meant to become the first company in the world to sell lunar regolith — ispace — was licensed by the Japanese government on November 4, 2022, under number S22-019; the minister for space policy, Takaichi, said at the time that if the resources were transferred to NASA, it would become the world’s first commercial transaction involving space resources on the Moon. In April 2023, the Hakuto-R spacecraft crashed during landing after confusing its altitude because of a crater rim. In June 2025, its second spacecraft, Resilience, crashed because of problems with its laser rangefinder. Masten Space Systems — the second participant on that same list — went through bankruptcy and an asset sale in 2022: Astrobotic bought it.
More than five years later, not one of the four samples has been collected. The precedent for which all of this was launched still exists in the form of three payments totaling one dollar.
The scheme of “our own law instead of an international regime” is not a space-age invention. It was first tested on the seabed, and that is where it reached its final result.
In 1970, the United States voted for a UN General Assembly resolution establishing the principle of the “common heritage of mankind” for the seabed beyond national jurisdiction. Ten years later, Congress passed the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act — and the law’s introductory section states outright that this is a temporary procedure, in force “pending the adoption of an international regime dealing with the subject matter.” The law also specifically stipulates that it does not constitute a claim of U.S. sovereignty over the seabed or its resources.
In 1982, UNCLOS opened for signature, and the United States did not sign it — because of Part XI, on extraction beyond national jurisdiction. In 1994, Part XI was revised, removing some of the industrialized countries’ objections; the United States did not ratify it then either. In 1984, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued four exploration licenses in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone — ten years before the convention entered into force and twelve years before the International Seabed Authority began operating.
Since then — not a single new license. Of the four, two have expired; two remain active, both ultimately ending up with Lockheed Martin. Over its entire history, the agency has not approved a single commercial mining project. As AP put it in a May 2026 report, the United States “could soon give companies the green light to commercially mine the seafloor — something that has never been done in international waters.”
Forty-six years of national legislation, four licenses, zero tons extracted. And the structure is fully prepared: the law contains a separate subsection on what will happen when the United States joins an international agreement. The subsection was written in 1980 and has been waiting for its moment for forty-six years.
Antarctica offered a third version of the same outcome. In 1988, after lengthy negotiations, a convention was adopted that was supposed to permit mineral extraction provided there was no environmental risk. In 1989, Australia and France declined to sign it, and because ratification by all treaty countries was required, the convention never entered into force. Two years later came the Madrid Protocol, with Article 7: “Any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research, shall be prohibited.”
One amusing detail in this story is the widespread belief that mining in Antarctica is banned for fifty years. The prohibition has no expiration date. Fifty years is the period during which amending the protocol requires unanimity among all Consultative Parties; any attempt to lift the ban also requires a functioning legal regime for regulating extraction, as well as guarantees under Article IV. Without that, the ban is indefinite.
The newest layer of this story did not make it into any news roundup. While Accords signatories celebrated their seventy-sixth member, a working group of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space was carrying out work that looks like dull bureaucracy and may end, perhaps, as international law.
The Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities was established in 2022 with a five-year plan. Since then — more than sixty meetings and hundreds of pages of written submissions. On September 24, 2026, the same day four countries signed the Accords, the first of six planned intersessional meetings took place ahead of the April 2027 session of the Legal Subcommittee. A consolidated draft of “initial recommended principles” was published.
The document is non-binding, and says so in plain text: the principles “do not create new legal rights or obligations.” The work proceeds strictly by consensus, and the committee has 110 member states, so the draft reads like the result of compromises, each of which can be traced.
The dispute over modal verbs is the most revealing. The United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom objected to “shall” in a non-binding text. An elegant solution was found: the language of the Outer Space Treaty is quoted in quotation marks, so the obligation is stated precisely, yet it is clear that its force comes from the treaty, not the principles. A separate paragraph specifies that the non-binding nature of the principles does not alter the binding force of the obligations reflected in them.
What matters most in the draft is not the details but the categorization. Resource activities are expressly included in the concept of “space activities,” meaning they fall within the existing framework of international law. After decades of dispute over the legality of mining, this is a change in status, not wording.
Principle 2 repeats the logic of Section 10 of the Accords almost word for word: extraction of resources in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty does not in itself constitute national appropriation. But the measure of legality has been shifted: previously, the drafts used the principles themselves; now, it is the Outer Space Treaty.
The preamble contains a compromise pushed by Russia: resources in situ are part of outer space. There is no moratorium on using them, but the establishment of property rights is deferred in time — commercially valuable material cannot legally detach itself from Article II until the moment it is extracted. In the definitions, the same Russian wording, “accessible and valuable,” introduces a relative threshold, one that an Opinio Juris analysis formulates as two questions: accessible with whose technology, and valuable to whom?
Principle 8 recommends that states adopt national laws on licensing and continuous supervision. The Outer Space Treaty contains no such requirement: it says that the activities of non-governmental entities require authorization and continuing supervision by the state, but does not prescribe the instrument for doing so. Formally, a recommendation; operationally, an invitation to write into national law the very mechanism already operating in the United States, Luxembourg, Japan, and the UAE.
And sharing benefits is proposed “on a voluntary basis” and “as appropriate.” Material and commercial benefits are not named in the list, but neither are they excluded. There is no distribution formula.
The comparison with the Moon Treaty is inevitable here, and it does not favor the treaty. It addressed the same task through binding and ambitious obligations and attracted seventeen participants — even though those very obligations were the reason states refused it. The current approach is not a single act but an iteration: principles can be revised, supplemented, and eventually given an international monitoring mechanism. The author of the analysis ends with a formula that is hard to dispute: in this field, iteration is not an alternative to regulation but the means by which multilateral regulation can happen at all.
What comes of it depends on which happens first: committee consensus or the first real shipment of cargo. The four seabed licenses issued in 1984 once looked like a beginning, too.