Who owns planets

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Read More. This has resulted in a renewed interest in exploring more permanent settlements on Mars or other celestial bodies. Read more: Five reasons India, China and other nations plan to travel to the Moon. 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.

These treaties like the Antarctic Treaty with respect to the management and use of Antarctica represent the international law that applies to outer space. The Moon Agreement provides the most extensive protection of the Moon environment, and includes specific rules relating to potential activities on the Moon and other celestial bodies. However, Australia is one of the very few countries which has acceded to the treaty — only 18 parties have acceded to or ratified this treaty compared to the Outer Space Treaty, which has members.

The Moon Agreement is therefore not considered to reflect customary international law — this means that its terms are not considered to reflect existing rules and norms of international space law.

China, the United States and Russia are not members of this treaty, and neither are United Arab Emirates and Luxembourg countries that do have clear space mining interests. Despite the fact that nations may not claim sovereignty over a celestial body, the international treaties leave open the scope for states and private firms to use and mine celestial bodies without asserting ownership of the entire asteroid or planet.

In other words, you can extract and own resources without asserting sovereignty over the entire planet. At the moment, in the absence of any clear laws regulating resource extraction, it is a case of first in, best dressed.

This gesture may have implied territorial ownership, but was purely symbolic because of the Outer Space Treaty. It sets out important principles, such as the concept that space should be considered the province of all mankind, that outer space is free for the exploration and use by all states, and that the Moon and other celestial bodies cannot be claimed by a sovereign nation state.

Additionally, the Moon and celestial bodies are to be used purely for peaceful purposes, and weapons will not be placed in orbit or in space. This treaty has worked so far, but there are some potential pitfalls - as Dr Stuart explains.

I suspect we will settle for a physical demarcation at the Karman Line, which is about km up, but it's also an option to go for a functional definition. This is where laws are defined based on the function of a space object rather than where it is in space.

A physical demarcation results in a lot of paperwork for commercial spaceflight companies, such as Virgin Galactic, which is developing a sub-orbital tourist space plane. It means Virgin has to abide by both international aviation laws as well as space laws, despite only being "in space" for five or six minutes. A sensible compromise has to be reached. Commentators agree that the Outer Space Treaty is an excellent foundation for international space law, but it makes no reference to commercial space activities, such as the exploitation of space resources; presumably because this was not foreseen back in There is a strong case for revisiting the Outer Space Treaty to bring it up to date," argued Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science at Birkbeck College, University of London.

There is an argument that in the future, when assets are developed in space, it is more cost-effective to use raw materials mined from space rather than transporting them from Earth. There is also another strong reason for developing clearly defined space laws, says Prof Crawford: "For scientific reasons, some areas of the Moon are sites of special scientific interest and should be preserved and protected from commercial activities.

As the Earth's population grows and more raw materials are required to maintain high living standards, it is arguably more ethical and environmentally sensitive to mine those materials from celestial bodies with no existing habitats and no bio-diversity to disrupt - as opposed to continuing to over-exploit this planet.

This raises a further issue: if space mining does become a reality through private companies like Planetary Resources and Moon Express, does their work contradict the Outer Space Treaty?