Originally published in The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2026, 5:55 p.m. ET. Read the original article.
NASA’s Artemis program aims to land astronauts on the moon as soon as 2028, the first manned lunar landing since 1972. China plans to follow with its own manned landing by 2030. But landing first won’t achieve what matters most for humanity: a self-sustaining lunar economy. Free enterprise on the moon and free trade in what it produces, from lunar-powered data services to cheaper Mars missions, promise to benefit people everywhere.
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. All need assurance that what they buy, build or fund remains theirs to use or transfer. At the lunar south pole, mines may someday harvest ice for rocket propellant, avoiding Earth launch costs. To attract investment, miners will need legal acknowledgment of first and continuous occupation, control over land use, the ability to exclude others and assurance that land and improvements can be sold or transferred. In short, ownership rights to lunar real estate.
Property rights typically co-evolve with commercial activity: An initial legal floor enables activity, experience exposes gaps and law hardens provisional practice into financeable rights. Homesteaders fenced and plowed the American West; Congress later codified their claims into law. Lunar property rights will likely follow the same path. Government contracts, equipment titles and resource rights have supported early missions, but suppliers, customers and investors need land rights to scale up physical operations and committed capital.
The existing patchwork of treaties and statutes protects some lunar property but avoids or precludes land rights. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty protects ownership of hardware launched to or built on the moon; the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA) protects ownership of extracted resources. The 1979 Moon Agreement, never ratified by a major spacefaring nation, disallowed lunar land rights. Even the 2020 Artemis Accords’ “safety zones” guarantee the principle of “free access to all areas of celestial bodies”—the opposite of private property exclusion.
The Outer Space Treaty and the CSLCA both disclaim national sovereignty over celestial bodies, and the Artemis Accords align with that position. That rules out Earth-based offshore drilling as a model: Near-shore leases require a sovereign coastal grantor, and mining beyond national jurisdiction comes bundled with mandatory United Nations benefit-sharing that has stalled seabed mining.
The CSLCA indicates a better model: Courts recognize and enforce extracted-resource claims without government claiming the underlying site. Lunar developers could extend this to land—forming a private consortium and registry to confirm first possession and continuous use, resolve disputes, and let governments adopt the registry into law later, just as 19th-century Western mining camps’ rules became the General Mining Act of 1872. First possession itself needs no novel theory: It underlies common law, civil law, Islamic law and African customary law.
For decades after Apollo, lunar activity was limited to whatever governments funded. That changed in 2018, when NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program began buying delivery services from providers that own their landers and bear the risk. In 2025, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost achieved the first fully successful commercial moon landing. That is a good first step. But government procurement alone doesn’t a self-sustaining market make.
Beyond statutes and treaties, governments need restraint: no threatening expropriation, no rewriting rules after investments are made. Capital can retreat well before any assets are actually seized—when Russia dismantled oil giant Yukos with back-tax claims in 2003, investors marked down other companies that could be next. 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. Its Achilles’ heel isn’t technological but institutional.
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 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.
Property rights in space benefit nonspacefaring nations, too. 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. Better to hold a minority share of a growing pie than to be part of or shut out of a stagnant one.
Mr. Chisholm is a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education and a former member of the MIT Corp. Mr. Garretson is founder and president of Orbital Progress, a nonprofit focused on market formation for the space economy.