Eternal Light, up for Grabs
CfA researcher Martin Elvis, seen at the Center for Astrophysics observatory, wants to clarify restrictions on lunar real estate before property conflicts arise.
The Outer Space Treaty bars any nation — and by extension, corporation — from owning property on a celestial body, but a loophole in the pact may amount to the same thing, warns a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) researcher.
Martin Elvis, a senior astrophysicist at the CfA, says that provisions in the treaty allow nations to exploit resources, including through establishing research stations, and bar others from disrupting such endeavors. In some cases, this could amount to de facto ownership, Elvis said. As China and Japan plan moon landings, and corporate leaders eye their own space ventures, the loophole has gained in importance.
Elvis spoke with the Gazette about his recent paper on the issue, co-authored with Tony Milligan of King's College London and Alanna Krolikowski, a former Fairbank Center fellow now at Georg-August University Göttingen, and published in the journal Space Policy. A realistic scenario, he and his fellow researchers wrote, would be a race to claim the lunar "Peaks of Eternal Light," bathed in near-perpetual sunlight and thus ideal for a photovoltaic power station.
GAZETTE: What is the Outer Space Treaty and what does it say?
ELVIS: It was agreed upon in 1967, during the Russian-U.S. rivalry over getting to the moon. It was concluded very quickly and it was a fight between socialist principles of the Russians — keeping space common property — and the U.S. capitalist approach saying we should be able to exploit space for its resources. And they sort of sit uncomfortably together in the treaty.
So you can't own any celestial body as it’s defined, including the moon, but you can make use of its resources. That leads to a sort of tension, but it has never mattered because it's never actually come up as a practical issue.