Who Will Own the Moon?

New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, by Rainer Zitelmann, Skyhorse Publishing, 282 pages, $32.99

Much of the public is unaware of the gradual transformation of space activity from a purely governmental arena to a commercial industry—or mistakenly assumes that this change arrived only with SpaceX. Rainer Zitelmann’s New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars offers a solid, brief summary of that history. While the book highlights other companies and the need for competition, it is somewhat too credulous about claims by SpaceX chief Elon Musk. But that is a minor fault in a useful introduction to the topic.

The book’s most interesting chapter is its final one, which argues that property rights should play a central role in our space future. That subject gets too little attention today. As the U.S. races back to the moon, Washington appears to be repeating the mistakes of the Apollo program: It is giving us a government-led, government-directed effort to fly government astronauts to government facilities, even if the launch vehicles this time are privately owned and operated.

The government’s interest in controlling the mission is understandable. The strategic value of space is visible from Ukraine to Iran to the South China Sea, and Washington has good reason not to want another power to dominate space or to deny American access to its resources. The best way to keep lunar resources from becoming an arena of conflict is to ensure that no power can lock market democracies out. We wouldn’t want to live in a world where Americans have no presence on the moon as an adversary uses lunar resources for military ends.

But we cannot rely on wise central planners, kept continuous across many elections, to achieve American goals in space. Nor can market democracies command the needed resources for such a mission. It is commercial interests that provide the sustained motivation to keep such policies moving forward. And since private actors need a profit motive, that is one reason property rights are essential.

Early outposts in isolated territories—think of the Polynesian expansion across the Pacific, or the Norse settlement of Iceland—may thrive locally without generating much export trade. In strict net-present-value terms, the development is hard to justify. But real estate value bridged the gap. Land on a barren volcanic rock is worth little; land next to a living settlement is worth more, and ownership offers investors a return. That land can be sold on expected future value, used as collateral, or treated as a real asset. A lunar mining outpost of 100 people may not have many products, but title takes no mass to ship back to Earth.

Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital explains not only why formal title matters, but how the U.S. succeeded in part by breaking arrangements that locked land in inaccessible grants and by turning squatter practice—mining claims, homesteading—into law. The Homestead Act of 1862 regularized what was already happening on the ground. We should approach the settlement of space in the same spirit.

Preventing Space Serfdom

The need for property rights doesn’t stop with the incentive for investment. What about the people on this frontier? 

People are what space development most lacks. They are labor—if only to fix and supervise robots—and they are the only source of local demand. People need things; robots, as yet, buy nothing.

The investments required for human occupancy are not mysterious. They have been discussed since the 1960s: closed-loop life support, local resource extraction and manufacturing, propellantless cislunar transportation, and countermeasures such as spin gravity for health hazards. NASA has never given priority to even the basic research behind those technologies, but such tech will be vital for commercial development. These innovations will come from people working in space, who experience needs firsthand, or from entrepreneurs on Earth competing to sell them solutions.

Yet the government is proceeding as if none of this matters. Will government astronauts on a lunar base be allowed to improve their life-support systems? Of course not. They do not own the equipment and cannot turn a screw without approval from a distant Mission Control landlord. That absentee landlord has nothing to gain from cheaper operations or reduced resupply; those costs are budget justifications for a government agency. Will the staff own their inventions? No: As government employees or contractors, their creations will be the intellectual property of the state.

Washington is apparently prepared to abandon the tools that made the American economy work. Instead, space workers will be serfs: people who will not own their habitats, their equipment, or the product of their labor, who must do what they are told by central planners millions of miles away.

A Market Framework for the Frontier

None of this is necessary. NASA can meet its objectives by buying services from private actors. The government can create structures by which customary rights of use and occupancy—already recognized in the Artemis Accords—can be transferred, mortgaged, and sold. NASA could require contractors offering lunar surface services to give the people who live there an equity stake in the physical plant and hence an interest in improving it. We could establish from the start that people living in space or on the moon are themselves customers who can make buying decisions.

As a matter of policy, the U.S. could loosen its grip on U.S.-flagged operations in space. Applying domestic tax and regulatory structures to space environments is unfeasible. Escape from burdensome law at home has always been a reason to move to a frontier. Giving U.S. operators regulatory flexibility could prevent a scenario where commercial space fleets register under foreign flags of convenience. Space does not need to become U.S. territory for property rights to exist. Customary arrangements need only be formalized.

The sudden interest in putting data centers into orbit shows how powerful regulatory relief can be. One major driver for the interest is escaping terrestrial municipal restrictions and environmental permitting. Bypassing that constraint alone may call forth investment that dwarfs NASA’s budget. The same logic applies to other heavily regulated industries on Earth, such as nuclear power, if they acquire the ability to conduct research off the planet.

Without formal property mechanisms, nation-states will enforce claims at gunpoint and billionaires with vast resources will carve out de facto monopolies. If SpaceX settled Mars, Musk could claim territorial control and make it stick, treaty or no treaty. Our goal should not be to stop private pioneers, but to ensure that dozens of competitors can join so that no single entity dictates terms for the rest. The small entrepreneur and the individual settler need the protection of property rights most.