Who Officially Owns The Moon????

thats easy....ME!

no, seriously, the moon is one of Earth's moon so the Earth owns it (in a sense). But as must people say, its free, no one owns it.

The Moon and planets other than our own are probably like Antartica, no one is allowed to claim it as their own.

Not earth other wise we would have places a base there in the 60's....I'd say some other planet has claimed it.

Murcielago, that's a pretty neat picture. What is that, a flash going off in a clean window while taking a pic of the moon?

I haven't read through the whole of this thread, so I dont' actually know the answer.

But, I think it should belong to the whole of the Human race.
As far as we know, we discovered it first!

Originally posted by Hellmutt

If the US "owns" the moon...

...then Norway should "own" the Arctic and the Antarctica.

Good point ... and the Native American's should own the US ...


The reality is that currently there is no value to owning the moon. If there ever were to be added value, such as finding minerals, I'm sure there would be a struggle for ownership between any parties that could actually afford to build a colony there.


According to dictionary dot com, "ownership" means:

Legal right to the possession of a thing.

So ownership of the moon would come down to establishing legal rights for owning the moon. Whose jurisdiction is the moon?

Sure we've been there, and so have the Russians, and the Chinese are planning on it as well. We left some junk there.

The real question is, could we defend it if it were attacked by space aliens?

I think land ownership, privately, depends on a legal system of a nation or collective of nations. However, a violation of this ownership, would subsequently require some sort of action or retribution by this nation or collective.

Since we do not have a treaty (like NATO) to defend the moon against some sort of enemy, I would say no one owns the moon, just like no one owns the Mariana trench at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean ... who would possibly want to defend it?

Naturally that might change if they discovered gold, etc. However, it's been estimated that while the likelihood of discovering mineral wealth on planets and asteroids may in fact be good, the cost of actually getting it and bringing it back to Earth, is far greater than it is to get it locally, so the point is moot.

We dont "own" the earth, we just believe we do

Whats this Dark side of the moon?, i thought all parts of the moon received some degree of sunlight at some point, as it does rotate as it orbits us

Yeah it erks me whenever people call it the 'Dark Side'
Kinda like DOS Operating System.

It's the FAR Side, people!

If the myths of the creation of the moon are to be believed then mother earth owns the moon as it was part of earth originally until Venus collided and the moon resulted.

However I heard once of a crazy scheme about advertising on the moon by some sort of projection device or something. Who would then have the rights to do that?

Or was I mistaken about this?

Originally posted by 12 12 2012

Originally posted by MrDog


However I heard once of a crazy scheme about advertising on the moon by some sort of projection device or something.

It was Pizza Hut, and they were going to use a laser beam to project it's logo on the moon, idea dumped back in the late 1990's.

Thanks I thought I remembered something.

Hey at least they would of had enough cheese topping Sorry sorry sorry.