Who Should Own Space?

As a species, we’ve been looking up at the stars for millennia but only more recently have we had the means to actually reach them. And now that we can, a thorny question emerges: who gets to own what’s up there, and more importantly, who gets to decide this?

From what I gather the current answer is a legal framework from 1967 called the Outer Space Treaty. According to the United Nations (UN), this treaty was set up through negotiations within the UN, mostly driven by the ‘Cold War space race’, and was officially endorsed  by the three major space powers at the time: the United States, the Soviet Union (Russia, today) and the United Kingdom, who also became the treaty’s depositary nations. The objective was ‘to establish foundational principles for space exploration for all humankind, preventing weaponisation and territorial claims in space.’

Curious that the treaty also says that no country can claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, i.e. the moon, planets, even asteroids. In effect, none of it can be planted with a flag and claimed as ‘yours’. In other words that Space belongs to all of humanity. That sounds reasonable and is such a noble sentiment. But like most noble sentiments, it gets messy the closer you look at it. 

Saying that Space belongs to everyone is functionally similar to saying it belongs to no one. And when something belongs to no one, whoever gets there first with the most resources tends to win. We’ve seen this play out on Earth plenty of times. The high seas were supposed to belong to everyone too, until countries started carving up fishing rights and underwater mineral claims. Antarctica, as another example was meant to be a scientific preserve for all humanity, protected by a treaty that banned resource extraction. But as the expiry date of that mining ban in 2048 looms closer, some countries are already jockeying for first position to exploit the mineral rights in Antarctica. The scientific cooperation we see now, will likely look very different when it becomes more apparent that there’s big money to be made exploiting Antarctica. 

Space is on the same path, except it’s also moving a lot faster. We’re still in the ‘everyone plays nice’ phase, but the resource rush is already warming up in the background. We’re not just talking about scientific outposts anymore. We’re talking about mining asteroids worth trillions, establishing permanent colonies on Mars, extracting resources from the moon. When that kind of money and strategic advantage is on the table, the idea that space belongs to all of humanity starts feeling less like a legal principle and more like a pleasant fiction we tell ourselves.

So should space be free for exploration without national claims? That’s a rhetorical question in my view because we need to be realistic about human nature. Countries and corporations don’t operate on goodwill, they operate on incentives. If there’s no framework for who can do what and benefit from it, the void will be filled by whoever’s powerful enough to take what they want. That’s not cynicism, that’s history. And if you’ve lived long enough on this planet you’ll know that history does indeed repeat itself. 

The trickier question is enforcement. Who arbitrates when someone breaks the rules? Right now, it’s basically the ‘scout’s honour’ system backed by geopolitical pressure. The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs exists but like most things UN, has no real teeth to bite when the need comes to it. If China or the US or SpaceX decides to ignore international norms, what’s the actual consequence? Another strongly worded letter perhaps? Or economic sanctions that might hurt the sanctioning country just as much, let’s not even mention the innocents like you and I. 

I advance that we need something with actual authority to arbitrate among nations, although this is also where it gets a bit more complicated. Any global body powerful enough to enforce rules in Space would need to be backed by the nations willing to fund and empower it. That means for those nations, giving up some degree of sovereignty, which historically speaking, nations have always hated doing. One doesn’t have to look far, take the matter with the International Criminal Court which exists, but major powers like the US, Russia, and China never signed on to its jurisdiction because they don’t want to be held accountable to an external authority. So, why should we think that Space would be any different?

Maybe the answer isn’t having a single global arbiter but a coalition of spacefaring nations agreeing to mutual oversight. Something like a Space Security Council but one that actually functions. Representatives from countries actively engaged in Space activities, with rotating membership to prevent any one power from dominating. Give it the authority to investigate violations, impose penalties, and coordinate responses. Make the penalties severe enough to matter: revoke launch licenses, freeze assets, exclude from international Space collaboration.

But even that has problems. Who decides which countries get a seat at the table? Do we lock in the current major players and risk creating a permanent elite club? Or do we make it open to all nations and watch it devolve into bureaucratic paralysis? And what happens when a private company (think SpaceX, Meta, Blue Origins) not a country, is the one breaking the rules? Do we hold their home nation responsible or do the corporations get to operate in a regulatory grey zone?

The philosophical ideal would be holding Space as a kind of ‘Commons’. This would mean treating Space as genuinely shared, protected, and with rules enforced fairly regardless of who’s involved. The tricky part about this is that Commons only work when everyone agrees to the rules and there’s a credible threat for breaking them. We’ve struggled to achieve that on Earth with things like climate agreements and nuclear non-proliferation. Space adds layers of complexity because it’s vast, difficult to monitor, and enforcement mechanisms are even harder to implement when the violation happens millions of miles away.

Perhaps the real question isn’t who should own Space but rather, are we capable of not screwing it up the way we’ve screwed up so much down here on Earth. Perhaps Space shouldn’t be owned but managed more thoughtfully and fairly. Perhaps even in ways that we’ve rarely demonstrated as a species. Whether we can pull that off remains to be seen. But one thing’s certain and that is, if we don’t figure out a practical approach to Space governance before the proverbial ‘gold rush’ really begins, we’ll end up with the same power dynamics in Space that we already have here on the Earth.