Law and Moon Crater Naming

January 29, 2010 at 4:19 pm | Posted in Space Law | Leave a comment

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

From the Times of India:

No SRK crater on moon!
JAISON LEWIS , 28 January 2010, 12:00am IST
News that Shah Rukh Khan has had a lunar crater named after him, Shah Rukh Khan Arago B, has turned out to be just a bit of moon shine and

It has emerged that a UN Outer Space Treaty explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the moon or a planet, since they are the common heritage of mankind. However, an enterprising American entrepreneur from Nevada, Dennis Hope, claimed to have found a loophole in the treaty and has sold everything from real estate to crater names to millions of people around the globe. His company, the Lunar Geographical Society, was started in 1980 and he is the self-proclaimed head of the Lunar Embassy. In the last 20 Years Hope has made around nine million dollars.

Hope lets users claim their stake over craters by using his his web site http://www.fullmoonatlas.com to track named and unnamed craters. People pay the price for the crater and then receive a certificate and a picture of the crater they buy. The Shah Rukh Khan crater is allegedly located in the Southern Mare Tranquillitatis (3.4 ° N 20.8 ° E), its diameter is 7.0 kilometres with a depth of 140 metres and has no record of who the buyer is.

According to a report in the National Geographic, Tanja Masson-Zwaan, president of the International Institute of Space Law, based in the Netherlands dismissed Hope’s business tactic saying, “The trouble is that, legally, nobody can own the moon or anything else in space, for that matter.” . . . [Full Story]