Privately Owned Soviet Moon Rover Sparks Space Law Talks

March 22, 2010 at 1:48 pm | Posted in Space Law | Leave a comment

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

From Space.com:

Privately Owned Soviet Moon Rover Sparks Space Law Talks
By Leonard David
posted: 22 March 2010
11:47 am ET

New photographs of the former Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover on the moon, which is owned by an American millionaire, is causing a legal stir over who can own what on the lunar surface. . . .

. . . American entrepreneur Richard Garriott is a highly successful video game developer. He’s also a space aficionado and the son of scientist-astronaut Owen Garriott, who flew both a Skylab 3 mission in 1973 and onboard the STS-9 space shuttle mission on Columbia in 1983.

In 1993, Richard Garriott purchased both the Soviet Union’s Luna 21 lander and the Lunokhod 2 rover. The deal was struck during a Sotheby’s space auction in New York. . . .

. . . Furthermore, Garriott has had casual conversations with lawyers about international law and property rights on the moon.

In the real moon space law, possessing Lunokhod 2 is one thing. But is it anchored on a piece of lunar land to imply a level of ownership?

“I think I can truly make the only private, legitimate claim to territory – at the very least around my rover and, potentially, along its point of travel,” Garriott said, “to give me some actual property rights on the moon.”

Garriott added that his assertion is somewhat tongue in cheek.

“But it is interesting speculation…and I think that there’s already international framework to support that territorial claim,” he said. . . .

. . . .Enter space lawyer, Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz. She is Director of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law and Research Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi.

“The soundness of a property right depends in large part on the integrity of the documents that memorialize the right,” Gabrynowicz told SPACE.com via email. “This is why property buyers conduct title searches before buying property. They want to be sure that the title is good.”

Gabrynowicz said that without reading the papers or knowing how they were processed and by whom, she can’t speak to the validity of the ownership of a space object purchased at auction.

“However, a contention that buying a space object that landed on the lunar surface from a sovereign nation gives rise to a property right to the territory under it is wrong,” Gabrynowicz said.

Gabrynowicz said that States-Parties to the Outer Space Treaty of 1966 cannot acquire lunar territory by landing an object on the moon.

“The USSR was and Russia is a party to the Outer Space Treaty,” she added. “It did not acquire the territory under the object when it landed. One cannot sell what one does not own. Since USSR/Russia did not have a property right to the territory under the landed object, there was nothing to sell.” . . .[Full Story]