Billionaires are making regular trips to space for a reason: they want to harness the potential economic payoff. We need to come up with a framework for property rights in space that will benefit all of humanity, not just the super rich, argues Rebecca Lowe. Under her proposal - inspired by philosopher John Locke - people could earn the right for the exclusive use of plots of moon land, as long as this advances certain moral aims.

Revisiting the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that bans any appropriation of planetary or lunar land might be worth doing, writes Tony Milligan. But using John Locke’s 17^th century framework is not the way to think about property rights in space. The Solar System is a very different place from Earth, and a whole new type of economy would need to be invented for it.

In two separate articles, Rebecca Lowe and Tony Milligan put forward their arguments on how we should think about property rights in space.

Rebecca Lowe

Privatising the moon’ is a meme, or at least a caricature. It’s used to emphasise the unrelenting greed of capitalists: ‘They’d sell off the moon if they could!’. Cowboys on Earth. Cowboys in space. And fair enough, rocket-man billionaires are rarely out of the news these days.

Nonetheless, these billionaires give us good reasons to think hard about property rights in space. Firstly, it’s not enough just to state that doing something — even as outlandish sounding as privatising the moon — is wrong. You need to be able to explain why. What if humankind needed to escape Earth? Would it be fundamentally impermissible to try to inhabit the moon, in such a situation? We’d struggle without any recourse to private property.

Beyond that, it’d be nice to think that these billionaires are spending their money on rocketships solely for the intrinsic value of knowing more about our universe. But presumably a large part of them taking on the serious financial and reputational costs of space exploration is a massive potential payoff. And that payoff is something that could be harnessed for the good of all humankind.

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The more you think about it, the clearer it seems that a morally-justified system for assigning and governing property rights in space could present vast benefits.

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