Space resource rights
National laws that grant a company ownership of the resources it extracts from a celestial body, without claiming the body itself.
The Outer Space Treaty forbids a state from appropriating the Moon or an asteroid, but an investor will not fund a mining mission without knowing who will own what it brings back. Several countries have settled the point by statute: extraction confers ownership of the resource removed, not of the ground it came from, much as fishing on the high seas confers ownership of the fish but not of the ocean. The United States led, Luxembourg followed to attract the industry, then the United Arab Emirates and Japan. That reading is not universal, and part of the legal community considers it contrary to the spirit of the treaty. For insurance, it makes possible what was not before, title to an extraterrestrial cargo, but title recognized by some countries only, which makes it an asset whose value depends on a political border.
The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of November 25, 2015 recognized that ownership, and Luxembourg's law of July 20, 2017 did the same in Europe; on December 3, 2020, NASA signed contracts with four companies to buy lunar samples for between 1 and 15,000 dollars, to set the precedent of a sale.
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