Who Owns the Moon’s Water? The Coming Legal War Over Lunar Resource Extraction Rights

Key Takeaways

• No binding international framework governs who can extract or own lunar resources
• The Artemis Accords, signed by 61 nations, conflict directly with China and Russia’s rival vision
• Water ice at the lunar south pole is the resource that will trigger the first real territorial disputes

The Real Prize at the Poles

The Moon is not short of interesting materials. It has uranium, potassium, phosphorus, platinum-group metals, and helium-3, an isotope of helium so rare on Earth that it exists there in meaningful quantities only as a byproduct of tritium decay in nuclear weapons programs. Helium-3 can theoretically serve as fuel for nuclear fusion reactions that would produce far less radioactive waste than conventional fission power. Seattle-based startup Interlune, working with Iowa industrial manufacturer Vermeer, has been developing an electric lunar excavator designed to extract helium-3, with a prototype capable of processing up to 100 metric tons of lunar soil per hour. The company has announced plans for a 2027 mission to confirm helium-3 concentrations before deploying a pilot plant in 2029.

But helium-3 is a long-range bet. The resource that actually determines whether sustained human activity on the Moon becomes economically viable in the near term is far more mundane: water ice. Vast deposits of frozen water are believed to exist in permanently shadowed regions near the lunar south and north poles, craters so deep that sunlight has never reached their floors in billions of years. Water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which are the constituents of the highest-performance chemical rocket propellant. A functioning extraction and processing operation at the lunar south pole would transform the Moon from a destination requiring Earth-supplied fuel into a refueling node for the inner solar system. The economics of deep-space exploration change fundamentally if propellant can be sourced locally rather than launched from Earth’s gravity well.

This is why NASA‘s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program has sent multiple missions specifically targeting the south pole, and why both the Artemis program and China’s lunar ambitions are focused on the same narrow strip of terrain. Intuitive Machines landed its IM-2 mission at Mons Mouton near the lunar south pole in March 2025, carrying NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 suite, a drill and mass spectrometer designed to search for volatiles in the subsurface. The lander came down on its side about 820 feet from the intended landing site, limiting data return, but the mission collected 250 megabytes of data before operations ended. A fifth CLPS task order awarded to Intuitive Machines in March 2026, worth $180.4 million, will target Mons Malapert, a ridge near the south pole offering continuous Earth visibility and access to permanently shadowed regions.

The south pole is not a large place. The permanently shadowed regions that may contain substantial water ice are concentrated in specific craters, and the physical footprint of the most resource-rich sites is constrained. Multiple nations and companies targeting the same small area, under legal frameworks that don’t agree with each other about who has the right to extract what, is not a hypothetical future problem. It is the shape of the next decade.

A Legal Foundation Built for a Different World

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 was negotiated between the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, when space activity was exclusively governmental and the idea of a commercial company landing on the Moon and drilling for water ice would have seemed like science fiction. Article II of the treaty states that outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means. The treaty contains no provision for commercial resource extraction. It was written to prevent a repeat of the colonial territorial seizures of the 19th century, not to regulate mining royalties in the 21st.

Article VI of the same treaty holds that states bear “international responsibility” for the activities of their national entities, governmental and non-governmental, in outer space. This provision was the legal basis on which the U.S. Congress built the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act’s extraction rights provisions: if states are responsible for what their nationals do in space, states can also authorize what their nationals do in space, including extracting and owning resources. Whether this chain of logic holds under rigorous international legal scrutiny is genuinely contested. Scholars affiliated with the University of Nebraska’s space law program, among others, have argued that it is a reasonable interpretation. Scholars at institutions in countries that rejected the 2015 Act’s framing have argued the opposite with equal vigor.

The 1979 Moon Agreement, which attempted to extend the Outer Space Treaty’s framework by formally designating lunar resources as the “common heritage of mankind” and requiring an international regime for any exploitation, received only 18 ratifications and none from any significant spacefaring power. The United States, the Soviet Union, China, and every other nation with the capability to reach the Moon declined to ratify it. The “common heritage” concept, which would have required sharing the proceeds of lunar extraction with the international community on terms negotiated through a multilateral body, was specifically rejected by industrialized countries that considered it incompatible with commercial development.

The legal vacuum created by this rejection has been filled through a patchwork of national legislation and bilateral arrangements. The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 granted American citizens the right to own, transport, use, and sell resources extracted from asteroids or the Moon, while explicitly stating that this right does not constitute a claim of sovereignty over the celestial body itself. Luxembourg enacted similar legislation in 2017. The United Arab Emirates followed in 2019. Japan in 2021. Brazil in 2024. Italy passed its own law on June 11, 2025. Six nations have now enacted domestic legislation permitting space resource extraction under their own legal frameworks. These laws share the position that the Outer Space Treaty prohibits territorial appropriation but not the extraction of resources. They do not share consistent implementation frameworks, licensing regimes, or environmental standards.

The Artemis Accords, first signed in October 2020 by eight nations and expanded to 61 signatories as of January 2026 with the accession of Oman, attempt to build a coordinating framework among like-minded states. Section 10 of the Accords states that the extraction and utilization of space resources does not constitute national appropriation under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, effectively endorsing the U.S. legal interpretation. The Accords also establish principles for “safety zones” around operations to prevent harmful interference between competing activities.

Neither China nor Russia has signed the Accords. Both have characterized the safety zone concept as a mechanism for American operators to claim de facto territorial exclusion zones around the most valuable resource sites. Chinese state media has compared the Accords to European colonial land enclosure. Russia has called them a “blatant attempt to create international space law that favors the United States.” These characterizations are not simply diplomatic boilerplate. They reflect a substantive disagreement about whether the Artemis Accords’ interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty is legally valid, and the answer to that question will determine who can extract what from the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions without triggering a confrontation.

The ispace Question

The most concrete near-term test of how lunar resource ownership works in practice has been provided by Japanese company ispace. In 2020, ispace signed a contract with NASA under which the company would land on the Moon, collect a small sample of lunar regolith, and transfer ownership of that sample to NASA in exchange for payment. The contract price was $5,000, a nominal sum designed primarily to establish the legal principle that a commercial company can extract a lunar resource and sell it to a government customer. The sample was never to be returned to Earth; NASA simply wanted title to it on the surface.

The ispace contract was obtained under a license granted by the Japanese government, which has enacted its own space resource extraction legislation. It represents the first commercial transaction in which a private company held legal title, however briefly, to a material extracted from another celestial body. The mission failed to achieve a successful landing, meaning the commercial precedent remains demonstrative rather than practical. But the legal architecture it tested has been noted by every government and company developing lunar resource extraction plans.

The RESILIENCE lander, ispace’s second attempt, also failed to achieve a successful landing in 2025. The company has maintained transparency about what went wrong in both missions, publishing detailed findings within weeks of each failure. The failures don’t undermine the legal model, but they illustrate how far the industry remains from the operational reliability that would make commercial lunar resource extraction economically significant.

Firefly Aerospace‘s Blue Ghost lander, built in Cedar Park, Texas, successfully landed on the Moon in March 2025 and delivered ten NASA payloads to Mare Crisium. The mission, operated under a CLPS contract, demonstrated that commercial operators can execute precision lunar landings reliably enough to build a business around them. Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 is planned for launch in 2026, targeting the lunar far side. Australia’s national space agency is contributing a rover to Intuitive Machines’ IM-5 mission, expected to launch in 2027, specifically to demonstrate the country’s lunar resource extraction expertise.

Water, Property Rights, and the Problem of Exclusion

Water ice at the lunar south pole is a shared resource in a physical sense that makes the legal questions harder than most terrestrial resource analogies suggest. Groundwater, oil reservoirs, fisheries, and other shared subsurface or fugitive resources on Earth are managed through property rights frameworks that assign extraction entitlements to specific parties and limit total extraction through licensing and quota systems. These frameworks exist within the jurisdiction of sovereign states. The Moon has no sovereign. No government has legal authority to grant a mining license that any other government is obligated to respect.

The question of exclusion is where the conflict becomes concrete. If an American company establishes a water ice extraction operation in a permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole, and a Chinese state program subsequently establishes a facility in the same crater, what happens? Under the Artemis Accords framework, the American operator could invoke safety zone provisions to request that the Chinese program maintain a specified buffer distance. Under the Outer Space Treaty’s explicit prohibition on national appropriation and its principle of freedom of access to all parts of celestial bodies, China could argue that any exclusion zone constitutes exactly the kind of appropriation the treaty forbids.

The safety zone concept in the Artemis Accords attempts to split this difference by framing exclusion not as territorial sovereignty but as operational safety, a buffer maintained to prevent the physical operations of one party from interfering with those of another. This framing might work where the parties agree to the framework. When one party has explicitly rejected the framework and considers the safety zone concept itself to be an appropriation mechanism, the framing doesn’t hold. The distance between a safety zone and a territorial claim is as wide or as narrow as the parties decide to treat it, and China has already announced which side of that line it intends to stand on.

This scenario is not hypothetical in the sense of requiring implausible conditions. China has announced an intention to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030 and to establish a permanent International Lunar Research Station in partnership with Russia and other countries by 2035. The United States Artemis program is working toward crewed lunar landings at the south pole region. Both programs are targeting the same terrain for similar resource and operational reasons. The window during which this conflict remains theoretical is measured in years, not decades, and the decision about whether to build a governance framework before that window closes or to rely on ad hoc diplomacy after physical confrontation occurs is being made right now, implicitly, through the absence of any serious multilateral negotiation process that includes both the Artemis coalition and China.

The UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space established a Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities with a mandate to develop guiding principles for space resource extraction. In May 2025, the working group’s chair, Steven Freeland, presented a draft of recommended principles based on member state input. The draft was non-binding, and the working group faces the same challenge as every UN-led space governance effort: the countries with the most at stake in the outcome hold incompatible positions on what the principles should say. A binding international regime for lunar resource extraction that would satisfy both the Artemis Accords signatories and China’s position on space governance has not been achieved, and there is no realistic process through which one appears imminent.

The South Pole Terrain Problem

The permanently shadowed regions near the lunar south pole are not evenly distributed across a large area. They’re concentrated in a geographically constrained zone where the combination of near-constant sunlight for solar power on nearby ridges and access to the shadowed ice deposits creates what planetary scientists call the best real estate on the Moon. Shackleton Crater, with its permanently shadowed interior and sunlit rim, is the most discussed single location. Mons Malapert, which Intuitive Machines’ IM-5 is targeting, offers similar advantages.

Multiple nations and multiple commercial programs are already identifying overlapping priority sites. DARPA’s 10-Year Lunar Architecture study, launched in 2023, has examined the development of “shareable, scalable systems that interoperate” in order to support sustained presence on the Moon, implicitly acknowledging that the most valuable sites will have multiple occupants. The physical reality is that the permanently shadowed regions cover perhaps two to three percent of the lunar surface, with the most resource-rich deposits confined to even smaller areas within those regions.

The geography creates a first-mover dynamic that has no precedent in space governance. On Earth, a nation that establishes a continuous, functional presence in a contested territory and maintains that presence over time accrues practical, if not always legal, advantages that shape subsequent negotiation outcomes. The Moon’s resource sites are smaller, more isolated, more difficult to reach, and more technically demanding to operate in than any comparable terrestrial context. But the dynamic is similar: whoever arrives first with equipment capable of sustained extraction operations is in a position to present competitors with physical facts that are harder to contest than legal arguments.

The analogy that some legal scholars have proposed is to Antarctica, which is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System that suspends territorial claims and prohibits resource extraction for commercial purposes. Antarctica’s treaty was achievable partly because the resource extraction technology to make commercial Antarctic mining viable didn’t exist when the treaty was negotiated, reducing the economic stakes for the parties involved. The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1991, prohibits commercial mineral resource activities for at least 50 years. No equivalent prohibition exists for the Moon, and the commercial case for lunar water ice extraction is sufficiently developed that banning it would require overriding billions of dollars in existing investment and government program commitments.

China’s Alternative Framework

China’s vision for lunar governance is not simply an objection to the Artemis Accords. It rests on a substantive alternative framework built around the principle that space resources are the common heritage of mankind, the same language the 1979 Moon Agreement used and that the United States explicitly rejected. Beijing has proposed “shared multi-polar governance” in which major space powers have joint oversight of resource extraction activities and their proceeds are distributed through an international mechanism rather than accruing entirely to the extracting operator.

This position is not purely altruistic. China’s lunar program is state-funded and so not directly competing with American commercial operators in the same financial sense that SpaceX or Intuitive Machines are. A governance framework requiring international benefit-sharing would constrain American commercial actors more than it would constrain a state program that isn’t motivated by immediate commercial return. It would also give China a governance veto over activities at the most strategically valuable locations on the Moon, without China needing to be physically present at those locations first.

The China-Russia International Lunar Research Station project has secured commitments from several additional countries, primarily in the developing world, and is explicitly positioned as an alternative to the U.S.-led Artemis coalition. Russia’s role in the partnership has diminished as its space program has struggled following post-2022 sanctions and the isolation of Roscosmos from Western technology supply chains. But China’s independent lunar capability is genuine and growing. Chang’e-6 became the first mission in history to return samples from the Moon’s far side in 2024, a mission complexity that only China and the Apollo-era United States have demonstrated.

The Private Sector Is Already Investing

The legal debates might seem abstract if they weren’t accompanied by real money and real flight hardware. Companies are investing in lunar resource extraction on timelines that assume legal clarity that does not yet exist. Interlune has raised funding on the premise that helium-3 extraction can become a commercial enterprise by the early 2030s. Astrobotic Technology in Pittsburgh is developing the Griffin lander for larger payload deliveries to the lunar surface. Astrolab in California is developing a rover designed for surface analysis and potential resource prospecting at sites across the lunar surface.

The CLPS program’s $2.6 billion in total contract value through 2028, distributed across fixed-price contracts with American companies, represents a government-funded development pathway that accelerates private sector readiness for resource extraction operations. Every successful landing, every working drill, every dataset returned from a polar shadowed region builds the commercial case that lunar resource extraction is achievable on a timeline that investors can evaluate. NASA’s IM-5 contract with Intuitive Machines for $180.4 million, awarded in March 2026, specifically targets Mons Malapert for its access to permanently shadowed regions, the most direct NASA acknowledgment to date that the commercial infrastructure it’s building through CLPS is oriented toward eventual resource extraction as much as science.

The investment assumptions embedded in these commercial decisions are significant and worth examining closely. A company spending substantial capital on lunar landing infrastructure is implicitly betting that any resource it eventually extracts will be legally ownable, legally sellable, and protected from confiscation or forced sharing by an international body. That bet is currently made on the basis of U.S. domestic law, which grants extraction rights to American citizens, and the Artemis Accords, which provide non-binding multilateral endorsement among 61 signatory nations. Neither provides binding protection against a Chinese or Russian program that doesn’t recognize the same legal framework and physically occupies the same resource site.

The risk here is that commercial investment is proceeding on legal assumptions that the international system has not validated. If the U.S. domestic legal framework for space resource rights is eventually challenged by a broader international coalition demanding common heritage treatment of lunar resources, companies that have already invested in extraction infrastructure could find their assets subject to governance requirements they didn’t anticipate. The probability of this outcome is difficult to assess, but its potential magnitude makes it a material risk for any investor evaluating the lunar resource extraction sector with a sufficiently long time horizon.

Where It Goes From Here

The likeliest near-term path is fragmentation rather than resolution. The Artemis coalition will continue operating under the framework of the Accords and national legislation permitting resource extraction. China and Russia will continue developing capabilities under their alternative framework. The UN working group will continue drafting non-binding principles that neither coalition is prepared to accept as binding. The first serious confrontation will not be a legal dispute in an international court. It will be a physical situation in which two programs operating under incompatible legal frameworks find themselves in proximity to the same resource deposit.

There is a version of this where cooler heads and pragmatic negotiation produce a workable bilateral arrangement between the United States and China on south pole resource operations, something like the practical informal understandings that governed Antarctic research station placement before the Antarctic Treaty was formalized. Such an outcome would require both governments to accept that the legal framework question can be bracketed while operational coordination proceeds, a diplomatic accomplishment that is harder than it sounds when the two parties also disagree on Taiwan, technology export controls, and the basic architecture of international order.

The alternative, and perhaps the more probable one, is that the confrontation happens before the diplomacy does, and the legal framework for lunar resources gets determined by facts on the ground rather than negotiations in Geneva. The first extraction operation at a resource-rich south pole site may produce a legal crisis that no existing framework is adequate to resolve cleanly, setting precedents through occupation and assertion rather than through the deliberate multilateral process that the governance literature prescribes.

Whether that situation produces a negotiated accommodation, an escalating standoff, or a foundational precedent that effectively settles the legal question through physical priority will depend partly on the diplomatic relationships between the parties at the time and partly on which program arrives first with the most capable extraction infrastructure. The Moon doesn’t have a police force. What it has is physics, propellant margins, and whoever gets there first with equipment that can operate continuously through the lunar night.

The working group’s draft principles from May 2025 represent the international community’s best current attempt to build a common framework before that confrontation occurs. The draft was presented by chair Steven Freeland and reflects input from member states that hold incompatible positions on almost every substantive point, which is why the principles remain recommendations rather than rules and why the working group’s mandate explicitly excludes the drafting of binding treaty language. Researchers who have studied the history of commons governance, from fisheries to spectrum allocation to deep-sea mineral rights, know that these frameworks are far more achievable before a resource becomes commercially viable than after economic interests have crystallized around incompatible positions. The window for building a workable international regime for lunar resources may not extend much past the early 2030s. After that point, physical facts on the surface will increasingly determine legal facts in international forums.

Summary

The question of who owns the Moon’s water has no answer that all the relevant parties accept. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits territorial appropriation but says nothing coherent about resource extraction. The Artemis Accords endorse extraction rights for 61 signatories but are non-binding and explicitly rejected by the two countries most capable of competing at the lunar south pole. National legislation in six countries grants domestic extraction rights that no international body is obligated to enforce. The commercial companies investing in lunar resource infrastructure are betting on legal clarity that hasn’t arrived and may not arrive before the first operational confrontation makes it moot. China and Russia are developing alternative governance frameworks that would fundamentally restructure who benefits from whatever is found in those permanently shadowed craters.

The window for building a workable international regime, one negotiated before physical facts at south pole resource sites have crystallized into entrenched positions, is not infinite. Researchers who have studied the governance of shared commons across multiple domains and historical periods, from deep-sea mineral rights to radio spectrum allocation to Antarctic territorial claims, consistently find that frameworks built before exploitation begins are far more durable and equitable than those assembled after competing interests have committed capital and national prestige to incompatible positions. The Moon is now past the point where that window is comfortably open. It is not yet past the point where it is closed, though the gap is narrowing with every mission that successfully demonstrates a lunar landing near a permanently shadowed crater and every contract that puts commercial capital behind the assumption that extraction rights are real and defensible. The first extraction operation at a resource-rich south pole site may produce a legal crisis that no existing framework is adequate to resolve cleanly, setting precedents through occupation and assertion rather than through deliberate multilateral process. Preparedness for that outcome, rather than continued hope that a binding international regime will materialize in time, may be the more realistic and defensible disposition for any government or company that has carefully looked at the physics, the timelines, and the declared positions of the parties involved.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

Why is water ice at the lunar south pole so strategically important?

Water ice in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, the components of high-performance rocket propellant. A functioning extraction and processing operation would transform the Moon into a propellant depot for deep-space missions, dramatically reducing the cost and mass of lunar and interplanetary exploration. This economic logic is why both the U.S. Artemis program and China’s lunar plans prioritize south pole terrain.

What does the Outer Space Treaty say about lunar resource extraction?

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits national appropriation of the Moon and other celestial bodies by claim of sovereignty, use, or occupation, but it contains no specific language addressing the extraction and commercial use of resources. The prevailing legal interpretation, endorsed by the U.S. and Artemis Accords signatories, holds that extraction is not the same as appropriation. China and Russia reject this interpretation and favor treatment of lunar resources as the common heritage of mankind.

What are the Artemis Accords and who has signed them?

The Artemis Accords are a set of non-binding bilateral arrangements between the United States and other countries, first signed in October 2020 by eight nations and expanded to 61 signatories as of January 2026. They establish principles for space exploration including transparency, safety zones around operations, and explicit endorsement of commercial space resource extraction as consistent with the Outer Space Treaty. Neither China nor Russia has signed the Accords.

What national laws permit space resource extraction?

Six nations had enacted domestic legislation permitting space resource extraction as of mid-2025: the United States in 2015, Luxembourg in 2017, the United Arab Emirates in 2019, Japan in 2021, Brazil in 2024, and Italy in June 2025. These laws share the position that resource extraction does not violate the Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation clause, but they do not share consistent implementation frameworks or licensing regimes.

What was the ispace NASA contract and why was it significant?

In 2020, Japanese company ispace signed a contract with NASA under which it would collect a small sample of lunar regolith and transfer ownership to NASA for a nominal payment of $5,000. The contract was designed primarily to establish the legal principle that a commercial company can extract and sell lunar resources. The mission failed to achieve a successful landing, but the legal architecture it tested has informed subsequent commercial and government approaches to lunar resource ownership.

What is China’s alternative framework for lunar resource governance?

China advocates for treating lunar resources as the “common heritage of mankind” and supports establishing an international regime for resource extraction that would distribute proceeds through a multilateral mechanism. Beijing has characterized the Artemis Accords’ safety zone provisions as a mechanism for excluding other countries from valuable resource sites and has compared them to colonial land enclosure. China is developing its own lunar capabilities through the Chang’e program and is building the International Lunar Research Station with Russia and partner nations.

How close is China to crewed lunar landings?

China has announced an intention to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, with plans for robotic precursor missions and lunar base construction as part of the International Lunar Research Station project targeting establishment by 2035. Chang’e-6 returned samples from the Moon’s far side in 2024, demonstrating mission complexity second only to the Apollo program in lunar surface operations history.

What is the Intuitive Machines IM-5 mission and when does it launch?

NASA awarded Intuitive Machines a $180.4 million CLPS contract in March 2026 for the IM-5 mission, which will deliver seven science and technology payloads including an Australian Space Agency rover to Mons Malapert near the lunar south pole. The site offers continuous Earth visibility, stable solar illumination, and access to permanently shadowed regions believed to contain water ice deposits. IM-5 will use a larger Nova-D class lander than previous Intuitive Machines missions and is planned for 2027.

What is the UN doing about lunar resource governance?

The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space established a Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities with a mandate to develop guiding principles for the field. In May 2025, the working group chair presented a draft set of recommended principles based on member state input. These principles are non-binding, and the working group faces the fundamental challenge that the countries with the largest stakes hold incompatible positions that a voluntary consensus framework cannot resolve.

What happens if two countries’ programs claim the same resource site on the Moon?

No binding international framework exists to adjudicate competing claims to lunar resource sites. A physical confrontation between programs operating under the Artemis Accords framework and China’s alternative framework at the same location would have no established legal resolution mechanism. The outcome would likely depend on physical presence, political negotiation, and the diplomatic relationships between the parties at the time, setting a precedent that would effectively determine lunar resource law through occupation rather than treaty.