Face In the Sky: Is the Moon Going to Get Legal Personhood?

It must also be noted that legal personhood has already been given to many non-human entities, like rivers, deities, and corporations worldwide.

Representative image.

LAST UPDATED: AUGUST 28, 2020

It is no secret that moon missions are planned with full speed by different nations. Many countries are planning to return to the Moon. A minimum of 10 missions by six countries are being planned before the end of 2021.

According to a report published in Gizmodo, international treaties governing outer space are in place, but there is ambiguity about how individuals, nations and corporations can use lunar resources. The report goes on to mention that the moon is seen as an inert object with no value in its own right.



In April this year, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, signed an Executive Order on the use of “off-Earth resources”. With this move, he cleared his country’s stand on mining on the Moon and other celestial bodies. The stance is, “Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space”.

For the unversed, Lunar resources include helium-3 (a possible clean energy source), rare earth elements (used in electronics) and water ice. These lunar resources are usually located in shadowed craters at the poles, water ice could be used to make fuel for lunar industries and to take the next step on to Mars.

It must also be noted that legal personhood has already been given to many non-human entities, like rivers, deities, and corporations worldwide. The importance of such things is that they are a bank of meaning and memory. These also in some or the other way shape the human behaviour.

Similarly, the need for considering lunar objects too arises, particularly in two aspects: memory and agency. The major reason why experts want to study the Moon is to retrieve the memory of how it formed after separating from Earth billions of years ago.


This memory is encoded in geological features such as the craters and lava fields, among other things.