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Comment by cellshade | Hacker News Reader

Ownership of celestial bodies is covered by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which states that celestial bodies (such as Mars) are not subject to national appropriation and are the common heritage of all mankind.

Whether the treaty will mean anything in the future to come, however, is an open question, I guess.

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This is something that, with "luck", will come up in our lifetimes. I expect that if China lands robotic miners on the Moon and starts harvesting helium 3 and sends back canisters of it to China, or if someone figures out how to create permanent presence on the Moon without cooperation from other nation-states, it will bring that issue to the forefront.

It was also an interesting question for me with the asteroid mining startups. If you land on an asteroid and extract its platinum, can you keep it?

It's one thing to say that a celestial body is the common heritage of all mankind.

It's something else entirely to say that if you spend billions of dollars to pull platinum out of an asteroid you can't sell it for profit. I don't think the two things are necessarily mutually exclusive.

If they plan on selling the platinum they harvested they'd better plan on cutting dividend checks to every last person on earth.

Possession is nine tenths of the law?

I believe there is a loophole in this very treaty due to the fact that it only outlines these rules for nations as opposed to private entities.

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