I'm Tom Batchel with my good colleague, David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show.

We're very pleased to be speaking to a space lawyer, space property lawyer, space lawyer to do with the future which is already here.

This is Laura Montgomery of Ground-based Space space matters. Laura, we have right now an

example to look at for how adverse possession works. Blue fireflies, aerospace, blue ghost,

they've twice landed on the surface of the moon. Each time there have been different anomalies, but in any event, they're acknowledged

as having successfully landed there.

And for the second event, they did send back metrics that were useful.

It sits there forever unless it's moved.

I'm using that example as opposed to a NASA version or a Ros Cosmos version because

those are state enterprises. Firefly, it did experiments. It's on the surface of the moon. Is it

in possession of Firefly? Do they own that artifact? And does that artifact lay claim to property on either side of it or to the

mineral rights underneath? What is its, what is its authority? Well, I, so let's think of

property rights in three ways. There's ownership of objects, ownership of extracted resources, like if you're

mining something, and then ownership in land. It is not controversial that they own their object.

They put it there, they made it, it's theirs. No one else gets to go and take it from them.

It is way less controversial that if someone went up to do some mining, you know, there's

a number of countries that recognize entities' rights in extracted resources, meaning that

if someone goes in mines water ice, the United States and the UAE and Luxembourg and a few others will

recognize that your ownership in what you took out of the ground. So those are the first two.

Those are the totally not controversial, not as controversial. And then the third one of land

is more controversial because we just haven't worked this out yet.

And there are those who read the outer space treaty to prohibit it. I don't. So here you have Firefly sitting on the surface of the moon.

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