Citizens of the Moon: Law, Identity, and the Politics of Space

Some frontiers arrive with flags, others arrive with paperwork.

The Moon, it turns out, may be the latter. 

© Drawn by the Moon by NASA Images

For years, the future of space governance was framed in imaginative terms, evoking colonies, explorers, and “aliens” from distant worlds. After all, men have not revisited the Moon since 1972. Yet the modern space age has a way of making fiction look premature. [Today, rocket launches are no longer rare events, private companies are planning lunar mining operations, governments are preparing long-term missions to the Moon, and thousands of satellites now crowd Earth’s orbit. 

With all of that in mind, permanent human habitation beyond Earth no longer seems like an idea reserved for the overly optimistic. Instead, it increasingly appears to be a logistical and legal reality in the making.

At first glance, the overlap between migration law and space law seems obvious. If humans eventually settle the Moon, would they remain citizens of Earth-based nations? Or would they be granted lunar citizenships? Would future migration and border control systems extend beyond Earth as well? 

These are the questions that initially caught my eye. However, the more pressing issues, as space law experts stress, are less glamorous and far more immediate: namely, how one goes about establishing jurisdiction, regulating resource extraction, addressing environmental interference, assigning liability, and structuring governance in a place that no nation can legally own. That is where the Moon stops being a distant dream and starts becoming a legal problem. 

New Moon, Old Law

The renewed global focus on the Moon marks a clear shift in the history of space exploration. During the Cold War, lunar missions were mostly symbolic performances of national prestige. Apollo was not just about science but also about showing who got there first, making the Moon merely a stage of international competition. The contemporary return to the Moon is different, according to Christopher Johnson from the International Institute of Air and Space Law (IIASL), whose interview helped shape this article, since the modern lunar race reflects a convergence of scientific, political, and business interests. 

NASA’s Artemis program, formally announced in 2019, signaled that the Moon is no longer just a destination for flags and footprints but now also a site for potential long-term habitation and commercial participation.

This represents a significant legal shift, since the old space age was largely built around spacecraft traveling through space, while the new one is increasingly focused on people staying put, or at least staying longer. This means that the Moon is no longer just a place one passes through on the way to somewhere else but is rather becoming a place where humans may work, build, extract resources, and perhaps one day even live for extended periods. And the moment humans begin to do so, the question of law becomes unavoidable.

Lunar Loopholes: Outer Space Treaty

The backbone of space law remains the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, whose major principles are familiar. The exploration and use of outer space is the province of all mankind; no state may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, and states bear international responsibility for all of their national activities in space. This is an elegant, broad language, very much the kind that looks stable until real-life challenges arrive. For a long time, it worked well enough because human activity in space remained limited, with satellites orbiting, astronauts visiting, and stations in place, as permanent habitation and large-scale resource extraction were not yet serious realities.

The Moon has ended that comfort of relative simplicity. Johnson described the likely emergence of a special branch of space law, called ‘moon law’, which would be distinct from traditional space law. He noted that the same treaty applies to low Earth orbit, Mars, asteroids, and the Moon, even though these environments are not remotely the same. 

The real doctrinal tension is salient: Article II of the Outer Space Treaty prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies, so no state can legally own lunar territory, but long-term habitation requires local resources. Humans cannot survive on the Moon by arriving empty-handed and hoping for the best, as water, shelter, materials, and energy all have to come from somewhere. As Johnson put it, you cannot bring all the water you need from Earth; you have to use what the Moon has.

That is where the central contradictions come in: no ownership but necessary use, no sovereignty but practical control, and no annexation but a need to operate, build, and survive. Simply put, space law is being asked to preserve non-appropriation while still making activity legally possible. In practice, this means that the greatest legal conflicts on the Moon may come from the ordinary mechanics of coexistence.

One Small Step for Man, One Giant Dust Cloud for Everyone Else

Public debates about space conflicts often sound like bad science fiction. In reality, these processes are a lot less cinematic and much more annoying. 

As one of the biggest gaps in lunar governance Johnson identified interferences. Lunar operations produce very earthly problems in a very unearthly place. A landing or takeoff can kick up dust that can damage nearby infrastructure, cover solar panels, disturb scientific instruments, and overlap communications frequencies. All these instances may not sound dramatic at first, but they can become critical factors in a mission’s success. 

In other words, the Moon is not a hostile environment because it is mysterious, but because it is inconvenient.

The Outer Space Treaty does contain obligations to avoid harmful interference and to act with due regard for others, but these standards are vague, and vagueness is a poor substitute for operational rules. It merely encourages general space savoir-vivre without specifying concrete requirements, leaving unresolved whether states should notify each other before landing, designate operational zones, or prioritise transparency over coordination. 

These operational problems also reveal that space law is no longer dealing only with technology, but also with people, status, and belonging. 

Strangers on Earth, Strangers in Space

The overlap between migration law and space law becomes especially interesting when the word “alien” enters the discussion. In many legal systems, especially in common law systems, “alien” remains a formal legal term for non-citizens. That term is old and technical, and it carries far more baggage than its defenders usually admit. 

On paper, the term simply means a foreign national, but in practice, it has long been entangled with exclusion, suspicion, and otherness, leading immigration scholars for years to argue that terminology is never neutral. 

In her book Impossible Subjects, Mae Ngai examines how an immigrant is transformed into an alien and how restrictive immigration laws produced new categories of racial difference. She pointed out that, especially in the United States, illegality is closely linked to race, making it not only a breach of the positive law but also a racial construction born out of a perception in the eyes of a nation.

That is why the word feels so awkward in the context of space, and as humanity prepares for the legal possibility of living beyond Earth, maybe it is time to revisit these terms. By still using the same vocabulary to describe migrants on Earth, we create a strange circularity where Earth’s outsiders are called “aliens” while space itself remains the place where actual “aliens” are imagined to live. 

The Moon does not need a better vocabulary as urgently as it needs workable rules, yet the symbolism matters. Language reveals what the law considers normal and what it considers foreign. In that sense, migration law and space law are two sides of the same coin: both focus on belonging and define it through territory. 

The deeper irony is that lunar settlement may eventually force legal systems to rethink the basic link between place and identity. If people live on the Moon for decades, raise children there, and work under Earth-based legal systems, the question arises as to what exactly nationality means and who, precisely, counts as an outsider. And once identity and belonging enter the equation, economics is never far behind.

Money Has Entered Orbit

If the doctrinal issue is ownership, then the economic issue is uncertainty, and that may be where lunar law becomes truly unavoidable. 

The Moon is increasingly viewed as a site of economic opportunity, with water ice near the poles confirmed as potentially convertible into fuel, lunar materials can support construction and manufacturing, and commercial space companies are already part of government lunar programs. The Moon is no longer just a scientific project but rather an asset class in waiting.

Long-term habitation requires resource use, and there is no way around that, yet resource use runs directly into the anti-appropriation principle. To address that, the legal system must find a way to enable economic activity without turning the Moon into a new form of territorial conquest. 

That is where legal imagination becomes useful, for not every legal problem is solved by more laws. Sometimes it is solved by new legal fictions, and the law has always relied on constructs like corporations, jurisdiction, and sovereignty that exist because everyone agrees to treat them as real.

The Moon may require something similar, with future systems relying on licensing, temporary operational zones, usage rights, or other arrangements that preserve the principle that no state owns the Moon while still enabling investment. 

However, that would not be a perfect solution because the law rarely offers perfection, but rather workable contradictions. If companies are expected to spend billions on lunar infrastructure, they will want to know what they can use, what they can protect, and what happens when someone else lands nearby and starts kicking dust over everything. Additionally, as we know from public international law, rules are often difficult to enforce without institutions capable of interpreting, applying, and upholding them.

No Court, No Problem?

One of the more striking gaps in current governance is the absence of a dedicated space court, for at present, disputes in space usually fall back on diplomacy, arbitration, or broader international law mechanisms. Johnson suggested that specialized space courts are likely to emerge in the coming decades, not necessarily to create a whole new legal universe but rather to apply familiar principles, such as treaty interpretation, liability, procedure, and evidence, to a domain that increasingly needs its own institutional home. 

That prediction is not far-fetched because international law has a habit of becoming more specialized as the stakes increase, just as maritime law did not remain a loose set of customs forever, and trade law did not stay abstract once commerce became global, so space law may be heading in the same direction, only with less ocean and more vacuum. 

This does not mean that a space court would solve every problem, because it would not, but it would signal that the Moon is no longer merely theoretical; once disputes are serious enough to require dedicated institutions, the frontier has already changed shape. Still, beneath all the procedural questions lies an even more fundamental one: whether humanity should think of the Moon as property at all. 

Lunar Colonialism

Perhaps the most philosophically interesting part of the whole discussion is Johnson’s rejection of the idea that the Moon is humanity’s property, since the Moon, he suggested, does not belong to humankind because we do not own nature; we are part of it. That sounds rather simple, but in the age of capitalism, with its need for profit and ownership, it sometimes gets lost. 

This idea runs counter to centuries of legal and political thought built around land, borders, ownership, and control, for Earth’s legal order was shaped by territory, whereas the Moon refuses to cooperate with that design. Territorial annexation is forbidden; that much is clear, but survival on the Moon still requires interaction with the Moon’s resources. 

This is where space law brushes up against environmental ethics and, oddly enough, migration law again. Migration law asks who belongs within a territory, while space law is beginning to ask whether territory itself should remain the central unit of political thought, which is a much larger question than citizenship. 

The Moon may never be governed like Earth and may never need to be, but it will certainly need rules, and those rules will say a great deal about whether humanity can imagine order without possession. Perhaps that is why the idea of future lunar citizens remains so compelling: it forces the law to confront questions it has never fully answered on Earth either.

Citizens We Do Not Yet Have

The idea of “citizens of the Moon” remains speculative, not impossible forever perhaps, but far from the immediate horizon. 

Still, the question refuses to go away because it exposes the pressure points in both migration law and space law, for both fields are about sorting people, about access, status, and exclusion, and both depend on legal categories that assume stable territory while now being asked to think beyond the planet that created them.

Space law is not simply about rockets anymore; it is about governance in a place where no one may own the ground, yet everyone may need to use it, and migration law is not only about border crossings, but is about how law names outsiders and decides who belongs. Put together, they suggest a future in which the law must operate without its old assumptions about territory, ownership, and exclusion, which is both a challenging and irresistible prospect for lawyers. 

The Moon may never have citizens in the ordinary sense, but it will almost certainly have rules, and the shape of those rules may tell us more about the course of humanity than the Moon itself ever will.