The Outer Space Treaty and Who Owns Asteroid Resources

Can anyone own an asteroid? No. Can a company own the water or metal it pulls out of one? Several governments now say yes, and the rest of the world has not agreed. If Frontier or anyone else is going to prospect an asteroid, this is the legal ground they stand on.

The treaty everyone starts from

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is the foundation of space law, with more than a hundred states party to it, including every nation that has ever launched anything. Two of its articles matter here.

Article II says 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." No flag, no border, no title deed.

Article VI says states are internationally responsible for the activities of their nationals in space, including companies, and must authorise and continuously supervise them. That is why every space company needs a licence from its home government, and why the home government is on the hook if something goes wrong.

What the treaty does not say is whether extracting a resource from a celestial body counts as appropriating the body. It was written in 1967, when nobody expected private asteroid mining, and the silence is where the argument lives.

The 1979 attempt to close the gap

The Moon Agreement of 1979 tried to answer the question directly. It declares the Moon and its natural resources "the common heritage of mankind" and commits parties to set up an international regime to govern exploitation once it becomes feasible. It has 17 parties as of 2024. The United States, Russia and China never ratified it, and neither did any country with a serious launch capability. For practical purposes it does not govern anyone who could actually mine anything.

The national laws: six countries say "finders keepers"

Starting in 2015, individual governments began passing laws that let their own companies own what they extract. The reasoning in each case is the same: Article II bans national appropriation of territory, so a private company taking a resource from an asteroid, without claiming the asteroid itself, is no different from a fishing boat taking fish from the high seas.

United States (2015). The Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act added a section to US law, 51 U.S.C. § 51303, stating that a US citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid or space resource "shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell" it, "in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States." The same act disavows any claim of sovereignty over a celestial body.

Luxembourg (2017). The law of 20 July 2017 made Luxembourg the first European country with such a framework. Its first article is blunt: space resources are capable of being appropriated. Companies need government authorisation and supervision, and the law was written explicitly to attract asteroid-mining firms to register there.

United Arab Emirates (2019). Federal Law No. 12 of 2019 on the regulation of the space sector covers space resources, defined as any non-living resources in outer space including minerals and water, and a 2023 Cabinet resolution set out the permit regime for exploring and using them.

Japan (2021). The Space Resources Act took effect in December 2021, as summarised by the US Library of Congress: a company needs a permit tied to its launch licence, and a permitted operator owns what it extracts under the approved plan. In November 2022 the lunar company ispace received the first licence under the act.

Brazil (2024) and Italy (2025) have since passed similar measures, according to a summary by the International Bar Association, bringing the count to six.

None of these laws claims to own an asteroid. All of them assert that their companies may own what comes off one. Whether that reading of Article II is correct is contested, and the counter-view, held by a number of legal scholars and historically by Russia, is that you cannot grant your citizens rights over something your state does not have the authority to grant.

The Artemis Accords: the US position goes multilateral

In 2020 NASA launched the Artemis Accords, a set of non-binding principles for countries joining its lunar programme. Section 10 states that extracting space resources "does not inherently constitute national appropriation" under Article II, and that it should be done in a way consistent with the Outer Space Treaty. It also introduces "safety zones" around operations, a concept not found in any treaty.

The Accords have grown fast. NASA reported in late September 2026 that they had reached 76 signatories, with 17 countries joining in 2026 alone. Russia and China have not signed and are pursuing their own lunar station partnership. The Accords are a political statement of how a large group of countries intends to read the treaty, not a treaty themselves.

The UN is still writing the rules

The place where the whole world, including China and Russia, discusses this is the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Its Legal Subcommittee set up a Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities with a five-year plan to produce a set of recommended principles by 2027. A consolidated draft was circulated in September 2026 and is still being negotiated, with the text split into points of general agreement and points still in dispute. The principles will be non-binding. Even so, they are the closest thing to a global answer that exists, and the next 18 months will shape them.

Where New Zealand stands

This matters to Frontier because Frontier is based in New Zealand. New Zealand signed the Artemis Accords in June 2021, after initially declining to sign in 2020 because officials were uneasy about the resource and safety-zone principles being set outside a multilateral process. When it did sign, the foreign minister described existing international law as giving only high-level rules on resource use and called the Accords a first step toward the additional standards needed for long-term sustainability.

In practice, New Zealand's position has three parts. It is an Artemis signatory. It has said at the UN that it supports the Working Group's multilateral process and sees the Accords as complementary to it. And its domestic law, the Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Act 2017, regulates launches and payloads from New Zealand and by New Zealand nationals overseas but does not contain a resource-ownership provision like those in the US or Luxembourg. A New Zealand company that extracted material from an asteroid would need a payload permit, and the question of what it owned afterwards would be answered by the international framework, not by a domestic statute.

What this means for a prospecting mission

For a mission like the one Frontier is studying, the law is actually simpler than the headlines suggest, because prospecting does not extract anything. Flying to an asteroid, measuring it, and publishing the data is the kind of activity the Outer Space Treaty was written to encourage: Article I calls for free access to all areas of celestial bodies and for scientific investigation. The permits needed are a launch licence from the launching state and a payload permit from the operator's home state.

The hard questions arrive at the extraction stage, and they are worth stating honestly:

• A company registered in the US, Luxembourg, the UAE or Japan has domestic legal title to what it extracts. A company registered elsewhere, including New Zealand, currently does not.
• No country's domestic title binds any other country. A dispute between a Luxembourg miner and a Chinese one over the same asteroid has no court to go to.
• The UN principles due in 2027 may add shared expectations about notification, safety zones and avoiding harmful interference, which would reduce the chance of such disputes without resolving the ownership question.

Frontier's approach is to do the work in the open. Prospecting data published freely is useful under any legal regime, and a project that has named every contributor and shown every receipt is a better-placed applicant for whatever permits the 2030s require.

Frequently asked questions

Can I buy an asteroid? No. Companies that sell "deeds" to celestial bodies are selling paper. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty prevents states from claiming them, and states cannot pass on a title they do not hold.

Is asteroid mining legal? Prospecting is clearly legal under the treaty. Extraction and ownership are legal under the domestic laws of six countries and unsettled internationally.

Will the UN ban space mining? There is no sign of that. The Working Group's draft principles aim to set conditions for resource activities, not prohibit them.

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