The property status of lunar resources

Abstract

Introduction - Water from the Moon: In 1993, Celine Dion released a song whose lyrics spoke of the seemingly impossible tasks of getting water from the moon in order to earn someone's love. As late as two decades ago, Earth's natural satellite was being viewed as the ultimate desert - a vast, lonely, forbidding type of existence or expanse of nothing and as a magnificent desolation, as described by its visitors Frank Borman and Buzz Aldrin (Chaikin 1994, pp. 121, 211). As years passed, the Moon turned, under the scrutinizing eyes of the scientists, from a presumed bone-dry desert into a watery treasure chest, capable of quenching the NewSpace entrepreneurs' thirst for rocket fuel. The idea of orbital depots supplied with water extracted from the Moon became feasible, and companies were born, such as the Shackleton Energy Company, with an eye on mining the ice-water-rich Lunar south pole (Wall 2011).