Res Luna
Project Contributors: Open Lunar, SGAC Eagle Team & Moon Dialogs Res Luna was a legal working group to discuss and offer support to the international debate on space resource governance.
Open Lunar Impact
Res Luna was a legal working group to discuss and offer support to the international debate on space resource governance.
About the Project
In partnership with SGAC and the Moon Dialogs, Open Lunar led a research initiative throughout 2021 to gather and analyze resource governance approaches from Earth systems and draw insights about their applicability to lunar resource systems. This was completed in early 2022 and the results have been presented at numerous venues including the IASC Space Commons conference,the Ostrom Workshop space working group, and informed recommendations presented to the United Nations.
About the Need
With emerging space capabilities and commercial ingenuity, the accessibility and potential use of space has become increasingly interesting to state and non-state actors. Accordingly, in recent years, legislators started to regulate space activities under their national jurisdiction to facilitate economic opportunities and enforce international obligations.
About the Solution
Res Luna developed a structured characterization of different governance arrangements that could be applied to lunar resources.The foundational elements consist of allocating a set of more or less restricted property and decision-making rights to natural or legal individuals (privatization), groups of peoples (commoning), federal agencies (nationalization), or the international community (global commons).
Res Luna Report