His name is Dennis Hope. He lives in Rio Vista, California. In 1980, having recently divorced his wife and worked his way through most of his savings, he was sitting in a car outside a shopping centre one afternoon when he looked up at the Moon and had the specific commercial thought that has now, four and a half decades later, made him unusually famous. What if he sold it?
Hope was not a lawyer. He was not an astronomer, an aerospace engineer, or a diplomat. He was, on his own account of that afternoon, a used-car salesman who had recently taken one introductory course in political science at a local community college. But he remembered, from the course, that there was a piece of international law called the Outer Space Treaty, which had been signed in 1967 by more than a hundred countries and which said something about nobody being allowed to own the Moon. He drove to the library. He requested the text of the treaty. And he read it carefully.
What he found in the second paragraph was, he thought, the loophole.
What the treaty actually says
According to the official text of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, maintained by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, Article II reads in full: “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.” That sentence is the operative one. It is short. It is very carefully written. It is also the reason no country on Earth has ever claimed the Moon, even though at least three of the treaty’s signatories have physically landed spacecraft on it.
What Hope noticed, reading the sentence in 1980, was that it forbids national appropriation. It says nothing at all about individuals. The word “nation” or “state” or “country” appears throughout the treaty. The word “individual” or “private citizen” appears nowhere. On Hope’s reading, the treaty forbade governments from claiming the Moon, and did not forbid anybody else.
On 22 November 1980, he drove to the office of the San Francisco County seat, filed a formal declaration of ownership for the entire lunar surface, along with the surface of every other planet in the solar system except Earth and every moon of every one of those planets, and had the declaration officially registered with the local United States government. He then mailed copies of the registered claim to the United Nations headquarters in New York and to the government of the Soviet Union, informing both bodies that unless they could produce a specific legal objection to his claim, he intended to begin subdividing and selling off the property.
Neither of them replied.
Hope took the silence, on his own subsequent account, as legal acquiescence. Six weeks later, he founded a business called Lunar Embassy and began selling one-acre lots on the Moon for $19.95 each, plus a small handling fee for the physical deed. He has been doing so ever since.
The business Hope built
The numbers, on Hope’s own reporting, are difficult to entirely believe until you sit with them for a while. Lunar Embassy has, at the peak of its sales, moved as many as 1,500 individual lunar deeds per day. According to a 2013 profile of Hope in US News and World Report, which examined his corporate records and interviewed him at length, the company has, over the course of its four-decade operating history, sold plots of lunar land to more than six million individual customers, along with acreage on Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter’s moon Io. Hope claims sales of approximately 611 million acres of the Moon, 325 million acres of Mars, and a combined 125 million acres across the other bodies.
The customer list is, on Hope’s own testimony, remarkable. He says he has sold Moon deeds to three former United States presidents, namely Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush. He says John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Barbara Walters are all among his customers. He turned down, on his account, a $50 million offer from a single buyer who wanted to purchase the entire northern region of the Moon in one transaction. He runs the business out of a modest office with two full-time employees, twenty-seven resellers, and a small network of what he calls ambassadors, in various countries, who resell his deeds on commission.
What he sells his customers, in physical terms, is a certificate of ownership, a copy of the original registered declaration, a small map of the lunar plot, and a set of “constitutional” documents establishing the Lunar Embassy as a governing entity for the property. What he does not sell them is any actual legal right to the land in question. This is because there is no such right for him to sell.
Why the loophole was never really there
According to a 2021 fact-check published in USA Today, drawing on interviews with legal scholars including Ram Jakhu of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University and Tanja Masson-Zwaan of the International Institute of Space Law, the legal consensus on Hope’s loophole has been consistent since the day he first identified it. The Outer Space Treaty does more work than Article II alone suggests. Article VI of the same treaty requires that all activities in outer space, whether carried out by governments or by private individuals or corporations, be authorised and supervised by a signatory government. Which means that even if a private individual believed themselves to have staked a claim on the Moon, they would need a national government to recognise and authorise the claim in order for it to have any legal standing. And no national government is permitted to do so, because doing so would violate Article II.
Masson-Zwaan, who currently serves as the president of the International Institute of Space Law, put it plainly in a 2009 statement to National Geographic. What Hope is doing does not give people buying pieces of paper the right to ownership of the Moon.
Jakhu was even blunter. I do not see a loophole, he told Discover magazine. There is no legal ambiguity in the treaty. The lack of a mention of individuals is not a loophole. It is a consequence of the treaty being written to govern nations, which are the entities that sign international treaties, and being read as binding on those nations and everything they authorise, which is how international treaty law works.
What all of this points at, on the current state of international space law, is that the pieces of paper Hope has been selling for the past forty-six years are, in strict legal terms, pieces of paper. They are not deeds. They are memorabilia. Which does not mean that Hope has been running a fraud, exactly. Every customer who has bought one knew, or should have known, on the face of the transaction, that the Moon is not for sale and cannot be. What Hope has been selling is the pleasant fiction that it can, in a small ceremonial way, be purchased anyway. Six million people have decided that fiction was worth roughly twenty dollars each to own a piece of.
The genuinely interesting question, at the point in history the space industry has now reached, is what happens when actual companies with actual mining equipment and actual rockets start arriving at the Moon within the next decade. The United States, in a 2015 piece of domestic legislation called the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, has already asserted the right of American citizens to own resources they extract from celestial bodies, even though it has not asserted the right to own the ground the resources are extracted from. Luxembourg has passed similar legislation. Several other countries are drafting their own versions. And the Outer Space Treaty itself, whose Article II has held the line for almost sixty years, has never been updated to address what happens when private companies start building bases on the Moon and taking material out of it.
Dennis Hope, on the surviving legal record, does not own the Moon. But the question his forty-six-year business has been quietly poking at is one that international law has never satisfactorily answered, and one that the next generation of lunar operators is going to force the world’s legal systems to answer whether they want to or not.
Kiran Athar is not a space lawyer or an aerospace expert. She writes about the law, business, and the ordinary corners of the modern world where the two intersect, drawing on peer-reviewed research and primary-source scholarship.
