Nobody ate the Moon. Nobody owns it either, and the reason that second sentence is more complicated than it sounds is now a live commercial question.
The foundation is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, formally the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. It is ratified by every major spacefaring state. Article II is the relevant sentence: 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 disposes of the novelty lunar deed in the gift shop. No state can claim territory, and no private party can derive a property title from a state that has none to give. Article VI closes the obvious loophole by making states internationally responsible for the space activities of their own non-governmental entities, and requiring that those activities be authorized and continuously supervised. A company cannot escape the treaty by not being a government.
You cannot own the Moon. Whether you can own a bucket of it is the entire modern argument.
The unsettled question is resources rather than territory. Mining a body is not obviously the same act as appropriating it — the usual analogy is fishing in international waters, where nobody owns the sea but the catch is yours. Whether the analogy holds is genuinely contested, and states have started answering it unilaterally.
The United States did so in the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which provides that a U.S. citizen engaged in commercial recovery of a space resource is entitled to possess, own, transport, use and sell it, while explicitly disclaiming any assertion of sovereignty over a celestial body. Luxembourg passed a comparable law in 2017, and other jurisdictions have followed. Each of these is a national statute asserting a reading of an international treaty, which is a legally awkward posture no matter how carefully drafted.
Alongside that sits the Artemis Accords, a set of non-binding bilateral commitments first signed in 2020 and now joined by a substantial number of states. They restate the Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation principle and add operational practices, including the notification of “safety zones” around activities so that others can avoid harmful interference. Critics argue that a zone you must ask permission to enter functions like a claim regardless of the label. Supporters argue that deconfliction without exclusion is precisely what the treaty’s Article IX duty of due regard already requires.
There is one further instrument, the 1979 Moon Agreement, which declares the Moon and its resources the common heritage of mankind and calls for an international regime to govern exploitation. It exists, it is in force, and no major spacefaring state has joined it — which makes it a useful marker of what the international community declined to agree to.
So: you cannot own the Moon. Whether you can own a bucket of it is the entire modern argument, and it is being settled by national legislation and operational practice ahead of any negotiated answer. That is a slow-moving story with no photograph attached, which is why it loses every week to a headline about a billionaire eating it.