Speaker
Description
As humanity returns to the Moon, we face an institutional vacuum comparable to that of the late Middle Ages and early modern period — a time when emerging markets, rising maritime powers, and expanding trade routes demanded new forms of political economy. In that era, company-states, merchant guilds, and special jurisdictions filled the void between weak sovereign control and the practical demands of commerce, eventually giving rise to international legal norms, commercial codes, and investment-enabling institutions. Today, we are in a similar moment for the governance of space.
This paper presents the Lunar Development Cooperative (LDC) — a proposed for-profit, public-private partnership that offers a scalable framework for infrastructure, services, and governance on the Moon. Structured to align the incentives of nation-states, private actors, and civil society, the LDC would support a rules-based lunar economy consistent with international law, while remaining flexible enough to adapt to evolving norms and technologies.
The LDC’s core function is to act as a neutral infrastructure and public service provider to all member entities operating on the Moon. It would build and maintain shared assets — such as power, roads, communication, storage, and landing facilities — while offering high-value services like search and rescue, risk insurance, and diplomatic assistance. Its most critical function, however, is to maintain a registry and contractual framework that governs members’ planned activities and allocates enforceable operational rights without violating the Outer Space Treaty’s prohibition on sovereignty or land ownership.
The LDC’s ability to develop and enforce norms comes not by territorial claims but by providing infrastructure available only to parties that agree to form a legally binding contract regulating their activities. In doing so, the LDC internalizes externalities and aligns actors’ incentives toward environmental stewardship, resource efficiency, and peaceful economic growth. Because the LDC does not compete in commercial markets (e.g. resource extraction), it avoids the conflicts of interest that have historically plagued societies living under company-states and instead acts as a meta-architectural layer: fostering interdependence, lowering barriers to entry, and catalyzing the emergence of a robust lunar economy.
Institutionally, the LDC draws from the author’s experience outside the space community as an international economic development consultant and from multiple lessons from history: from the structures emerging during the eras of exploration and colonization; the autonomy and experimental governance of special economic zones and free cities; and the evolution of decentralized, bottom-up legal orders like the Lex Mercatoria. Its shareholding structure is open to both nations and individuals, with built-in provisions for accessibility by developing countries and indigenous communities — creating not only a legal-institutional scaffold, but a material vehicle for humanity’s shared stake in the Moon.
In time, the LDC’s rules, registry, and dispute resolution practices may serve as de facto standards — gradually influencing the development of formal space law in the same way that voluntary associations of merchants, miners, and sailors shaped terrestrial legal systems over centuries.
We invite space lawyers, economists, engineers, and policy professionals to contribute to the development of this institutional model. The future of space settlement will not be built by infrastructure alone, but by the quality of the agreements, incentives, and norms that underpin it. The LDC offers a cooperative, inclusive, and evolution-friendly path forward — one capable of bridging today’s sovereignty vacuum and tomorrow’s lunar society.