Despite the arrival of privately funded lunar mining companies, advancements in space resource legislation (such as the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015) and lunar prospecting missions such as LUPEX, one legal hurdle remains that will likely impact the pace of investment in future lunar mining activities: property rights on a celestial body. This issue — specifically, the concept of exclusive administrative rights (the ability to manage and exclude others from a given area) — has been the subject of several SpaceNews op-eds.
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