Back in 1997, three men from Yemen, Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil, and Abdullah al-Umari, trekked down to the national prosecutor’s office in Sana’a and filed a lawsuit against the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. When the Yemenis sued NASA, their case wasn’t about wages, or intellectual property, or ethics, or anything you might expect, though. They were suing for trespassing, claiming that they were the rightful inheritors and owners of Mars, and demanding an immediate cessation to the activities of the recently landed Mars pathfinder rover Sojourner. All further studies on Mars, they claimed, would have to be cleared through them.
The cohort based their claims on their purported descent from the Himyarites and Sabaeans, ethnic groups who lived in southern Arabia forming empires, using a unique alphabet and worshipping their own pantheons in the first millennium B.C.E. Much about these people’s histories have been lost since the coming of the Arabic language and the Islamic faith, but later Muslim authors claimed that they had seven temples for each of the seven planets, all visible in the night sky at the time, and all considered intermediaries to a divine power.
Whether these peoples believed they could own the planets, and whether these Yemenis were descendants of ancient priests or practitioners, we’ll probably never know. The trio told the al-Thawri newspaper that they had the documents to prove their claims, and were only seeking their right now because of the anniversary of several ancient cities’ foundations, and the desire to raise money to refurbish them. But reportedly the only man to see this proof was Yemen’s chief prosecutor, who threw out the case and threatened the group with jail time. The fact that the Yemenis turned around the next year and tried to sell Martian land to investors for $2 per square mile makes many suspect that these were just hucksters or jokers, but you never know.
When the Yeminis sued NASA, NASA paid the Yemeni claims no real mind. They have encountered dozens of shady characters and fervent believers who’ve staked claims to the whole solar system for ages. Virgiliu Pop of the Romanian Space Agency wrote the definitive account on extraterrestrial estate claims in 2006, with Unreal Estate: The Men Who Sold The Moon. Many, like Dennis Hope’s famous Lunar Embassy Commission, which has sold over 2 million acres of moon at $20 per acre to customers (he claims) like Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, and former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, just think they’re clever people coming up with a new legal loophole (they aren’t) to make a ton of cash. Other claims, though, involve injunctions and reparations for space agencies’ meddling in astrology by interfering with the stars or desecrating what some consider to be the holy cosmos by human interference. These bizarre claimants hit home for NASA in cases like Gregory W. Nemitz’s claim to Asteroid 433, aka Eros, which he claimed gave him the right to issue the space agency a parking ticket for landing a craft there in 2001.
None of these claims stick. As far back as 1967, the Outer Space Treaty (to which Yemen is a ratified signatory) has held that no country can claim ownership over extraterrestrial territory. This position was upheld in 1979 with the Moon Agreement. And even if one were to challenge these treaties, or just to file moral claims or damages, by accepted legal norms one would have to either be a citizen representative and resident of another planet, or be able to show real intent and ability to occupy that territory. The Yemenis have no legal leg to stand on (or spaceship to land on).
This could change, though. Not every country is a signatory to the existing space treaties, and fewer have ratified the agreements. There’s already precedent for large scale and legitimate legal challenges to the ban on rights to extraterrestrial property, like the 1976 Bogotá Declaration of the First Meeting of Equatorial Countries, which sought control over miles of Earth’s geosynchronous orbit over their territories. These early claims have been ignored, but if space flight ever becomes common, resources are found, or attitudes just change, it’s easy enough to weasel out of a treaty and find a new legal framework. Fortunately for NASA, by then it’s quite likely we’ll be able to bypass the Yemenis and claim squatter’s rights on Mars.
