In January of 2024, the company Astrobiotic was set to make history with the first privately-developed lander, named Peregrine, to reach the lunar surface, sent aboard a United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. The lander carried the usual sorts of scientific instruments, many of them developed by NASA and its research partners. But tucked away among all those instruments was a small payload, with spots in that cargo sold by the companies Celestis and Elysium Space.
Nobody owns the moon—researcher suggests that could be a problem
