Is It Possible to Own the Moon? episode artwork

EPISODE · Jun 16, 2026 · 12 MIN

Is It Possible to Own the Moon?

from Sidequests

In 1980, Dennis Hope filed paperwork claiming ownership of the Moon and sent formal notice to the United Nations. Nobody objected. So he started selling. This episode of Sidequests traces how a struggling used-car salesman from San Francisco built a multimillion-dollar real estate business on a gap in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, generated roughly twelve million dollars in revenue, sold property to Ronald Reagan and Tom Cruise, created his own interplanetary government, and was never successfully stopped by any country on Earth. Whether it's legal is still, technically, unclear — which is exactly the point. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode metadata supplied by the publisher feed · Published Jun 16, 2026

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Is It Possible to Own the Moon?

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