Who owns space? As the race starts to exploit the cosmos for commercial gains, we must act to preserve it for all humanity

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception.

- By Maggie Aderin-Pocock

The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are.

In 1995, the Hubble space telescope captured its first deep-field image: this showed us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our known universe, huge wheeling collections of stars dispersed through space.

Let's take the International Astronomical Union's definition of space as everything in the universe apart from our planet and atmosphere.

Asking the question "who owns space?" seems laughable. Hubris at a whole new level. The idea that we could lay claim to the rest of the universe is beyond conceit.

A few years ago, I postulated that space exploration could be divided into three eras. The first was confrontation: it was the second world war that fuelled our first forays into the abyss.

The space race was born from military competition. The second era brought collaboration. The formation of the European Space Agency in 1975 and that symbolic docking between Soviet and US space vehicles symbolised what humanity could achieve collectively. Now we're on the verge of a third era: commercialisation. Space exploration is no longer just the domain of nations, but of billionaires, private companies and start-ups.