In Orlando, a few weeks ago, The Economist Magazine convened what was called “The Space Economy Summit.” A few weeks earlier, at NASA’s Houston Space Center, there was the “Lunar and Mars Economy Summit.”

There’s no economy on the moon yet, but governments and private companies are hard at work to change that. This week on “Marketplace Morning Report,” we’re looking at opportunities on the moon, as well as the potential costs, and at what should the guardrails for a lunar economy.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is dean of social sciences, a professor of religion, and a professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University. She recently joined Marketplace host David Brancaccio to discuss existing rules and ethical concerns. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: You know, I was going to ask, when we think about an emerging lunar economy, who owns the moon? But then I found the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which seems to ban private ownership of celestial bodies. Is it a settled matter?

Mary-Jane Rubenstein: Well, it is settled and it is not settled. It is settled in so far as over 100 major nations have signed on to the Outer Space Treaty, which dictates, as you've said, that nobody can own part or all of a planetary body. It is not settled in so far as the U.S. recently — in 2015, in particular — has passed legislation arguing that citizens — by which they mean corporations — can, in fact, own the materials that they recover from a lunar body. So you can't own part of the moon, but you can own the stuff that the moon contains.

Brancaccio: All right, well, that brings us right to mining and the rules that might apply if they find something of value that they would like to extract on the moon. What protocols might guide that?

Rubenstein: It's actually not clear whether or not ownership is guaranteed or protected, and so that is going to be worked out in the courts, and it'll be worked out on the lunar surface, really.

Brancaccio: Yeah, and that gets us to who would get to do that? That would be the fastest and the mightiest, the country or group or interest that gets there first and can defend the perimeter.

Rubenstein: That's right. So there are plenty of nations that object to the way that the U.S. and some of the other larger nations have gone about making unilateral legislation on these matters, but those tend to be non-space-faring nations, and the rules, it seems, are going to be set by those nations that can make it up there and set policy as they go.

Brancaccio: You could just imagine a private interest wanting to build a big structure on the lunar surface that would be visible from Earth, like a perpetual piece of advertising. Someone might object to that.

Rubenstein: A couple of years ago, when a mission — a privately-funded mission — intended to deposit human remains on the lunar surface in a kind of ritual burial, and the Navajo Nation objected to this and said, "You can't just do whatever you want on the surface of the moon," and these corporations said, "Yes, we absolutely can." And the Navajo Nation appealed to NASA, and NASA said, "We don't have any control over private corporations." So we are in this age where private actors, in a fairly unregulated fashion, are able to pursue all kinds of interests without much oversight and over the objections of many other actors.

Brancaccio: As humans, map out what the rules might be for using the moon. As you think about the ethics of answering that question, one thing that would come to mind would be one hopes it's a transparent process.

Rubenstein: I think one of the major impediments to that openness is that there is no operative relationship between the U.S. and China when it comes to space matters. It's almost seen as an imperative to maintain some kind of secrecy in order to rival China, to make sure that the U.S. gets there in order to set the rules before China does.