United States Space & Rocket Center. Photo: Ke4roh via Wikimedia Commons.

A vacation to the Moon may no longer be a far-off pipe dream for Americans (at least those with plenty of money in the bank). Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, has previously announced plans to prepare to send private citizens into space by late 2018. And citizens of Earth—including the legal community—are wondering what comes next.

This is because, at the moment, it's not completely clear which commercial laws govern space or what regulations companies and their in-house attorneys have to follow there. Most of the space law that does exist deals with government and military activities, not commercial activity. And the laws that do address businesses in space mostly deal with satellites, not full-fledged space tourism or, say, asteroid mining.

“We have international and domestic laws geared up to the activities done in the last 40 years which [have been in] civil and military space,” said Sagi Kfir, the general counsel of Deep Space Industries, an asteroid mining company. “But with the boom of these startups we'll see an increased development or increased emphasis on developing new regulations for space.”