What country can claim they own it?
The Outer Space Treaty declares that the moon and all celestial bodies belong to all mankind.
Which obviously sets us up for a protracted legal conflict with the Borg.
The moon is owned by the Moon People (aka the Lunarians) and ruled by the Moon Governor.
Sheesh, kids today don’t know anything!
Here’s what the Apollo 11 plaque reads:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969 A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
So keep your tentacles off our Moon, you damned dirty aliens!
I do because I inherited it from a great-grandparent that won it in a poker game back in the 1920’s (I still think I was screwed because my siblings got Jupiter and Alpha Centari respectively). Other than the landing fees my family got from it back it the 60’s and 70’s, it has been a dud of a property and I expect it to remain that way for the rest of my lifetime. The liability insurance is getting to be excessive so I am working on putting it in a long-term trust for all of humanity to enjoy but that won’t be finalized for another few months.
Wait a minute, didn’t Joseph Cavor claim the moon for Queen Victoria back in 1899? 
He who has the guns. On a serious note, eventually, someone will probably develop the technology to actually go to the moon and start using the resources there. Others may object to this - they may want the Lunar resources for themselves, or they may object to strip mining pits defacing the way the Moon appears from Earth. When that happens, the objecting party better have more firepower than the party that is already on the Moon, or their objections won’t carry any weight…
The Chairman of the Board speaks.
What a coincidence! My great-grandparent lost the moon in a poker game around the same time. The story of how she obtained it isn’t entirely clear but, occasionally, after partaking of her “medicinals”, as she called it, she would sometimes ramble on about a miner who’d struck it big and did quite a bit of traveling. Or did quite a bit of traveling before striking it big, depending on how much of her medicinals she’d taken. And on days when it really kicked in, she would claim to have traveled with him. She’d talk about dead, barren places and other places that were in constant storm. And another with a strange arc in the sky, like a huge rainbow, but not.
Great Gran said the miner gave her the moon as an expression of his admiration for her. Admiration. They were so quaint in those days. His name was Ersa or something Italian-sounding like that. Or that’s where he was from, again depending on how much her medicinals were affecting her. She’d always regretted betting the moon in that card game but she just knew her luck was about to change. It didn’t, of course. Fortunately, Ersa the miner had moved on by then, so she didn’t have to 'splain herself to him. Never saw him again, either.
Of course, we knew her “medicinals” was just booze and she was batshit crazy, but she was an entertaining old broad and we loved her anyway.
“The Moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men.”
-Troy McClure
No country owns it–it belongs to the Amazon Women!
Eh, there isn’t much there to fight over. I suspect it will be more or less like Antarctica, where countries occasionally lodge competing claims, but no one really cares enough to start shooting.
What resources are actually worth strip mining for on the moon exactly? Is there anything up there, that isn’t down here? Not that I’m aware of anyway.
Resources? Scads of helium-3, as all good Space Nazis know.
For today’s industry, nothing.
However, the Moon actually has more solid resources than the entire earth’s crust. It’s thought to be a chunk of the earth, so it should have about the same element mix the earth has, deeper in.
Eventually, most credible scientists and engineers predict that humans will derive a way to build a reasonably compact self-replicating factory. The way it might physically function is to be determined - it might be a roomful of robots, 3d printers, and compact versions of furnaces and element separation equipment. Or, it might require nanoscale assembler systems.
Either way, once you have a self replicating factory that is reasonably quick, you would be able to order the factory to do a production run of all of the parts used in the factory itself and you’d load the assembly plans for putting together the robots into the factory’s memory. The factory would then copy itself. Those factories would copy themselves, and so on.
Setting up a factory like this on the earth, eventually raw materials would be too expensive, and you’d run out of places you can afford the mining permits to. The moon, you could set up one factory, and a few years later, the entire surface of the moon would be factories.
So that’s why Brazilian supermodels have such long legs. (cite) It’s the lesser gravity on their homeworld.
I don’t buy this for one minute.
Then you’re not a credible scientist or engineer. You are a self replicating organism. The lowly e-coli and the lowly algae, creature so small that you need a microscope to see them, are complete self replicating factories.
Lunar rock isn’t conveniently dissolved in pressurized seawater, so you cannot digest it the same way living cells do, which is why a self replicating factory has to be a lot larger, so it can use as a digestive organ a plasma furnace or a bath of chemicals. By a similar analogy, an airliner is only really efficient if it’s much larger than a mosquito which also flies.
Delos D. Harriman.