NASA announced Thursday it plans to purchase lunar soil from a commercial company, an effort the agency’s top official said is intended to set a precedent for the transfer of ownership of extraterrestrial material and stimulate a market harvesting resources from bodies throughout the solar system.

The initiative is starting small, but NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Thursday it could lead to companies being able to mine lunar soil for water ice, precious metals, and other resources.

“We’re interested in buying some lunar soil commercially,” Bridenstine said Thursday in a virtual presentation at the Secure World Foundation’s Space Sustainability Summit.

“So we want a commercial company to go to the moon, extract some lunar soil, and then … NASA can take possession of it.”.

“We are buying the regolith, but we’re doing it really to demonstrate that it can be done, that the resources extracted from the moon are in fact owned by the people who invest their sweat, and their treasure, and their equity into that effort,” Bridenstine said.

NASA’s effort to purchase lunar soil from a commercial company has its roots in a law passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2015, Bridenstine said.

Bridenstine said NASA believes in the Outer Space Treaty, but NASA wants to “enable a normalization process” to show that extraterrestrial resources can be mined and owned.

“But we do believe that we can extract and utilize the resources from the moon, just like we can extract and utilize tuna from the ocean,” Bridenstine said.

In order to make the Artemis program last, NASA says crews or robots will need to eventually extract and utilize resources, such as water ice, from the moon, instead of bringing all the required materials from Earth.

“There is no risk of companies strip-mining the moon and ruining it until closer to the year 2100, because there are no valuable resources on the moon that you can sell on Earth,” tweeted Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida whose research expertise includes sampling planetary soil.

The policy runs counter to the 1979 Moon Treaty, which states that the moon and its natural resources are the “common heritage of mankind.” The Moon Treaty adds that an international framework is needed to govern the exploitation of lunar resources “when such exploitation is about to become feasible.”.

Bridenstine said Friday that NASA wants to ensure there is a “strong legal framework grounded in international law” that allows individuals and companies to pursue private interests at the moon.

“What we’re trying to do is make sure that there is a norm of behavior that says the resources can be extracted, and that we’re doing it in a way that is in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty,” Bridenstine said.

Bridenstine said Thursday that although NASA is not a regulatory agency, it can set expectations for private companies.

“If you want to be with us when we go to the moon, if you want to be a private company that can have NASA as a customer, if you want to be with us when we go to Mars, then there are certain behaviors that you have to adhere to,” Bridenstine said.

The companies that win awards will gather lunar soil or rocks from any location on the moon, and provide imagery to NASA of the collection and the collected material, along with data identifying where the material was captured.

Bridenstine said Thursday NASA anticipates paying between $15,000 to $25,000 for between 50 and 500 grams of lunar soil.

In 2018, NASA established the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to set up a series of competitions for companies to bid for contracts to ferry scientific instruments to the moon.