The Joshua Tree Crater Company
About us
We are a small company in the California high desert, making unique gift ideas for kids, grown-ups, and the holidays. We think the Moon belongs to all of humanity.
The Joshua Tree Crater Company is a space-themed novelty gift store, part of ExplOrbit. We make one thing: a stargazing gift set built around the dedication of a real, IAU-catalogued crater on the Moon, a unique gift idea for kids, grown-ups, and everyone in between, and one of our favorite gifts for the holidays. We started here, in the high desert, where the sky is still dark enough that a child can look up and understand, without anyone explaining it, that the universe is very large and they are part of it.
How is this different from a lunar real estate site?
Plenty of sites will sell you a "deed" to a parcel of land on the Moon. We do not, and we never will. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no country or company can claim ownership of the Moon, so no one can legally sell you a piece of it, however official the paperwork looks. What we offer instead is a symbolic certificate of crater dedication in our own JT Crater Company Registry: a real crater, a real name, permanently on record. A share of every purchase also goes toward raising awareness for the conservation and protection of the Moon and its natural resources, work that matters more each year as traffic to the lunar surface grows.
Can I really name a crater on the Moon?
Yes. Every crater in our catalogue is a real, IAU-recognised feature with its own coordinates and diameter, and twenty-four open for dedication each day. Naming one is a fun, unique gift for people of any age, a birthday, a new baby, someone you have lost, or just yourself. It will never be an official designation, but it will be permanently yours in our registry, with a printed certificate to prove it.
Explore, discover, learn, protect
Those four words are printed on everything we make, in that order, because that is the order it happens in. People explore what is in front of them, discover something worth knowing, learn enough to care, and protect what they have come to love.
From the desert to the Moon.
