Commercial space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow is worried that the US may loose the new game of “solar system monopoly” and that China might soon be the owner of the moon.

The entrepreneur said the ownership of the moon, is up for grabs, and China is likely to snag it.

Bigelow, the owner of aerospace company Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, said at the 2011 International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight that by the time America gets into gear to build its own moon base, large swaths of lunar territory may already be claimed.

Bigelow’s comments came at a talk that the firebrand entrepreneur himself warned the audience would be “controversial” an where he said that Americans were “still basking in the lunar glory from 40 years ago”.

“But we don’t own one square foot of the damn place. NASA is a shadow of the space agency it once was in the 1960s and 1970s,” he said.