The Artemis Moon Base project is legally questionable

With NASA planning to launch four astronauts on Wednesday on the Artemis 2 mission, the race to return to the moon is back on. The current mission will see astronauts travel aboard the Orion capsule around the moon before returning to Earth within 10 days. They will test hardware and systems that could soon allow Americans to step on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years on the Artemis IV mission scheduled for 2028. NASA isn’t ready to land humans on the moon yet, but that’s the goal for the next five years: not just taking people to the moon, but also establishing a long-term human presence on its surface.

This is Artemis’ selling point to NASA, compared to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, that we would not just visit the Moon for a few days, but would inhabit it for a long period of time. It’s still unclear exactly for how long, but the idea is to build a lunar base that would allow astronauts to live on the moon for weeks or even months at a time.

This makes logistics more complicated, as astronauts will not be able to bring all the supplies and resources they need with them. Instead, they will need to take advantage of the limited resources found on the Moon, in a process called in situ resource utilization. Instead of transporting a huge amount of water from Earth, for example, we would go and look for some ice on the Moon and melt it to use instead. Simple, right?

It really isn’t. There is science. And there is the law.

The moon’s environment is harsh and inhospitable Dangerous space radiationA dusty substance called regolith Sharp as glass and destroys equipmentAnd a different level of cuteness to deal with. Although it’s less fanciful than the wild Mars colonization plans Promised by SpaceX CEO Elon MuskNASA’s goal of establishing a base on the Moon by 2030 remains largely optimistic. During its communications about Artemis, NASA emphasized the importance of… Identify and extract resources From the Moon, including water for fuel, helium-3 for energy, and rare earth elements such as scandium that are used in electronics. It is difficult to know how abundant these resources are until they are fully mapped and evaluated, but there is at least potential value, because they are required to maintain habitation on the Moon. This is the rationale behind much of Artemis: resources are needed to support the lunar base, so we need to build a lunar base to search for it.

The agency even described these efforts as “Lunar gold rushBut this points to a problem with Artemis that cannot be solved by developing new technologies: some experts say that extracting resources from the moon is a violation of international law.

There is not a great deal of international law that applies to space exploration, but what is there is pretty clear in one respect: no one owns the moon. The Outer Space Treaty (which was signed nearly 60 years ago but is still the main basis of international law in space today, if you can believe it) is very clear about the principle of non-possession, meaning that states cannot claim sovereignty over any object in space. But what about resource extraction? There, we reach a sticky area.

“The United States views resource extraction as not appropriation,” says Cassandra Steer, a space law expert and founder of the Australian Center for Space Governance. Many international space lawyers, including Steer, have argued that this is illegal. “This is an incorrect interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty. You are trying to find a loophole.” After all, if a country started drilling for resources from an area to which it has no claim on the land these days, that would cause… Some legal problems.

The United States was tactical in its approach to this issue, through the use of an agreement called Artemis Accords. This is not an international treaty, but rather an agreement signed by more than 60 countries on the adoption of high-level principles regarding space and lunar exploration in particular. Many of these principles are sound and reasonable approaches to space exploration, covering topics such as sharing scientific data, considering safety and emergency procedures, and committing to the peaceful use of space.

but Document It also includes sections specifically allowing the extraction and use of space resources, saying this does not conflict with the non-seizure principle, and allowing certain countries to create “safe zones” around areas of their lunar activity where other countries cannot interfere.

This does not exactly mean that whoever gets to the moon first and claims a part of it now owns it, but it does imply that whoever begins activities such as research or mining in a certain area on the moon can now extract resources from that area and other countries cannot stop it. It does not own a piece of the Moon, but gets priority access by drilling, dredging and occupying a strategic location for its potential value.

It is difficult not to draw parallels between this approach and the history of land grabbing in the American West in the nineteenth century, especially with regard to access to key resources such as water. “I think the Artemis Accords might open the door to these kinds of moon claims,” says Rebecca Boyle, a journalist and author of a book on the subject. Our moon. “The conventions say that safe zones must be relevant to current activities, but again, I think a creative lawyer or elegant legal argument could lead to a situation where someone arriving somewhere uses the safe zone rule first to claim whatever is there.”

The smart move by the United States was to incorporate the agreements into the Artemis program, so countries that wanted to participate in Artemis had to sign the document. With a handful of major players such as Canada, Japan, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom signing, several other countries, including France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, India and Germany, have followed suit.

“And so, it was strong-arming the United States to say, if you want to join our program, you have to agree with our interpretation of international law. This imposes what we call Opinion on the law “The treaty is not in international law,” Steer explains. The strength of this consensus from many countries is that if resource extraction is tolerated in practice, the original intention of the treaty can in fact be overridden by a widely accepted interpretation.

Steer summed up NASA’s approach bluntly: “You’re just trying to rewrite the treaty, and somehow you’ve convinced 60 countries to do it with you.”

The real elephant in the room of this legal wrangling is China, which has not signed the Artemis Accords and is on track to send its own astronauts to the moon perhaps even before the United States can. The relationship between China and the United States is practically non-existent when it comes to space activities, but China is working to build its own international cooperation relationships for its lunar program, including signing an agreement with Russia and carrying payloads from various European countries and Saudi Arabia aboard its lunar rovers. China plans to build its own lunar base with Russia called the International Lunar Research Station, and the United States is aggressively pushing its lunar program to try to overcome its competitors.

“The multi-trillion-dollar question is: Why do we go to the moon? And it is, in my opinion, a purely geopolitical question,” Steer says. This is certainly what propelled the United States during the recent Space Race, when the Cold War was in full swing and the Soviet Union’s race to the moon was not just a matter of political power, but also an attempt to prove who had the superior political ideology. Now, in the age of America First Trumpism, the United States is trying to prove its power and capability once again, but the nationalist rhetoric has failed to capture the reality of space exploration, which is that space exploration is now dependent on international partnerships and cross-border cooperation.

Today, not only prestige is at stake, but also access to space resources, from control of lunar orbits and lunar outposts to control of materials required for further lunar exploration, such as ice or helium-3. After all, NASA has been remarkably circular in its rationale for Artemis: We need to send astronauts to the Moon to secure access to ice, because we need access to water to support human exploration. There are potential scientific justifications for a Moon mission, from learning about the composition of the solar system to using the Moon as a base to build a powerful telescope, but they have not been well articulated or widely promoted by NASA.

“The real justification, the hidden one, is who will gain political dominance,” Steer says. “Space is just another domain where geopolitics comes into play. It’s no different than the AI ​​race, it’s no different than competition over other resources, over oil, over water… It’s another domain where the United States is grasping at straws to remain the sole dominant power, and discovers that it actually can’t.”