Tag Archives: Moon Agreement 1984

Building on the Moon: the Environmental Impact

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The Environmental Burden of Building on the Moon

Who Will be the First to Colonize the Solar System?

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A Chinese spacecraft touched down on grasslands in China’s Inner Mongolia region in June 2024, carrying the first-ever rock samples from the far side of the moon. A scientific breakthrough in itself, the success also advanced China’s plan to put astronauts on the moon by 2030 and build a lunar base by 2035. Such momentum is worrying American space officials and lawmakers, who have their own ambitions to build moon bases.

Unlike the original space race between the Americans and the Soviets, the goal of the U.S. and China isn’t just to make a short trip to the moon. It is to build permanent human outposts on its most strategic location, the lunar south pole. And as both nations gear up to build stations there one day, it is looking likely that tensions in orbit will mirror those on Earth.

Some U.S. officials fear China is planning a land grab. Chinese officials suspect the same of the Americans and are teaming up with Russia and other friendly nations for its south-pole outpost. The successful completion of the Chang’e 6 mission shows that, by one measure, China is ahead for now. Its lunar program has now soft-landed on the moon four times since 2013, the latest mission scooping up rocks near the south pole with robotic arms…

Meanwhile, after a decades-long moon-landing hiatus, two U.S. companies this year launched lunar-surface missions under NASA contracts. One lander tipped on its side after touching down. The other didn’t try to land because of technical problems. At least two more private missions, with funding from NASA, are slated to try to get to the moon later this year….All this is piling pressure upon the world’s most storied space agency. Through its Artemis exploration program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to conduct multiple landings in the coming years, develop a logistics station in lunar orbit and eventually build permanent camps on the moon’s surface. But Artemis has faced repeated delays and cost overruns while relying on a complex mix of government workers and private contractors…

“Unlike the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 20th century, this new round of competition centers on the water ice at the lunar south pole, with its extraction and use as a common goal,” wrote four scientists affiliated with China’s Academy of Sciences in a paper published in May. “The ability to collect and utilize lunar resources is a mark of national prestige and geopolitical influence. “We’re talking about colonizing the solar system,” said Greg Autry, a NASA official during the Trump administration.

Excerpts from Stu Woo, Historic Moon Mission Moves China Ahead in Space Race With U.S., WSJ, June 25, 2024

The Moon Miners

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The joint announcement by China and Russia in March 20211 on their collaboration to explore the moon has the potential to scramble the geopolitics of space exploration, once again setting up competing programs and goals for the scientific and, potentially, commercial exploitation of the moon. This time, though, the main players will be the United States and China, with Russia as a supporting player.

In recent years, China has made huge advances in space exploration, putting its own astronauts in orbit and sending probes to the moon and to Mars. It has effectively drafted Russia as a partner in missions that it has already planned, outpacing a Russian program that has stalled in recent years. In December 2020, China’s Chang’e-5 mission brought back samples from the moon’s surface, which have gone on display with great fanfare in Beijing. That made China only the third nation, after the United States and the Soviet Union, to accomplish the feat. In the coming months, it is expected to send a lander and rover to the Martian surface, hard on the heels of NASA’s Perseverance, which arrived there in February 2021..

 According to a statement by the China National Space Administration, they agreed to “use their accumulated experience in space science research and development and use of space equipment and space technology to jointly formulate a route map for the construction of an international lunar scientific research station.”

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia became an important partner in the development of the International Space Station. With NASA having retired the space shuttle in 2011, Russia’s Soyuz rockets were the only way to get to the International Space Station until SpaceX, a private company founded by the billionaire Elon Musk, sent astronauts into orbit on its own rocket last year. China, by contrast, was never invited to the International Space Station, as American law prohibits NASA from cooperating with Beijing. 

China pledged to keep the joint project with Russia “open to all interested countries and international partners,” as the statement put it, but it seemed all but certain to exclude the United States and its allies in space exploration. The United States has its own plans to revisit the moon by 2024 through an international program called Artemis. With Russia by its side, China could now draw in other countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, establishing parallel programs for lunar development….

Excerpts from China and Russia Agree to Explore the Moon Together, NYT, Mar. 10, 2021

A Lethal Combination: Pentagon and NASA

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U.S. government and aerospace-industry officials are removing decades-old barriers between civilian and military space projects, in response to escalating foreign threats beyond the atmosphere. The Pentagon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are joining forces to tackle efforts such as exploring the region around the moon and extending the life of satellites. Many details are still developing or remain classified.  Driving the changes are actions by Moscow and Beijing to challenge American space interests with antisatellite weapons, jamming capabilities and other potentially hostile technology. Eventually, according to government and industry officials briefed on the matter, civil-military cooperation is expected to extend to defending planned NASA bases on the lunar surface, as well as protecting U.S. commercial operations envisioned to extract water or minerals there…

Large and small contractors are maneuvering to take advantage of opportunities to merge military and nonmilitary technologies. They include established military suppliers that already have a foot in both camps, such as Northrop Grumman,  the Dynetics unit of Leidos Holdings, and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Smaller companies such as Maxar Technologies Holdings,  closely held robotic-lander maker Astrobotic Technology, and small-satellite producer Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by Raytheon Technologies, also seek to diversify in the same way…

The U.S. astronaut corps always has included many military officers, some previous NASA scientists quietly shared data with military counterparts and NASA’s now-retired Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to launch Pentagon satellites. But today, veteran industry and government experts describe the cooperation as much more extensive, covering burgeoning capabilities such as repairing and repurposing satellites in orbit, or moving them around with nuclear propulsion. Intelligence agencies are more involved than ever in leveraging civilian technology, including artificial intelligence, robotic capabilities and production know-how.

Excerpt from Pentagon, NASA Knock Down Barriers Impeding Joint Space Projects, WSJ, Feb. 1, 2021

New Fait Accompli in Space: the Artemis Accords

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Seven countries have joined the United States in signing the Artemis Accords on October 13, 2020, a set of principles governing norms of behavior for those who want to participate in the Artemis lunar exploration program: Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom….The accords outline a series of principles that countries participating in the Artemis program are expected to adhere to, from interoperability and release of scientific data to use of space resources and preserving space heritage. Many of the principles stem directly from the Outer Space Treaty and related treaties.

NASA was originally focused on having the document apply to lunar and later Martian exploration. Japan wanted to include asteroid and comet missions as well, based on that country’s program of robotic asteroid missions like the Hayabusa2 asteroids sample return spacecraft. The document now includes asteroid and comet missions, as well as activities in orbit around the moon and Mars and the Lagrange points of the Earth-moon system.

NASA is implementing the Artemis Accords as a series of bilateral agreements between the United States and other countries, which allows them to move more quickly than if NASA sought a multilateral agreement under the aegis of the United Nations…Frans von der Dunk, a professor of space law at the University of Nebraska, drew parallels with development of international civil aviation regulations, which started with bilateral agreements between the United States and United Kingdom that were later copied among other nations. “That is something that will possibly happen here as well,” he said.

The bilateral nature of the accords, though, do present restrictions. China, for instance, cannot sign on, because NASA, under the so-called “Wolf Amendment” in US law, is restricted from bilateral cooperation with China.

The accords are outside the traditional UN framework of international space law – such as the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The requirement to sign bilateral agreements with the US can be viewed as a way of trying to impose US preferences on how to regulate space on others. Russia has already stated that the Artemis Program is too “US-centric”.  India, Germany, France and the European Space Agency (ESA) have not yet signed on to the accords.

Excerpt from Jeff Foust ,Eight countries sign Artemis Accords, Space News, Oct. 13, 2020