Bill Nelson, the current leader of NASA, said in an interview this year: “We want to stop China from coming in and saying the water is theirs.” He was referring specifically to the south pole of the Moon, a territory on our satellite that has suddenly become highly coveted. And not only China and the US want to reach it. Russia and India, for example, are already accelerating their plans to arrive in the coming years. Because?
At the south pole of the Moon there is water in the form of ice. Scientists from the Chinese National Academy of Sciences have estimated that there may be some 270,000 million tons of water in this state. These deposits can be a source of hydrogen and oxygen, which could be used to make rocket fuel. But, in addition, the presence of other minerals is suspected, such as scandium, yttrium and lanthanide. These three are metals used in the manufacture of computers, smartphones and other technological devices.
In other words: a potential lunar mine. How could China and the US agree? When Nelson confessed his concern about China’s arrival at the south pole of the Moon, he compared it to the situation of the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in Asia that six nations have disputed for years. Among them, China, the Philippines and Vietnam.
«This territory was in international waters, and China came and claimed them for itself; They started building landing strips. said Nelson. And he insisted: “We want to prevent this type of thing.” But can China claim sovereignty over any part of the Moon? Can the US do it? In short: whose Moon is it?
NASA’s plans to clarify who owns the Moon
Of all the planned trips to the Moon, the US seems to be the most advanced. NASA hopes to send a group of astronauts on the Artemis mission at the end of 2025. It will be the first time in more than 50 years that a human has set foot on lunar soil. China, always with more secrecy, has said that it wants to arrive around 2030—NASA has already said that it fears it will happen sooner. Russia set a date for sometime in the next decade and India, for 2040.
Among NASA’s mission preparations, not everything has to do with technology. Along with the development of equipment and vehicles, the US agency has been promoting what they call the Artemis Accords, an agreement that the US promotes worldwide to establish basic principles for exploration on the Moon. They also refer to what may happen on Mars, comets and asteroids.
The initiative started in 2020. Since then, NASA has taken steps to ensure that as many countries sign the agreement. It is common to see Nelson, the agency’s leader, visiting countries to confirm his support. Bulgaria this month became the 32nd nation to sign the document. Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Germany are already on the list. But India is the only other space power that has joined the US plan.
The Artemis Accords establish “safety zones” that all signatory countries must respect to prevent conflicts. It also establishes that space exploration must be exclusively for peaceful purposes and in accordance with international law. and guarantees a «safe and sustainable resource extraction».
The controversies over the Artemis Accords
The leader of NASA has said that they are “common sense principles.” They serve to guarantee peace, collaboration and unified systems: “So that if someone has to help other astronauts, the ships have compatible docking systems.” But also, Nelson noted in the interview last May, to put the competition aside: «It is also ruled out that someone could reach the Moon and claim territory and prevent others from entering. And here I am thinking about China.
The Artemis Accords are not so clear on all points. The security zones mentioned in the document They are described as surfaces reserved for a specific activity of some of the spatial actors. He clarifies that they will be temporary and will cease when said activity concludes, but does not say more. Some experts have warned that the lack of definition and clear purpose It can lead to gray interpretations, which would violate the principle of non-appropriation of lunar territory.
“Depending on the point of view of a particular actor, security zones can be described in various ways,” notes Alejandro Q. Gilbert, of the Colorado School of Mines, in an analysis published in March in Journal of Space Safety Engineering. Gilbert says the most controversial areas are presumably related to resource extraction. “While buffer zones may be sufficient for small-scale resource activity in the short term, the scale of future large-scale space mining will likely require a broader multilateral governance framework.”
Other analysts maintain that these security zones would serve to limit access to the Moon to countries that are not part of the Artemis Accords. This would make the US — the country that licenses most of the world’s space companies — “the de facto guardian of the Moon, asteroids and other celestial bodies,” say Aaron Boley and Michael Byers of the University of British Columbia, in Science.
Other regulations on ownership of the Moon
For considerations like these—and because of the historical political and commercial dispute—neither Russia nor China have signed these agreements. However, they did sign another agreement, which those of Artemis refer to in a large part of their regulations.
The United Nations created the Outer Space Treaty in 1966.. To the question about who owns the Moon, the rule clearly answers: no one. Not now, not never. It states that no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon and that space exploration should benefit all countries. More than 100 countries have ratified the treaty, which prohibits testing any weapons or conducting military maneuvers on lunar soil and in space.
But other norms have tried to regulate the controversy. In 1979, the Moon Treaty appeared and included a key point: private actors. No part of the Moon, the document says, “shall be owned by any State, international organization (intergovernmental or non-governmental), national organization or non-governmental entity or by any natural person.” But only twenty countries have signed it. China, Russia and the US are not on the list.
“Space mining is subject to relatively little existing policy or governance, despite these potentially high risks,” explains a article from the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit organization. Moon mining “creates the potential for conflict between competing nation-states, as well as between non-governmental actors”.
The exploitation of large corporations
Barack Obama, former US president, signed a law in 2015 that gave private companies the right to own resources they extracted in space. “We think we can extract and use resources from the Moon, just as we can extract and use tuna from the ocean,” said in 2020, the then NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine.
NASA has said it expects start excavating lunar soil in 2032. Gerald Sanders, rocket scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said last June at the World Mining Conference that they are currently analyzing the potential of resources on the Moon to, with data in hand, attract private investment. Companies like SpaceX—led by Elon Musk—and Blue Origin already collaborate with NASA.
Whose Moon is it? There was a lunatic named Jenaro Gajardo Vera, a Chilean poet and lawyer. They say that in 1954, Jenaro went to a notary office in the city of Talca to register his name as the sole owner of the Moon. He paid, in exchange, 42 Chilean pesos. He made three publications in the Official Gazette with the intention of him. “As there was no opposition, I was granted registration,” says one review of the Condors of Talca Society, an organization of which Jenaro was a part.
Jenaro became famous. Legend has it, fueled by the Condors of Talca, that President Richard Nixon asked Jenaro for permission for astronauts Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong to land on the Moon for the first time in 1969. The poet celebrated “the democratic gesture” and gave them your permission.
Jenaro died in 1998, at 79 years of age. Various media in Chile and the world collect what he supposedly wrote in his final will: “I leave the Moon to my people, full of love for their sorrows.”