Who owns the moon?
The first successful moon landing of a private lander, Odysseus, last week came a month after Japan and six months after India touched down on Earth's natural satellite.
As more states and private companies reach the moon, some experts say, adequate legal framework and international agreements may be needed to avoid conflicts.
"Many hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested over the last several decades with the hope that the moon will turn out to be a resource for commercial activity, commercial development of the minerals and the water ice on the moon," says Anthony Grayling, a British philosopher and founder of New College of the Humanities in London. NCH finalized its merger with Northeastern in 2019.
"Exploration of new frontiers will produce new ways of imagining, new challenges, new technologies that can be of tremendous utility," says Grayling, who moderated a fireside chat Monday that was part of Northeastern's "Thinking the Future" series and recently published a book, "Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity's Common Interests in Space."
Commercialization can also create friction and rivalries between different parties, he says, that can lead to potential conflicts.
However, Mai'a Cross, dean's professor of political science, international affairs and diplomacy and director of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures at Northeastern, does not see companies or states taking advantage of the lack of regulations and starting something conflictual.
"The reason is because we have international norms and we have space diplomacy going on," says Cross, who was on the panel Monday.
Historically, interaction of humans in space, she says, has been highly cooperative and peaceful.
Space is a really difficult and expensive area to operate in, she says. The Artemis accords, for example, support creation of notifications and coordination zones, because landing two objects within a kilometer of each other can cause significant damage.
"It makes much more sense for us to continue this track record of a peaceful presence and cooperation in space," Cross says.
The example of Odysseus, created by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, shows that private companies can benefit from cooperative missions with such state entities as NASA, and as businesses progress into space they will be interested in protecting and growing their profits rather than getting involved in conflicts.
"They're more worried about safety and the ways in which they can operate," Cross says.
Michelle Hanlon, co-director of the Air and Space Law Program at the University of Mississippi School of Law and its Center for Air and Space Law who participated in the panel discussion, says that although there might be a robust framework for exploration of outer space, a stronger, specific and more detailed framework is required for activities on the moon.
She says the landscape of legal regulations of any activities on the moon is untouched, but she does not see any new treaty being signed anytime soon in the current political climate around the globe.
The Outer Space Treaty, a multilateral agreement signed in 1967, provides some guidelines, Hanlon says, rooted in the principles of free exploration and use of the celestial bodies exclusively for peaceful purposes.
Under current agreements nobody can claim territory on the moon by sovereignty, user occupation or other reasons. The treaty also stipulates that no nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction can be brought to outer space.
Cross does agree that there is a big risk and the world is at a critical juncture in terms of whether space might become weaponized. But so far, she says, governments have prevented weaponization of space from happening.
"It has almost reached the level of taboo," she says. "I do think that militaries will plan for worst case scenarios, such as a potential arms race in space, but this doesn't mean that it will happen."
In an ideal world, Cross says, there would be an international organization, a global space agency, that would enable everyone to share all of the resources and discoveries that come from space exploration.
For now, space diplomacy regulates the ongoing dialogue, Cross says, which involves communication, transparency and persuasion.
"If you're worried that an actor is taking something too far, diplomacy is a process where you actually try to curtail some of these misunderstandings that lead to self-fulfilling prophecies," she says.
The U.S. has been building up allies around the Artemis accords, a non-binding multilateral agreement to return humans to the moon by 2026, with the ultimate goal of expanding space exploration to Mars and beyond, signed by 36 countries but not Russia and China.
Russia and China have joined forces to build the International Lunar Research Station on the moon, welcoming several other countries that are not part of the Artemis accords into their alliance.
A controlled landing of a spacecraft on the lunar surface without significant damage to either the lander or the scientific instruments it carried, i.e. soft landing, is still a true challenge. Only five countries have been able to soft-land on the moon in the last 60 years: the United States, Russia (USSR), China, India and Japan. The moon has gravity but no atmosphere, which makes a gradual descent challenging because a spacecraft landing is entirely dependent on engines and not parachutes.
India's successful soft landing of Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft consisting of a lander and a rover on the moon in August broke the stronghold of Russia, China and the U.S., Hanlon says, and opened access to space to everyone at lesser cost.
"The achievement of India was fantastic, not only because it heralded the entry of a new major space actor, but also because it inspired all of the young people and the citizens of India to think about science and space," Cross says.
Humans should cooperate and engage in adventures, she says, push boundaries and get new knowledge from exploration together.
"Seeing Earth from space, it's fragile," Cross says. "We all live there. That's our only home."
Provided by Northeastern University
This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.
In the Wild West of corporate space travel, humans could return to the moon. But does it bring diplomatic challenges?
When Pittsburgh-based company Astrobiotic Technology launched its fuel-efficient, NASA-backed flight to the moon, hopes were high that it would be the first U.S. moon landing in more than 50 years. But a fuel leak resulted in the company pulling the plug on the landing and in NASA delaying its plans to return humans to the surface of the moon by a year as part of its Artemis program.
The failure of Astrobiotic's landing is a reminder that even though space exploration is now spearheaded by companies, not countries, the challenges of space travel remain the same. But Mai'a Cross, dean's professor of political science, international affairs and diplomacy, director of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures at Northeastern University, says it should also show the public how important space diplomacy is in what she says is a Wild West age of corporate moon launches.
"The fact that basically around half of the attempts to land a rover on the moon fail and yet people persist and try to achieve it, that something as straightforward as that is still challenging to achieve, it makes much more sense to cooperate than to try to weaponize and fight wars in space," Cross says.
When Cross sees a company like Astrobiotic launching its Peregrine lander, she sees the dual-edged nature of the current corporate-led space age.
There are clear reasons why the U.S. hasn't sent humans back to the moon in more than 50 years. It's not only technically challenging and expensive but risky. Infamous space shuttle disasters like Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 "changed the national mood and the willingness of U.S. presidents to put a lot of funding into NASA," Cross says. Operations shifted to non-human, robotic missions, which have continued "in a robust way" over the last couple of decades.
But the shift to private companies leading the way in space exploration has opened the doors for a flurry of innovation and the potential for sending humans back to the moon, Cross says, even as it creates regulatory challenges for governments around the world.
"It was really with the advent of the reusable rocket that SpaceX managed to create that opened up the landscape for thinking about sending humans back into space," Cross says. "So much of this has been so dependent on specific political leaders who are interested or not interested in space exploration, but once the private companies started really creating an ecosystem of their own and space travel became dramatically cheaper, this idea of going back to the moon became prominent."
About 80% of the space economy is now dominated by companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. Even though many of these companies receive funding from government agencies like NASA, governments don't have to rely on taxpayer dollars as much to fund space missions and can leverage innovative technologies created by companies that now have financial incentives to invest in space tech.
The involvement of the private sector also helps open the doors for more diplomatic conversations about the future of humanity in space. It makes Cross "cautiously optimistic" that the competitive, sometimes militaristic space race rhetoric won't dominate international discourse.
"When you see the most exciting, latest advancements, they are all cooperative," Cross says. "They increasingly involve private companies, and private companies don't want a war in space—they want profit out of space technologies."
"Space is such a difficult domain to exist in and take advantage of that it makes much more sense for countries of the world to cooperate in trying to explore further rather than to compete," Cross adds.
While space exploration wouldn't be where it is without corporations innovating, Cross says more companies attempting to launch to the moon and beyond complicates space diplomacy in key ways.
There is very little regulation when it comes to corporate space exploration. When the Outer Space Treaty was originally drafted by the United Nations in the 1960s, there was little indication that companies, not countries, would be charting the moon and stars.
"One of the issues that emerges is that private companies see space exploration as profitable because they can mine certain resources in space that are very rare on Earth, but the spirit of the original Outer Space Treaty was that you can't have ownership of anything in space," Cross says. "Now you have a situation where, if anything, the regulation points to private companies not being able to mine in outer space, but if we're going to have this space age that also benefits governments, they need to be able to do that to some extent."
To date, the Artemis Accords are the most serious effort to resolve diplomatic complications like this. If NASA wants Artemis launches, like Peregrine, to both get off the ground and succeed in the long term, Cross says the path forward might involve giving private companies a seat at the table—and not just when it comes to exploring space.
"Increasingly, governments are realizing that they need to bring private actors into the room as well when they're talking about the future of space and norms and regulations that need to emerge out of that," Cross says.
Provided by Northeastern University
This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.]
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