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Eight countries have signed a pact to regulate lunar exploration, including human settlements on the moon’s surface.
Eight countries have signed an international pact for moon exploration called Artemis Accords, NASA announced Tuesday, a victory for the US space agency as it works to shape standards for building long-term settlements on the lunar surface. .
The agreements, named after NASA’s Artemis lunar program, seek to build on existing international space law by establishing “safe zones” that would surround future lunar bases to avoid conflict between the states operating there and by allowing that private companies own the lunar resources they extract. .
The United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates signed the bilateral agreements during an annual space conference on Tuesday after months of talks. The United States is working to cultivate allies for its plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.
“What we are trying to do is set standards of behavior that all nations can accept,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters. He said the agreements are consistent with a 1967 treaty that holds the moon and other celestial bodies exempt from national property claims.
“We are implementing the Outer Space Treaty with the purpose of creating the broadest, most inclusive and largest coalition of manned spaceflight in human history,” Bridenstine said.
The Trump administration and the governments of other countries with space travel see the moon as a strategic asset. The moon also has value for long-term scientific research that could enable future missions to Mars, activities that fall under an international space law regime widely regarded as outdated.
In 2019, US Vice President Mike Pence ordered NASA to return humans to the moon by 2024, cutting the agency’s previous timeline in half, and building a long-term human presence in the lunar surface.
NASA’s program, expected to cost tens of billions of dollars, will send robotic rovers to the surface of the moon before an eventual human landing. NASA also plans to build a Lunar Gateway, a space station that orbits the moon. The plans call for it to be built by a combination of NASA contractors and international partners.
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