KTU researcher: how to govern lunar industrialization?

Florian Rabitz is a Chief Researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities of KTU.

The Moon is the next frontier in the economic development of outer space. The United States, China, Russia, and South Korea have all committed to construct permanent lunar outposts during the 2030s and 2040s. A growing private industry shows significant commercial interest in lunar infrastructure development and resource extraction. Yet international rules on lunar activities remain underdeveloped.

The Moon has been a focal point of human imagination across the ages. Yet within the next decade or two, its face might change forever. This is due to the increasing political and commercial interest in the development of large-scale infrastructure on the surface of the Moon. Lunar ice mining could provide water and oxygen for astronauts, and hydrogen fuel for spaceships.

The moon as the next economic frontier

Solar power installations at the so-called peaks of eternal light could provide electricity around the clock. Satellites in lunar orbit, and railroads on the surface, would grant sophisticated capacities for navigation and logistics. Nuclear-powered data centers, hotels, and industrial facilities for converting lunar regolith into construction materials are other options that are presently being explored.

Nobody quite knows how feasible these and other proposals are. Considering the massive strides that we have witnessed in the development of space technology, and in the growth of the space industry in recent years, their feasibility is rapidly increasing. As a new economic frontier is opening up, questions of governance are becoming more urgent.

So far, however, international rules have not kept up with technological and economic developments in outer space. International space law mostly consists of a handful of international treaties adopted from the 1960s to the 1980s. Add to that a wide range of non-binding decisions and resolutions adopted by various United Nations bodies, as well as numerous private sector initiatives addressing diverse technical issues of outer space activities. While outer space governance is gradually increasing in complexity, glaring deficits remain when it comes to the regulation of lunar activities.

For one, the Moon is an Area Beyond National Jurisdiction. As with other celestial bodies, it cannot be appropriated via sovereignty or private property claims, and its use must be for the benefit of all countries. These two provisions are at the core of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which remains until today the heart of international space law.

The 1979 Moon Agreement goes one step further, declaring the Moon as the common heritage of humankind that is, in principle, subject to international oversight. How private and governmental actors will comply with these and other provisions of international space law as the lunar gold rush intensifies is anyone’s guess. Without a significant overhaul of international rules, it is likely that lunar industrialization will benefit a handful of countries and a handful of industries, while possibly causing irreversible environmental damage to the celestial focal point of human culture.

Lunar governance system is needed

We are seeing early signs of where lunar activities are heading: Rapid growth in private missions has led to the crash of several landing vehicles in the past few years, littering the surface of the Moon with trash that is unlikely to be recovered for now. We are also seeing lunar burials, with cremated ashes being sent to the Moon in exchange for a hefty fee, despite the protests of indigenous peoples against what they consider to be essentially sacrilegious.

A temporary freeze on lunar activities, except for those with a clear scientific rationale, offers the best way forward for the moment. Governments need time to develop international rules on space safety, space sustainability, environmental impact assessment, and on the question of how the various benefits resulting from large-scale lunar activities should be distributed.

This cannot happen overnight. Reducing the political and commercial pressure via a temporary ban would grant breathing room for the world to try and come up with a lunar governance system that is fair, effective, and sustainable. As we are already in acute danger of ruining this planet, let’s go easy on the Moon for now.

Florian Rabitz, Inga Popovaitė and Vidas Vilčinskas are researchers at KTU’s Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities working on the project “The Transnationalization of Outer Space”, funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (project no. P-MIP-23-234).