'Artemis mission cannot lead to interplanetary Wild West’

 

 

Professor Mike Lockwood said: “The commercialisation of Artemis II is mainly in the form of the services supplied to support the mission, but there is talk about the Artemis programme paving the way for mining of the moon. This would be contrary to international law. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that nobody can own a part of a planet or moon and that nobody should contaminate it. These restrictions apply to companies as well as nation states.  We do not want a frontier mentality and a lack of sustainable thinking to produce an interplanetary Wild West.

“Artemis has considerable geopolitical implications. It is an international collaboration, but it’s not global. Importantly, it doesn’t include China or Russia. The mission presents an opportunity to forge a new international space treaty that is urgently needed because of the escalating problem of junk in near-Earth space.

 

"There are clear parallels to the Antarctica Treaty, signed in 1961 to prevent all territorial claims on the continent, protect it and prevent its use for military purposes.  That agreement was signed 50 years after the first explorations of the continent,  in the wake of two devastating global wars. It is now 50 years since the first exploration of the moon but the world today is not in such a cooperative mood, so a similar treaty may be more difficult to agree.”