by In February, Uruguay became the 36th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a set of non-binding principles for responsible actions to spawn on the moon.
The Accords were established in 2020, designed by NASA, in collaboration with the US State Department. Since then, there has been a steady pace of countries concluding the Artemis Accords, a set of principles created to guide cooperation in space exploration among nations, including those participating in NASA’s Artemis Program to “restart” the moon.
The basic premise of the Agreements is to promote “good practices and norms of responsible behavior” in relation to lunar exploration. But that’s a tall order because of the turmoil of the moment. Space.com drew attention to specialists on how the Accords are playing out around the world, as well as within the eagle-eyed, small-law community.
Related: Artemis Accords: Why the international lunar exploration framework matters
High stakes require basic norms
“Make no mistake. Humanity is again in a space race,” said a space lawyer Michelle Hanlon“Permanent Observer” of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
Hanlon is the executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law, as well as the co-founder of For All Moonkind.
As for the 21st century space race, Hanlon told Space.com that this time around the stakes are much higher than when it was just the United States and the former Soviet Union trying to outdo each other. breach.
“Many talk about access to resources in the moon and beyond, but it is even more than that. We are talking about the governance framework that will provide the basis for all space activities for years to come,” said Hanlon.
The Artemis Accords, Hanlon said, are not a binding Treaty, they are a political commitment.
“It says that we, the undersigned, generally agree on some important aspects of space exploration. It also says that we have much more to negotiate and agree on, Hanlon said.
“The laws and norms that will be applied to space activities cannot be formulated in a vacuum; so instead, we find baselines – the Agreements – and we agree that these are a starting point,” the space lawyer said.
There are those who suggest that the Accords compete with China’s stated ambition to put the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS, on the moon. “And in the sense that they are,” observed Hanlon.
“It’s like picking teams for the pick-up soccer game,” Hanlon said. “But there is no reason, from a policy point of view, that the ILRS parties and the Artemis parties cannot agree on basic norms for space.”
Hanlon’s view is that “any nation that wants a say in the future of humanity should join the Unions”.
power competitors
John Hickman is a professor of international affairs at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. He said that Washington, DC’s Artemis Accords cannot be understood as international politics in isolation from Beijing’s ILRS enterprise.
“The major power rivals the US and China, and they are both alliances of space-exploiting states competing for the moon and cislunar space,” Hickman told Space.com.
Hickman said the Artemis Accords represent a “diplomatic attempt to overcome the flaws of the paper” in the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty. He specifically calls out the unappropriated language, “which is subject to various interpretations.”
Hickman has explained the non-representative nature of the Artemis Accords, doing so a few years ago in an opinion piece for E-International Relations magazine.
The Artemis Accords are likely to be a transient, political lunar phenomenon,” Hickman wrote in the op-ed.
Furthermore, Hickman concluded, the United States can withdraw from the Artemis Agreement “only as long as it absorbs some of the business risk associated with the sketchy international legality of offshore mining projects, and if crucially neither China nor Russia decide to abandon the 1967 Outer. Space Treaty by annexing their own slices of lunar territory.”
The imperfect
“I think the Artemis Conventions contribute to the progressive development of international space law,” said Rossana Deplano, associate professor at the University of Leicester Law School and co-director of the Center for European Law and Internationalization in the United Kingdom.
“My analysis of the Artemis Agreements, in particular, indicates that they are in full compliance with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is unanimously regarded as ‘the constitution for outer space.’
Deplano said the Artemis Agreements are just one of the ways space activists can ensure compliance with the Outer Space Treaty.
“The upcoming Sino-Russian International Lunar Research Station may offer a different way to conduct scientific research on the moon, including a different way to implement the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty,” Deplano said.
However, there are two imperfections in the Artemis Agreements, as explained in Deplano’s review in the International & Comparative Law Quarterly.
The flaws in the Accords, Deplano said, are that they do not have an express position on benefit sharing. Also, they do not refer to relevant mechanisms for resolving spatial disputes.
However, in general, Deplano said, the Artemis Agreements promote transparency and due diligence in scientific space missions.
Opposition is inevitable
“Since they were announced, the Artemis Agreements have been very successful,” said Almudena Azcárate Ortega, a researcher in space security within the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Support for the Accords is significant, despite their non-legally binding nature, Ortega told Space.com.
In addition, the willingness of States to accept them could serve as an indicator of State practice, said Ortega, which could contribute to the expression of the general principles covered in the Treaty on Outer Space “which were very clear and very much debated in the law of space and a multilateral field of policy.”
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Ortega said that Artemis Unions encouraged States to speak out against them, namely two of the other major space powers: Russia and China.
“Both countries have expressed concern that the Artemis Program is too US-centric, and that neither of these countries is likely to sign the Agreements,” Ortega said.
This “inevitable opposition” is due to substantive issues, Ortega said, but also due to the current geopolitical climate.
The warm-under-the-collar climate affects any measure or initiative that is presented to the international community, said Ortega, “and the Artemis Agreement is no exception.”
