“Here, am I floating ’round my tin can
Far, above the Moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do”
— Space Oddity, David Bowie
As we’re approaching 2026, it feels like we’re headed for a dystopian 1984. Lo and behold! Some convoluted astral phenomenon might drag the temporal slider farther back to 1969. No, the hippies aren’t coming back. Instead, a rekindled gravitational fever is at play here. The law of attraction. Some distorted tidal echo is whispering electromagnetic waves of solitude and longing. Look, up! It comes from the dark skies above, past the low Earth orbit with its satellites and space junk. The sleepless mirror, the Moon, our ‘sentimental friend’, is calling us back.
In what constitutes a classic “history repeats itself” plot, space race and flag planting are back in fashion. The red thread in this not-so-sci-fi story, is NASA’s Artemis program. Under the moniker of yet another Olympian deity, NASA plans to bring humans back to the Moon’s surface by 2027, for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The Artemis program involves three separate lunar trips and is part of the long-term plan to advance space exploration and establish a permanent base on the moon — you heard it — a stepping stone for future voyages to Mars and beyond.
Moon exploration in the 21st century presents a different geopolitical situation at the roundtable. Though the competition between the USA and China is the main pull, the situation is more complex than the 1960s space race that was marked by the USA-VS-USSR dualistic rivalry in the Cold War. Since the last manned landing in 1972, a range of governmental space agencies and private/commercial missions have entered the race and achieved successful landings. Besides, the privatization of the space industry, partly funded by tech billionaires, suggests a future scenario closer to a lawless gold rush (they got minerals on the Moon!) with laser guns and rovers, than a regulated collaboration for humanity’s sake. The situation clearly demands a closer look.
The Apollo generation
Let’s quickly recap what happened the last time around. On July 20, 1969, crewmembers of the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, landed the Lunar Module Eagle spacecraft on Tranquility Base at approximately 20:17:40 UTC, thus becoming the first humans to ever set foot on a celestial body other than Earth. This historical event happened just a few hundred kilometres away from another lunar impact, a less famous and fortunate one. Just a few hours later, the Soviet mission Luna 15, an unmanned attempt to bring lunar soil back to Earth, lost contact due to a malfunction and crashed in the lunar Sea of Crises. Spanning the Cold War era of tension between the rival powers, the USA and USSR, the outcome of the Space Race showed which nation had superior spaceflight capability. Though the Soviet Union won many “firsts”, such as the first artificial satellite (Sputnik), the first animal in orbit (Laika), and the first ever human spaceflight (Yuri Gagarin), the success of Apollo 11 consecrated the United States’ technological superiority and concluded the Space Race.
Though conspiracy theories tainted the legitimacy of the landings, the Apollo era had a profound and lasting impact on culture and society, and stimulated advancements in science and engineering. Remarkably, the multiple Apollo voyages brought back a “ton” (382 kg to be precise) of lunar rocks that helped scientists investigate geochemical similarities with crust of the Earth. Also, the gathered data and samples provided evidence in support of the theory of Moon’s formation after a giant impact on early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. In other words, the two celestial bodies are similar and might share a past collision, but we barely scratched the surface.
Natural resources
Yet the one space agency that has recently started scratching the lunar surface is the Chinese national space agency, China National Space Administration (CNSA). Over the past five years, the CNSA has successfully retrieved lunar samples from both the near and the far side of the Moon. The far side remains largely unexplored and reveals a different geological history and conformation. These recent missions come at a time when mining rare minerals is beginning to shape the economic ambitions of countries. On Earth, China already controls the world’s largest reserves of rare earth and critical materials, essential for manufacturing hardware components in mobile phones, wind turbines, and weapons. In this context, the exploration of lunar resources and the militarization of space are becoming increasingly pressing questions, also shaped by geopolitical tensions.
Digging deeper into the lunar soil is among the objectives of the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a Chinese-Russian initiative to build an experimental research facility on the Moon by 2035. The project even included plans for a nuclear reactor that would power the facilities during the freezing two-week lunar nights. Constructions will only begin after a series of preparatory missions to explore and build the foundations for a permanent settlement. Planned for 2026, the Chang’e 7 mission will target the Moon’s South Pole to analyse the deposits of ice, a precious asset for fuel, life support, and infrastructure. Space assets are the cornerstone of future explorations, economic activities, and defence capabilities.
Space warfare
“Space is the world’s newest warfighting domain,” Trump said in his speech at Joint Base Andrews back in 2019 after signing legislation to establish a new army service: the U.S. Space Force. This is one of three space forces that include the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Aerospace Force and the Russian Space Force. In a military test in 2021, the latter targeted and destroyed its own Kosmos-1408 satellite with a direct-ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT) missile. The crash scattered around 1,500 pieces of space debris in the low Earth orbit, posing serious threats to other orbiting objects, such as the International Space Station (ISS), and creating shrapnel fields that will hamper the deployment of new satellites. DA-ASAT is part of what is known as a kinetic kill vehicle (KKV), a category of space weapons that builds kinetic energy to attain supersonic, or even hypervelocity, speed before colliding against its target. Space weapons can also be aimed at targets on Earth by using kinetic bombardment, also nicknamed “rods from God”, that are effective nuclear bunker busters. Given the high risks involved, many countries have called for bans and regulations.
Space law
Over the years, several self-bans and international treaties have been signed by many spacefaring nations to regulate the use of space and ensure safety. The Outer Space Treaty is among the most important agreements to define the legal framework, principles, and procedures constituting space law. Although it prohibits the use of nuclear weapons in space or the creation of military bases, the treaty does not expressly ban all military activities in space and allows for military space forces. The Artemis Accords (2020) have built on such groundwork and, among the key principles, state that all activities conducted under the Artemis program must be carried out “exclusively for peaceful purposes and in accordance with relevant international law”. However, when it comes to resource ownership, the waters get murky and the legislation ambiguous. The Outer Space Treaty, written during the Cold War, focused on arms controls without addressing the newer space activities, such as lunar and asteroid mining. Some suspect that the USA might be pushing for private ownership of space resources, a solution welcomed by commercial agencies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. It is evident that next years will be instrumental to define and negotiate new international agreements.
Back we go
At this point, the legacy of Apollo feels like something of a distant analogue past, frozen in images of cathode-ray tube television, bulky camera apparatus, and chart records printed on paper and manually marked with ballpoint pens. An iconography that is in striking contrast to the recent technological sophistication of robotic rovers on Mars, like Curiosity, or the YouTube live streaming from the ISS, where eloquent astronauts explain the nuts and bolts of space-designed espresso machines, sleeping capsules and toiletries. Movies have also contributed to mutating the aesthetic of spacefaring. So, the revolutionary and artistic ambience of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) has given way to the zero-gravity realism, smoothened by CGI, of recent movies like Gravity (2013) and First Man (2018).
While the Artemis era will likely not match the level of public engagement of Apollo — it is estimated that one-fifth of the world’s population watched the live transmission of the Apollo 11 moonwalk — the 21st-century space race will be critical to establish a new global order and set the foundations for future voyages to deep space. The challenges of this generation include promoting fair and sustainable opportunities on the Moon, adhering to the principles of international law, and encouraging human-centred debates and legislation to limit space monopolies and the escalation of global tensions.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the Moon!
“And now she turns her perfect face
Upon the world below.”
— The Moon, Emily Dickinson
