Five years after the Artemis Agreement was established, key rules for operating on the moon remain unresolved, including how to respond to emergencies and how to define “safety zones” around lunar activities.
As NASA gives up to launch its Artemis 2 mission — which will return astronauts to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in over half a century, which assumes humans will later return to the lunar surface – work continues on the ground to figure out how to deal with the inherent dangers of lunar exploration.
The article continues below
“In a lunar scenario, if there’s an emergency, whether it’s a (Artemis Treaty) signatory or not, how do you behave in that scenario?” said Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, UAE Minister of Sports and Chancellor of the Higher Colleges of Technology. The results of the discussions were not shared, although details are expected to follow as the signatories continue their work.
Artemis Accord’s signatories sign up to key principles, one of which is interoperability. This means that partners with NASA The Artemis program should aim to develop and support systems that can work together with existing infrastructure, with the aim of increasing the safety of space operations.
Cooperation between Artemis Agreement signatories and non-participants during an emergency can be much more complicated politically, in terms of communication and technology compatibility.
Asked whether there had been approaches to other lunar actors such as e.g China and Russia about joining the Artemis agreements, Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, said there had been none, quoting limitations under which NASA operates regarding engagement with these parties.
Another area of focus and complexity is security zones. Under the Artemis agreements, safe zones are the de facto mechanism to avoid interference. These suggest establishing buffer areas around lunar operations, such as landers, habitats or resource extraction sites, to prevent harmful interference. But defining a safety zone and its area is challenging.
“What a safe zone is is not well defined,” Al Falasi said. “(They) can be small, can be big. We have to be very specific about it.”
With both the US and China looking to send crewed and robotic missions to the moon’s south pole, which has notable key locations in terms of solar illumination and access to areas that could potentially host water icewill such questions have to be answered to avoid problems and disagreements or worse.
The safe zone concept is said to be part of avoiding “harmful interference”, Al Falasi noted, and the difficulty of defining this. “There is some interference every day, but what is harmful interference?” Safe zones and defining harmful interference are “the basis for ensuring non-interference,” Al Falasi said.
Al Falasi said the meetings included exploring potential scenarios involving countries and private companies, both within and outside the Artemis Agreement framework. The specifics of the scenarios were shared, except for one of the scenarios that simulated an emergency.
This lack of specificity comes after years of work on the Artemis agreement, which has more than 60 signatories. And a big question is whether these zones are temporary buffers, and whether they would effectively provide something equivalent ownership of the moon.
Other parties outside the Artemis Agreements – such as China and Russia, which have agreed to establish the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) and coordinating bodies—may argue that these could become territorial claims in disguise, especially as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits the acquisition of territory on celestial bodies. But as activities on the moon accelerate, both Artemis Accords participants and non-signatories will need to find common ground.
