Moonrise or Moonfall? Assessing Lunar policy trends and futures in a changing landscape
With six lunar missions launched this year – the most since 1969 – it is clear the Moon is no longer a distant prospect. Our closest celestial neighbourhood is fastly becoming a multi-faceted and politically complex arena for human activity, hopefully collaborative, potentially contested. To capture key trends in 2024, at the Lunar Policy Platform, we have surveyed of lunar stakeholders from across the globe in private, public, scientific, and academic spheres. Based on the feedback received, and our own expert assessment, we found three key trends for lunar policy have emerged from 2024:
A significant uptick in activity from a wider range of actors particularly with the physical arrival of commercial actors
A step forward in multilateral policy with the establishment of ATLAC at COPUOS despite a backdrop of deepening global geopolitical competition.
Significant progress is being made on developing permanent lunar orbital and surface infrastructure, confirming a shift away from transient exploration and towards sustained activity and presence.
While the development of the Moon is accelerating with a growing number of different actors, this acceleration would hardly bear any fruits without appropriate policies and standards preserving peace, ensuring safety and enabling sustainability. If uncontrolled, this rapid increase in activity may see the Moon move away from an area of cooperation, collaboration, and healthy competition towards a region where new flashpoints, conflicts, and political issues can arise, particularly as the global geopolitical environment intensifies. Stakeholders will need to work hard to keep the Moon from becoming the geopolitical arena that the Arctic has become, or the Antarctic is sliding towards.
Increasing activities from a wider array of actors
While commercial actors are set to become increasingly influential in the lunar environment, and their impact on policy discussions will probably grow throughout the decade, the specifics of how they may participate in these discussions remains somehow unclear and possibly contentious. One such contentious point currently looming between the Artemis Accord partners and ILRS partners is over the degree of engagement of non-governmental actors in multilateral forums, with the former supporting its increase and the latter remaining quite wary.
“The time for starting to think about how to deal with surface infrastructure, let alone orbital traffic, is now.”
Global regulatory norms around commercial entities also remain unresolved. Countries like China, Iran, Russia, and several Global South nations advocate for tighter control and oversight, while the US and other Western countries have traditionally adopted a more laissez-faire approach, which under the second Trump Administration could be loosened further, again setting the ground for a potential policy flashpoint.
Multilateralism in a geopolitically competitive globe
Significant strides have been made at the global level this year indicating that multilateral cooperation, and increasingly coordination, is recognised as important and desired.
The Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation (ATLAC) was established at UNCOPUOS to develop recommendations aimed at improving multilateral discussion related to lunar activities and to consider if any international mechanisms or infrastructure is required. It is not for establishing these mechanisms but for consulting on what might be needed.
This year also saw the world’s first UN Lunar Sustainability Conference, the Lisbon Declaration, and the UN Pact for the Future endorsed by state actors. The outcomes of these events found broad agreement among states on the immediate issues facing lunar activity; specifically 1) increased transparency and information sharing 2) consultation mechanisms for lunar activities, and 3) capacity building and interoperability.
Despite this, the increasing geopolitical competition on Earth, alongside the spectre of blocification, is spilling over into the Cislunar environment. Three key examples this year:
A Senior Chinese CNSA official, the Deputy Director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, published a paper directly calling the US a competitor in the lunar environment and specifically noting resources will be a point of contention between China, the US and other space-faring states. This of course is in the context of the last few years of US and NASA statements alleging China’s intention to seize Lunar resources and potentially restrict access to critical areas like the Lunar far side.
Conversely, China’s Chang’e 6 was accused of deploying a secret rover by Indian and Western sources. An example that highlights wider fears around the civil-military dual-use nature of most space technology and activity at a time when trust between competing states is low and transparency measures inadequate for Earth orbits, let alone cislunar operations.
After Chang’e 6, ESA has no plans for further cooperation with China, a position influenced by the trajectory of increasing China-Russia collaboration.
Progress, but fast enough?
ATLAC represents a significant first step toward establishing a multilateral framework for lunar governance, aiming to mitigate the potential risk of blocification. There has been historical reluctance among states to make meaningful progress on governance at the international level. No new binding multilateral treaties have been made since the 1970s, even on widely agreed issues such as information sharing and improved coordination. This has led to the establishment of so-called “minilateralist” initiatives like the US Artemis Accords and the China-Russia ILRS.
ATLAC may also present some answers for how commercial actors can participate in space governance and regulation discussions at the international level in terms of its mandate including the possibility for commercial actors to provide written inputs with their perspectives. This will depend on being invited, however, with ATLAC’s establishment having seen the manner of commercial actor engagement contested and compromise reached by shifting from “welcomed” to having to be invited.
Significant work remains to be done in addressing key policy issues at the multilateral level. Although many stakeholders consider the projected 100 lunar missions by 2030 unrealistic, even a fraction of these missions would represent a substantial increase in activity, especially from initiatives like the Artemis Programme’s Lunar Gateway and the ILRS, which aim to establish a sustained activity tempo. As these activities increase, they are likely to outpace the already strained multilateral policy frameworks, raising the risk of losing what consensus has been established since 1967 and hindering the development of shared norms.
“If uncontrolled, this rapid increase in activity may see the Moon move away from an area of cooperation, collaboration, and healthy competition towards a region where new flashpoints, conflicts, and political issues can arise”
ATLAC serves as a key example in this context. Its initial challenge lies in appointing its chairs and securing the endorsement of its multi-year work plan from COPUOS by 2025. Findings highlighting the areas that need coordination and policy mechanisms are anticipated in 2027-28 after which development and negotiation of those policies and mechanisms can begin to happen. By that time, however, lunar communications constellations and large-scale infrastructure initiatives will likely already be in progress. This underscores a growing need to transition from agreeing on broad principles to detailed frameworks for multilateral cooperation to cover emerging gaps and ensure national or bloc-driven policy and regulation do not lead to significant deviations or create conflict.
Permanent infrastructure development
This year has seen significant steps in the development of planned infrastructure, further marking the shift away from on-off exploration and towards focusing on establishing a sustained presence. Three key areas where this is seen are:
Communications
Intuitive Machines won a NASA contract providing up to $4.8bn to develop, launch, and operate a five-satellite communications and navigation constellation around the moon. The contract lasts 5 years, with a possible 5-year extension. Similarly in October Telespazio, heading a consortium, signed a contract with ESA to manage the development of a satellite constellation dedicated to providing navigation and communication services as part of the ESA’s Moonlight Initiative. China also launched Queqiao-2, its lunar satcom, for Chang’e 6, 7 and 8 in March, complimenting its Queqiao-1. The mission also served as a pathfinder for a planned Queqiao lunar satellite constellation, with two experimental CubeSats Tiandu-1 and Tiandu-2 flying in formation and testing communications and navigation payloads.
Lunar Railroad
DARPA in March selected Northrop Grumman to further develop the concept of a moon-based railroad network as part of the broader 10-year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study. The study will outline necessary resources, assess costs and risks, explore prototypes, and examine construction and operationalisation.
Nuclear Powerplants
Russia revealed this year that it and China are building a nuclear reactor for ILRS by 2035. Likewise, the UK Space Agency has funded a Rolls-Royce-led consortium for phase 2 to develop micro-nuclear reactors for lunar exploration to be delivered by 2029. NASA also this year wrapped up phase 1 of its Fission Surface Power Project, which started in 2022 and aims to deliver a nuclear reactor to the moon in the early 2030s. It has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, and IX (Intuitive Machines and X-Energy) so far. Phase 2 is set for 2025 and may see an increase in the number of commercial partners.
Permanent infrastructure, permanent problems?
Of the three categories, communications infrastructure is the furthest ahead, with a fairly rapid expansion of orbital communications infrastructure on the books. This poses an urgent policy challenge, as operational issues are already surfacing. Earlier this year, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute reported that its lunar orbiter had encountered 40 “red alarms” for potential collisions over the past 18 months, despite only around 17 satellites being in lunar orbit. Only this year they had to make 4 collision avoidance manoeuvres, two of which were performed blind due to a lack of mission information from the other objects in question.
Currently, there are no international mechanisms for coordination—no protocols determine who should manoeuvre first or how. Space agencies currently manage these situations through bilateral information-sharing and collaboration. However, the expected rise in satellites and diversity of actors will strain this informal coordination, especially as decision windows can already be as short as a single day.
The policy implications of permanent lunar surface infrastructure like nuclear power stations, and railroads have yet to be addressed, with no consensus on how to manage permanent occupation of physical space on the lunar surface and what does this mean for Outer Space Treaty-mandated free access to all areas of celestial bodies. Stakeholders may misjudge the urgency of resolving these issues, feeling them to be far-off matters. However, considering the consensus-building nature of UNCOPUOS, which has become increasingly vulnerable to geopolitical spillover in recent years alongside the long lead times, the time for starting to think about how to deal with surface infrastructure, let alone orbital traffic, is now.
2025 and Beyond
Looking ahead to 2025, the significant developments of 2024 underscore the urgent need to begin crafting lunar policy tools. While it may appear that there is ample time to establish internationally agreed norms, rules, and safeguards to safely and sustainably govern the increasing diversity of actors engaging in lunar activity, the reality is more complex. The lengthy lead times required for international multilateral action—where consensus is essential—highlight the challenge. “Hard law” approaches have largely stalled since the late 1970s and even current initiatives like ATLAC are expected to take 4–5 years to identify priority areas for discussing action and starting to build mechanisms from, assuming no geopolitical or political disruptions of course.
As lunar development rapidly approaches a critical juncture, the absence of appropriate policies and standards risks undermining peace, safety, and sustainability. Without proactive measures, this trajectory may lead to a hard landing instead of a sustainable takeoff.
At the Lunar Policy Platform, we are ready to do our part to support the development of these measures and enable a prosperous, peaceful, safe and sustainable future on the Moon. For this reason, we will dedicate our efforts and resources to supporting the initial development of the following three tools from our proposed Policy Decalogue:
Lunar Transparency Standards
Lunar Science & Ethics Principles
Lunar Resources Catalogue, Principles, and Standards
Any actor interested in contributing to this work is warmly encouraged to get in touch with us.
