Exclusive: The Trump administration is drafting a legal blueprint for mining on the moon under a new U.S.-sponsored international agreement called the Artemis Accords
The agreement would be the latest effort to cultivate allies around NASA’s plan to put humans and space stations on the moon within the next decade, and comes as the civilian space agency plays a growing role in implementing American foreign policy. The draft pact has not been formally shared with U.S. allies yet.
The pact also aims to provide a framework under international law for companies to own the resources they mine, the sources said. The United States is a member of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and sees the “safety zones” as an implementation of one of its highly debated articles. It states that celestial bodies and the moon are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
As countries increasingly treat space as a new military domain, the U.S.-led agreement is also emblematic of NASA’s growing role as a tool of American diplomacy and is expected to stoke controversy among Washington’s space rivals such as China. NASA is investing tens of billions of dollars into the Artemis program, which calls for putting humans on the moon by 2024 and building up a “sustainable presence” on the lunar south pole thereafter, with private companies mining lunar rocks and subsurface water that can be converted to rocket fuel.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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