How Artemis II, competing lunar blocs, and a fractured UN process are forcing the hardest question in international space law: can states defend what they build on the Moon without claiming it?
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On 6 April 2026, four astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft completed a seven-hour crewed flyby of the Moon — the first time human beings had ventured that close to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972.¹ Artemis II was, by any measure, a triumph of engineering and nerve. It was also, quietly, a declaration of intent. Within days of the mission’s splashdown on 10 April, geopolitical commentary across capitals from Washington to Beijing to Vienna converged on the same uncomfortable observation: the Moon is being divided before anyone has agreed on the rules for sharing it.
That tension — between the physical reality of competing lunar programmes and the legal fiction of a shared celestial commons — sits at the heart of what may become the defining international law dispute of the next decade, since the practical measures states will inevitably take to protect their lunar installations and resource operations may, in effect if not in name, constitute the very territorial appropriation that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) forbids. This hypothesis is already being tested, in real time, by events on the ground — or rather, in low lunar orbit.
Two Moons, One South Pole
The geography of the lunar crisis is specific. The Moon’s south polar region contains permanently shadowed craters rich in water ice — a resource of enormous strategic value, since water can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant, potentially turning the Moon into a forward logistics hub for deep space operations.² The elevated crater rims nearby receive near-continuous sunlight, reducing the lethal thermal swings that degrade lunar hardware. There is, in other words, a very small number of very good sites on the Moon. And two separate blocs of nations are racing toward them on incompatible legal footing.
On the one side: the Artemis coalition, now comprising 62 signatories including the most recent, Latvia, which joined on 20 April 2026.³ The Artemis Accords commit signatories to transparency, interoperability, and — critically — the establishment of “safety zones” around ongoing operations to prevent “harmful interference.” Section 11 of the Accords invokes OST Article IX’s “due regard” obligation as its legal basis, but critics have long argued that zones which exclude other actors from specific lunar locations are, functionally, a form of occupation — the very thing Article II of the OST prohibits “by any other means.”⁴
On the other side: the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), the China-Russia initiative that as of April 2025 had attracted 17 states and over 50 research institutions.⁵ In late March 2026, the Russian Academy of Sciences approved the concept for Russia’s segment of the ILRS, formalising Moscow’s commitment to the joint project.⁶ China, meanwhile, has confirmed that Chang’e-7 — targeting the south pole to search for water ice — is scheduled for launch in August 2026.⁷ A crewed Chinese lunar landing is planned by 2030, with a basic ILRS model to follow by 2035.⁸ Neither Russia nor China has signed the Artemis Accords, and neither acknowledges an obligation to respect safety zones established under a framework they regard as a unilateral American construct.
The collision risk is not metaphorical, it is topographical. Both programmes are targeting the same narrow band of real estate at the lunar south pole. As “The Space Review” observed earlier this month, “operational experience, site characterisation data, and infrastructure placement all matter” — and “a company or state does not need to claim ownership over a lunar region if it can establish enough infrastructure, enough hazard rationale, and enough diplomatic expectation that others keep away.”⁹
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Into this geopolitical pressure cooker, President Trump dropped Executive Order 14369, “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” signed on 18 December 2025.¹⁰ The Order calls for Americans’ return to the Moon by 2028, a permanent lunar outpost by 2030, and — in language that would have seemed fantastical a generation ago — nuclear reactors on the lunar surface by 2030. It also directs the administration to ensure “the ability to detect, characterise, and counter the full range of security threats to U.S. space interests.” The phrase is artfully vague. But it frames the protection of lunar activities explicitly as a matter of national security, not merely operational safety.
Japan has moved in a similar direction. Its Ministry of Defense released the first Space Domain Defense Guidelines in July 2025, establishing satellite protection capabilities, mission assurance doctrine, and counter-C4I (command, control, communications, and intelligence) capabilities as pillars of national security.¹¹ The Guidelines explicitly contemplate operational measures to protect space assets against interference — a framework that, as lunar operations mature, will inevitably be read to cover surface installations as well. Japan simultaneously participates in the Artemis programme, has national space resources legislation in force, and is a co-lead on the LUPEX rover mission (with India) now planning to prospect for water ice at the south pole no earlier than 2028.¹²
So, the questions legal scholars, government advisors and counsel best solve very quickly are, under what conditions does a “security measure” protecting a lunar base, a resource extraction site, or a water ice processing facility cross the line into conduct that, as a Frontiers in Political Science study published in January 2026 put it, “gradually undermine[s] the non-appropriation principle… rather than reinforcing it”?¹³ Who decides? And what happens when there is no agreed answer before the first operational confrontation?
Vienna, April 2026: The UN Tries to Keep Up
The COPUOS Legal Subcommittee held its 65th session in Vienna from 15-22 April 2026 — an almost cinematic coincidence with the final days of the Artemis II mission. With 110 member states in the room, the Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities convened a pre-session on April 13 and presented its updated draft set of recommended principles for space resource activities, produced by Chair Steven Freeland and Vice-Chair Ayman Mahmoud Mohamed Ahmed.¹⁴ The European Union, in its formal statement to the Subcommittee, welcomed the progress and noted that the May 2026 Space Resources Week in Luxembourg would provide “multidisciplinary insights” into the Working Group’s continued deliberations.¹⁵
That is, to put it diplomatically, a measured response to an urgent situation. The Working Group’s mandate runs to 2027, and its draft principles, while significant in their aspiration to rise “above their decades-old legal and political impasse,” as a January 2026 EJIL:Talk! analysis characterised them,¹⁶ are recommendations — not binding law. More pointedly, they address resource activities. They do not yet directly tackle the harder question at the thesis’s core: not whether states may extract resources, but whether — and how far — they may defend the infrastructure through which they do so.
The gap matters because operational timelines are already outrunning governance. As a Space Policies Institute analysis published on 6 April 2026 noted with unsettling clarity: “crewed Artemis landings from 2028 will establish safety zone precedent before ATLAC [the Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation] reports in 2027.”¹⁷ The precedent will be set before the principles are adopted. Practice will precede law — and first-mover norms, once embedded in infrastructure and investment, are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge.
Safety Zones and the Vocabulary of Possession
The legal architecture of this problem is worth inhabiting for a moment, because the words matter enormously. Article II of the OST prohibits national appropriation “by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” The drafters’ catch-all phrase — “any other means” — was deliberate. It was intended to close loopholes. Fifty-nine years later, the loophole being tested is operational: a state that deploys a nuclear power reactor, a water-ice processing plant, and a crewed habitat at one of a handful of viable south-pole sites, surrounded by a declared safety zone of operationally justified radius, has not claimed sovereignty. It has, however, made that site functionally unavailable to others — perhaps permanently. Open Lunar‘s 6 April 2026 analysis of “Designated Lunar Areas” framed this tension as lucidly as any legal commentary has managed: “reserving an area exclusively for one actor, even under the guise of safety, constitutes appropriation if it prevents others from accessing that area indefinitely.”¹⁸
The Antarctic Treaty System offers, perhaps, a helpful parallel. Its Article IV freezes territorial claims for the Treaty’s duration — a model of constructive legal ambiguity that allowed states to operate in proximity without resolving their underlying disputes. Whether a similar “freeze” architecture is available for the Moon — and if so, what institutional form it would take — is among the most consequential unanswered questions in contemporary international law.¹⁹
Who Loses If the Question Goes Unanswered
Every jurisdiction that authorises lunar surface activities — or aspires to — has a direct stake in the outcome.
The EU Space Act, proposed in June 2025 and currently navigating the legislative process, mandates disposal plans, collision avoidance obligations, and real-time data transmission for spacecraft, but conspicuously contains no provisions limiting liability for space object damage and no liability cap for state recourse claims against operators.²⁰ That silence will matter the moment a safety-zone incident triggers a damage claim.
Australia — the only state party to both the Moon Agreement and the Artemis Accords — faces a version of this dilemma in uniquely acute form: its own legal commitments are, on a strict reading, irreconcilable. Its 2025 reforms to the Space (Launches and Returns) Act 2018 streamlined domestic regulation while leaving the deeper treaty tension untouched.²¹
Luxembourg, which has staked its economic future on becoming Europe’s hub for space resource activities, sits in an equally complex position. Its 2017 space resources law grants operators ownership rights over extracted materials — a provision that presupposes the legal clarity to operate and defend the infrastructure that does the extracting. That clarity does not yet exist in international law. The Space Resources Week scheduled for Luxembourg in May 2026 will bring together the global space resources community at precisely the moment when the need for that framework is most visible and least satisfied.²²
Space.com captured the broader mood in a February 2026 feature that asked, simply, whether current space law can handle the new space age.²³ The answer, as most serious practitioners privately concede, is: not yet, and not without deliberate effort. Considering the events unfolding before our eyes, the question is not whether the law must evolve. It is whether the evolution can happen fast enough, and with enough normative coherence, to prevent the first operational conflict on the lunar surface from being resolved not by treaty interpretation, but by the weight of installed infrastructure and the implicit threat of force.
A Thesis as a Mirror Held Up to a Crisis
The author of this article is currently working on a thesis that would create a necessary new legal framework for defending lunar activities, addressing security, safety zones, and the non-appropriation principle in international space law.
Academic research does not move at the speed of rocket programmes. But the best of it does something operational analysis cannot: it holds the conceptual architecture of a problem steady long enough to examine its load-bearing joints. By anchoring the defence-of-activities debate in rigorous doctrinal analysis — treaty interpretation under the Vienna Convention, travaux préparatoires of the OST, comparative regime study — and by tracking its evolution against live state practice at UNCOPUOS, in national legislation, and in the operational choices of the Artemis and ILRS coalitions, it sets out to produce what the field most urgently lacks: a structured, legally precise account of where the line between lawful protection and unlawful appropriation actually lies.
That account will not, by itself, stop a confrontation at the south pole. But it may provide the conceptual tools without which any attempt at negotiated settlement would be incoherent. In a domain where the stakes are simultaneously commercial, strategic, and existential — where water ice is also rocket fuel, and where a solar panel array on a crater rim is also a military asset — precision matters. The Moon, Artemis II reminded us this month, is no longer a legal abstraction. It is a destination. The law had better be ready when we arrive.
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1. NASA, “Artemis II Flight Day 4: Deep-Space Flying, Lunar Flyby Prep,” April 3, 2026; Space.com, “Artemis 2 Splashdown,” April 10, 2026.
2. The Space Review, “Strategic celestography and lunar competition: Artemis, CLEP, and the south polar region,” April 12, 2026.
3. NASA, “Artemis Accords,” updated April 20, 2026 (Latvia as 62nd signatory).
4. Open Lunar Foundation, “Safety Zones for Lunar Activities under the Artemis Accords,” 2022; Kluwer Law, “Safety Zones for Sustainability on the Moon,” Air and Space Law, 2023.
5. China National Space Administration / Moon Village Association, “China, Russia reveal roadmap for international moon base,” October 2025.
6. TASS, “Russian lunar station segment creation under project with China greenlighted,” March 31 / April 1, 2026.
7. Asia Times, “US-China space race shifts into a higher lunar gear,” April 9, 2026.
8. TV BRICS, “Chinese scientists present advanced technologies for construction of lunar research station,” December 28, 2025.
9. New Space Economy, “Lunar Development or Lunar Exploitation? The Business Fight Over the Moon’s Future,” April 2, 2026; The Space Review, April 12, 2026.
10. White House Fact Sheet, “President Donald J. Trump Launches a New Age of American Space Achievement,” December 17, 2025; Greenberg Traurig, “Executive Order Ensuring American Space Superiority,” January 25, 2026.
11. Institute of Geoeconomics, “Japan’s Space Domain Defense Guidelines: Background, Key Points,” August 13, 2025; Japan Ministry of Defense, Outline of Space Domain Defense Guidelines, August 7, 2025.
12. NASA, “NASA’s Water-Hunting Tool Will Help Scout Moon’s South Pole,” March 23, 2026.
13. Frontiers in Political Science, “Colonizing the moon in the post-terrestrial era? Challenges for the governance of lunar activities,” January 28, 2026.
14. UNOOSA, LSC 2026 session page and Working Group documents, April 13–22, 2026; UNOOSA, Updated draft set of recommended principles for space resource activities, March 24, 2026.
15. EU Delegation to Vienna International Organisations, “EU Statement at General Debate of the 65th Session of COPUOS Legal Subcommittee,” April 14, 2026.
16. EJIL:Talk!, “UNCOPUOS and the Quiet Transformation of Space Resources Law,” January 15, 2026.
17. Space Policies Institute, “Lunar Safety Zones: When Deconfliction Becomes Possession,” April 6, 2026.
18. Open Lunar, “Regulation Without Appropriation: Building Coordination Infrastructure for the Moon,” April 6, 2026.
19. JD Supra, “The South Pole and the Law – The Future of Antarctica Treaties,” March 30, 2026.
20. Willkie Farr & Gallagher, “Shooting for the Stars: An Ambitious New EU Space Act,” 2026 edition.
21. Bird & Bird, “Space and Satellite Wrap-Up — Legal and Regulatory Developments in 2025,” January 6, 2026.
22. EU Delegation Vienna, EU Statement, LSC 65th session, April 14, 2026.
23. Space.com, “Can current space law handle the new space age?” February 8, 2026.