He also proposed a comprehensive legal framework for lunar mining, called the Artemis Agreements, encouraging citizens to exploit the Earth’s natural satellite and other commercial celestial bodies.
The directive classified space as “a legally and physically unique area of human activity” instead of “global common goods”, paving the way for the exploitation of the moon without any international treaty.
Led by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Artemis Agreements were signed in October by Australia, Canada, England, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy and the United Arab Emirates.
“Unfortunately, the Trump administration has exacerbated a threat to national security and risked the economic opportunity it hoped to secure in outer space by failing to hire Russia or China as potential partners,” said Elya Taichman, a former Republican lawmaker. Michelle Lujan Grisham. In this regard: Will France abandon nuclear energy?
“Instead, the Artemis agreements led China and Russia to increased cooperation in space out of fear and necessity,” he wrote.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos was the first to speak, comparing politics with colonialism.
“There have already been examples in history when a country decided to start seizing territories in its interest – everyone remembers what happened,” Sergei Saveliev, Roscosmos’ deputy director general for international co-operation, said at the time.
China, which made history in 2019 by becoming the first country to launch a probe in the far part of the moon, has chosen a different approach. Since the Artemis agreements were first announced, Beijing has approached Russia to build a monthly research base together.
President Xi Jinping also assured that China planted its flag on the moon, which happened in December 2020, more than 50 years after the United States reached the lunar surface.
Next Wild West?
Historically, China has been excluded from the US-led international space order. It is not a partner in the International Space Station (ISS) program, and a US legislative provision has limited NASA’s ability to cooperate with it in space since 2011.
“America and China should cooperate in space,” say policy experts Anne-Marie Slaughter and Emily Lawrence. “If the United States managed to coordinate with the Soviet Union on space policy during the Cold War, they can now find a way to cooperate with China,” they note.
Slaughter, a former director of political planning at the U.S. State Department for 2009-2011, believes President Joe Biden’s team should distance itself from Trump’s agreements and take a new course in the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Peace. outer space.
“Biden can restore some of America’s global legitimacy by working to establish a multilateral framework, negotiated with all relevant parties that protect areas of common interest, while providing internationally accepted trade opportunities,” Slaughter and Lawrence wrote.
They do not say that it will be an easy task, but a necessary one. “Without an international framework that includes all major space-traveling countries, the moon could become the next Wild West.”
The race is on. It’s been a while. So much so that NASA has set out a $ 28 billion plan to launch an unmanned mission around the month in 2021, followed by a manned moon flight in 2023, then a monthly landing in 2024.
NASA plans to build a permanent base in lunar orbit called the Gateway, similar to the ISS. From there, the agency hopes to build a base on the lunar surface, where it can extract the resources needed to fly the first astronauts to Mars. Related to: A glimmer of hope for the oil markets
Russia has been pursuing plans to return to the moon in recent years, potentially traveling further into outer space.
Roscosmos unveiled plans to establish a monthly base in 2018 over the next two decades in 2018, while President Vladimir Putin has promised to launch a mission to Mars “very soon.”
The United States, Russia and China are not the first and only nations to jump on the monthly mining train.
Luxembourg, one of the first countries to focus on the exploitation of celestial bodies, created a Space Agency (LSA) in 2018 to stimulate the exploration and commercial use of resources from Near Earth.
Unlike NASA, the LSA does not conduct research or launch. Its aim is to accelerate collaborations between economic project leaders in the space sector, investors and other partners.
The small European nation announced in November that it intends to set up a European Space Resource Innovation Center (ESRIC) to lay the foundations for the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources.
Luxembourg also supports a program to start extracting resources from the Moon by 2025.
The mission, responsible for the European Space Agency in partnership with ArianeGroup, intends to extract billions of dollars worth of waste-free nuclear energy.
Billions of dollars market
Both China and India have launched ideas on extracting helium-3 from Earth’s natural satellite. Beijing has already landed on the moon twice in the 21st century, and will have several missions.
In Canada, most initiatives came from the private sector. One of the most popular was the Northern Ontario-based Deltion Innovations partnership with Moon Express, the first American private space exploration firm to be granted government permission to travel beyond Earth’s orbit.
Space companies are working on plans to exploit asteroids, track space debris, build the first human settlement on Mars, and billionaire Elon Musk’s own plan for an unmanned mission to the red planet.
Geologists, as well as emerging companies such as Planetary Resources in the US, a pioneer in the space mining industry, believe that asteroids are packed with iron ore, nickel and precious metals at much higher concentrations than those found on Earth, constituting a valued market. in billions.
On December 5, 2020, a metal asteroid 140 miles wide and worth about $ 10,000 billion made the closest approach to our planet.
“With NASA and other companies investing and developing nuclear power for use in space travel and colonization, the reality of mining asteroids is closer than ever,” said Bob Goldstein, CEO of US Nuclear Corp.
With proven fusion energy experiments, US Nuclear and Magneto-Inertial Fusion Technologies (MIFTI) believe they are just a few years away from building the world’s first fusion energy generator.
Fusion power releases up to four times more energy than fission and uses light, cheap, safe and durable fuel.
A spacecraft with fusion propulsion systems could reach the asteroid belt in just seven months. According to Goldstein, it could be strong enough to transport the asteroid into Earth orbit, where it would be much more efficient to extract it and transport these valuable resources to Earth.
From Mining.com
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