As Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others send thousands of satellites into orbit, growing numbers of companies are contemplating the vastly more complex task of landing on the moon. A spacecraft from Israel Aerospace Industries and the nonprofit SpaceIL crashed on the surface in 2019, and a lander from Japan’s Ispace Inc. suffered a similar fate in April. Later this year, two American companies, Astrobotic Technology Inc. of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines Inc. of Houston, each aim to give it a go.
Such private moon missions herald a new era of space activity, with various companies laying plans for what has long been the stuff of science fiction—growing crops in lunar greenhouses, mapping terrain with drones or extracting minerals from moondust. “We need strong commercial players” going to the moon, says Jonathan Geifman, chief executive officer of Helios Project Ltd., an Israeli startup that has signed up for a scheduled Ispace lunar landing in 2025 to test technology designed to produce oxygen and metals on the moon. “This is the beginning of a very long road.”
That prospect has many in the space community asking a fundamental question: Who sets the rules? The major spacefaring countries have yet to agree on the basics of regulating the commercialization of the moon’s resources. In the 1960s almost 100 nations agreed to the Outer Space Treaty, designed to prevent countries from making territorial claims or using celestial bodies for military purposes. The treaty declares that space should be used “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries,” but it makes just a brief mention of “non-governmental entities.” In 1979 the UN-brokered Moon Agreement went into more detail, but only 18 countries—none with extensive experience in space—embraced it.
