On 25 September 2026, San Marino became the 76th signatory to the Artemis Accords — a milestone that, on its surface, reads as a triumph of American diplomatic reach. Yet the same week, China's International Lunar Research Station programme quietly advanced its own technical coordination framework, drawing in partners across Asia, Africa, and Latin America who have declined to sign the Accords. The Moon, humanity's nearest celestial neighbour, is becoming the first extraterrestrial theatre of geopolitical bloc formation. And the governance frameworks being constructed today — in bilateral agreements, in COPUOS working groups, in national space laws — will determine whether humanity's off-world future is shared or contested.
This is not a distant problem. Commercial lunar missions are scheduled for the late 2020s. Permanent crewed outposts are planned for the early 2030s. The window for establishing durable, inclusive governance architecture is narrowing rapidly, and the institutional tools available to the international community were designed for a world that no longer exists.
The Architecture of a Divided Moon
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) established the foundational principle that the Moon is the "province of all mankind" — a commons, not a territory. The 1979 Moon Agreement attempted to operationalise this principle by establishing a regime for the equitable sharing of lunar resources, but it attracted only 18 ratifications, none from any major spacefaring nation. The result was a legal vacuum at precisely the moment when the vacuum began to matter.
Into that vacuum stepped two competing frameworks. The Artemis Accords, launched by NASA and the U.S. Department of State in 2020, are a series of bilateral political commitments designed to operationalise OST principles for the Artemis era. They are not a treaty. They do not create binding international law. They do not grant sovereign ownership of lunar territory. What they do is establish a coalition of nations committed to a particular interpretation of existing space law — one that affirms the legality of resource extraction, mandates transparency and data sharing, and introduces the concept of "safety zones" around lunar operations.
The Accords' rapid expansion to 76 signatories is diplomatically significant. It demonstrates that the United States has successfully built a broad coalition around its preferred governance model. But the coalition's composition reveals its limits: China, Russia, India (which signed in 2023 but has maintained strategic ambiguity), and several other major spacefaring nations have either declined to sign or have done so without substantive operational commitment.
The Artemis Accords are not a treaty — they are a diplomatic instrument designed to build a coalition of the willing before the rules are written.
China and Russia's response was the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) framework, announced in 2021 and progressively expanded since. The ILRS is not merely a scientific programme; it is a governance architecture in embryonic form. It establishes technical standards, coordination mechanisms, and partnership structures that parallel — and in some respects directly compete with — those of the Artemis framework. When China and Russia launched the ILRS, they did not reject international space law. They began writing a parallel version of it.
The Governance Gap: What Existing Law Cannot Do
The fundamental problem is not that the Outer Space Treaty is bad law. It is that the OST was designed for a world of state actors conducting scientific exploration, not for a world of commercial operators extracting resources, constructing permanent infrastructure, and competing for strategically valuable orbital positions. The treaty's core provisions — non-appropriation, peaceful use, state responsibility for national activities — remain sound as principles. But they provide almost no operational guidance for the questions that will define the next decade of lunar activity.
The Artemis Accords are not a treaty — they are a diplomatic instrument designed to build a coalition of the willing before the rules are written.
Consider the question of resource extraction. The OST prohibits national appropriation of the Moon or any part of it. But does extracting water ice from a lunar crater constitute appropriation? The United States, through the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act and the Artemis Accords, has taken the position that it does not — that resource extraction is consistent with the non-appropriation principle, just as fishing in international waters does not constitute a territorial claim. This interpretation is legally defensible but not universally accepted. Russia and several other nations have argued that it effectively allows wealthy spacefaring nations to claim the economic benefits of lunar resources while hiding behind the letter of the non-appropriation principle.
The question of safety zones is equally fraught. The Artemis Accords introduce the concept of temporary safety zones around lunar operations — areas within which other operators should not interfere. The stated purpose is operational safety, not territorial exclusion. But critics have noted that a sufficiently large safety zone around a resource-rich site could function as a de facto territorial claim, particularly if the zone is maintained indefinitely and enforced by the nation that established it.
The Moon Agreement's failure to attract major spacefaring nations was not an accident; it was a preview of the governance vacuum that now defines the cislunar domain.
In August 2026, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a dedicated meeting to assess current cislunar governance structures and identify the major gaps that will emerge as the lunar economy expands. The meeting's framing was telling: it treated the governance gap not as a future problem but as a present emergency, noting the urgent need for secure institutional systems to manage activities ranging from resource extraction and logistics to power and data services. The academic community has arrived at the same conclusion that policymakers have been slow to act upon: the governance architecture for the cislunar domain is dangerously underdeveloped relative to the pace of commercial and strategic activity.
The GEGSLA Experiment: Track 2 Governance in Practice
One of the more instructive developments in lunar governance has been the work of the Global Expert Group on Sustainable Lunar Activities (GEGSLA), hosted by the Moon Village Association. GEGSLA represents a "Track 2" approach to governance — expert-led, multidisciplinary, and deliberately positioned outside the formal intergovernmental process. Its mandate is to provide practical, technical, and normative guidance that can inform "Track 1" discussions within COPUOS and its Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultation (ATLAC).
In 2026, GEGSLA released significant outputs, including guidance on applying the World Heritage Convention to the Moon — a framework for protecting sites of special scientific and cultural significance — and practical frameworks for lunar multi-stakeholder coordination. These are not binding instruments. They carry no legal force. But they represent something important: the development of a shared technical vocabulary and a set of operational norms that could, over time, harden into customary international law.
The GEGSLA model is instructive because it acknowledges a fundamental reality of contemporary international governance: formal multilateral processes are too slow and too politically constrained to keep pace with technological change. The gap between what COPUOS can agree upon and what commercial operators are actually doing on the Moon will only widen in the coming years. Track 2 mechanisms — expert groups, industry consortia, technical standards bodies — are not a substitute for formal governance, but they are increasingly the primary site where operational norms are actually being developed.
The Limits of the Accords Model
The Artemis Accords model has genuine strengths. It is flexible, allowing for rapid expansion without the cumbersome ratification processes required for formal treaties. It is operationally specific, providing practical guidance on issues like data sharing, interoperability, and debris mitigation. And it has demonstrated real diplomatic traction, attracting 76 signatories in six years.
But the model has structural weaknesses that become more apparent as the lunar economy matures. First, the Accords are bilateral — each signatory enters into a separate agreement with the United States, not into a multilateral framework. This means that the Accords do not create a community of states with shared obligations to each other; they create a hub-and-spoke system with the United States at the centre. As the number of signatories grows, the coordination challenges of this architecture will multiply.
When China and Russia launched the International Lunar Research Station framework, they did not reject international space law — they began writing a parallel version of it.
Second, the Accords' non-binding nature, which is a feature in terms of diplomatic flexibility, is a bug in terms of legal certainty. Commercial operators need to know that their investments are protected by enforceable rules, not merely by political commitments that can be withdrawn or reinterpreted. The Accords provide a framework for cooperation among willing partners, but they do not provide the legal infrastructure that a mature lunar economy will require.
Third, and most fundamentally, the Accords cannot resolve the governance problem because they exclude the actors whose participation is essential for any durable solution. A lunar governance framework that does not include China — which has the world's second-largest space programme and is planning a permanent crewed lunar base — is not a governance framework. It is a coalition.
The Resource Question: Commons or Commodity?
At the heart of the lunar governance debate is a question that has no easy answer: is the Moon a global commons, to be managed for the benefit of all humanity, or is it a frontier, to be developed by those with the capability and the will to do so?
The OST's "province of all mankind" language suggests the former. But the practical reality of space development — which requires enormous capital investment, advanced technology, and sustained political commitment — pushes toward the latter. No commercial operator will invest billions of dollars in lunar resource extraction without some assurance that they can benefit from the resources they extract. No government will fund a lunar programme without some expectation of strategic return.
The technology readiness levels for lunar resource extraction hardware — excavation systems like RASSOR and LES3 — currently range from 4 to 5 on the standard scale, indicating that the technology is approaching but has not yet reached operational maturity. Researchers and legal experts are flagging the urgent need for international frameworks that can handle potential conflicts, such as competing requirements for the same lunar location. The window for establishing those frameworks before the first commercial extraction operations begin is measured in years, not decades.
When China and Russia launched the International Lunar Research Station framework, they did not reject international space law — they began writing a parallel version of it.
The most promising approaches to the resource question involve some form of benefit-sharing mechanism — a framework under which commercial operators can extract and use lunar resources, but contribute a portion of the value generated to a common fund that supports broader access to the lunar economy. This is analogous to the deep-seabed mining regime established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which created the International Seabed Authority to manage resource extraction in the international seabed area. The analogy is imperfect — the Moon is not the seabed, and the political dynamics of space governance are different from those of maritime law — but the basic architecture of a regulated commons with commercial access rights is worth serious consideration.
Safety Zones and the Territorial Creep Problem
The Artemis Accords' safety zone concept deserves particular scrutiny, because it represents the most direct challenge to the non-appropriation principle in current governance practice. The Accords describe safety zones as "temporary" and "safety-oriented," intended to prevent harmful interference between operations rather than to establish territorial claims. But the operational reality is more complex.
The Moon Agreement's failure to attract major spacefaring nations was not an accident; it was a preview of the governance vacuum that now defines the cislunar domain.
A safety zone around a water ice extraction site at the lunar south pole — one of the most strategically valuable locations in the inner solar system — could effectively exclude other operators from accessing the same resource. If the zone is maintained for the duration of the extraction operation, and if the extraction operation is designed to be indefinitely renewable, the distinction between a safety zone and a territorial claim becomes difficult to sustain in practice.
GEGSLA's 2026 guidance on Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) addresses a related problem: the protection of scientifically significant lunar locations from commercial interference. But the SSSI framework, like the safety zone concept, raises questions about who has the authority to designate protected areas, how those designations are enforced, and what happens when commercial interests conflict with scientific or heritage values.
The Path Forward: Convergence or Fragmentation?
The trajectory of lunar governance in 2026 points toward fragmentation rather than convergence. The Artemis and ILRS frameworks are not converging; they are developing in parallel, with different technical standards, different partnership structures, and different underlying assumptions about the legal status of lunar resources. The COPUOS process, which is the primary multilateral forum for space governance, is moving too slowly to bridge the gap.
This is not inevitable. There are precedents for governance convergence in domains where competing frameworks initially developed in parallel. The International Telecommunications Union managed to establish shared spectrum governance despite Cold War divisions. The Antarctic Treaty System created a framework for peaceful scientific cooperation in a strategically contested environment. These precedents are imperfect, but they demonstrate that governance convergence is possible even when geopolitical competition is intense.
What would convergence require in the lunar context? At minimum, it would require direct engagement between the Artemis and ILRS frameworks — not necessarily merger, but coordination on the technical standards and operational norms that affect all lunar actors regardless of political affiliation. It would require a more active role for COPUOS in developing binding instruments, rather than relying on non-binding guidelines and political commitments. And it would require a willingness on the part of the major spacefaring nations to accept constraints on their own freedom of action in exchange for a more stable and predictable governance environment.
None of these requirements are easily met. But the alternative — a Moon governed by competing blocs, with no shared rules for resource extraction, safety zones, or environmental protection — is worse for everyone, including the nations that currently benefit from the governance vacuum.
Conclusion: The Governance Window Is Closing
The expansion of the Artemis Accords to 76 signatories is a genuine diplomatic achievement. But it should not be mistaken for a solution to the lunar governance problem. The Accords have built a coalition; they have not built a governance system. The Moon Agreement's failure to attract major spacefaring nations was not an accident — it was a preview of the governance vacuum that now defines the cislunar domain. Filling that vacuum requires more than bilateral political commitments. It requires the kind of sustained multilateral engagement that has so far proved elusive.
The window for establishing durable lunar governance architecture is not infinite. Commercial missions are advancing. Permanent infrastructure is being planned. The first-mover advantage in lunar governance — the ability to shape the rules before they are set by practice and precedent — belongs to those who act now. The question is whether the international community has the political will to act before the Moon's divided sky becomes a permanent feature of the extraterrestrial landscape.
The governance choices made in the next five years will echo for centuries. That is not hyperbole. It is the nature of precedent in international law — and the reason why the current moment demands more than diplomatic incrementalism.
