In January 2026, Interlune — a Seattle-based startup founded by former Blue Origin engineers — announced a $6.9 million firm-fixed-price contract from NASA to develop prospecting tools for lunar helium-3 and water ice. The company had already signed a customer agreement with Maybell Quantum for the delivery of extracted helium-3. Its roadmap calls for a resource development mission in 2027 and a pilot extraction plant by 2029. The Moon, in other words, is no longer a destination for flags and footprints. It is becoming a site of commercial extraction — and the governance architecture needed to manage that transition is dangerously incomplete.
This is not a distant problem. The convergence of NASA's Artemis programme, a new generation of commercial lunar payload services, and the maturation of In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) technology has compressed the timeline from speculative to operational. A joint panel of experts has identified a near-term annual demand for 450 metric tonnes of lunar-derived propellant, representing a potential revenue stream of $2.4 billion per year. The broader space economy is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2040. The Moon sits at the centre of that projection — and the legal frameworks governing who may extract its resources, under what conditions, and with what obligations to the international community, remain fundamentally unresolved.
The Resource Landscape: What Is at Stake
The Moon's resource profile is more varied and strategically significant than popular accounts suggest. Three categories dominate current commercial interest.
Water Ice: The Propellant Economy
Permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles contain substantial deposits of water ice, confirmed by orbital observations and surface missions. Water ice is not merely a life-support resource. Electrolysed into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, it becomes rocket propellant — the fuel that could transform the Moon from a destination into a refuelling depot for deep-space missions. The economics are compelling: launching propellant from Earth costs approximately $10,000 per kilogramme to low Earth orbit, and multiples of that to lunar orbit. Locally produced propellant could reduce mission costs by orders of magnitude, enabling a self-sustaining cislunar economy.
NASA's MOXIE experiment on the Mars Perseverance rover demonstrated the extraction of oxygen from local carbon dioxide, validating the ISRU concept in an extraterrestrial environment. The MSOLO mass spectrometer, tested under lunar conditions, has further advanced the analytical tools needed to characterise resource deposits before extraction begins. The technology is maturing. The question is who controls access to the deposits once it does.
Helium-3: The Quantum and Fusion Premium
Helium-3 is extraordinarily rare on Earth — a byproduct of tritium decay in nuclear weapons programmes, produced in quantities measured in kilogrammes per year. The lunar surface, bombarded by solar wind over billions of years, contains an estimated one million tonnes of helium-3 embedded in regolith. Its applications span quantum computing — where it is used in dilution refrigerators to achieve the near-absolute-zero temperatures required for qubit stability — and, prospectively, fusion energy, where helium-3 offers a cleaner reaction pathway than deuterium-tritium fusion.
Interlune's customer agreement with Maybell Quantum is the first commercial transaction premised on lunar helium-3 delivery. It is a small contract, but its symbolic weight is considerable: it represents the first time a private company has sold a resource that does not yet exist in extractable form on a body other than Earth. The legal status of that transaction — under what authority it was made, and what rights it confers — is entirely unclear under existing international law.
Rare Earth Elements and Platinum Group Metals
A near-term annual demand for 450 metric tonnes of lunar-derived propellant represents a potential revenue stream of $2.4 billion — and not a single binding international rule governs who may extract it.
China currently dominates global rare earth element (REE) production, controlling approximately 60% of mining output and a larger share of processing capacity. The strategic vulnerability this creates for Western technology supply chains — from electric vehicles to defence electronics — has intensified interest in alternative sources. Lunar REE deposits, while less well-characterised than water ice or helium-3, represent a long-term hedge against terrestrial supply chain concentration. Platinum group metals, similarly, are present in lunar regolith at concentrations that may become economically viable as extraction costs fall.
The Legal Architecture: A Framework Built for a Different Era
The foundational document of space law is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), negotiated at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Article II of the OST prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies by claim of sovereignty, use, or occupation. What it does not explicitly address is whether private entities may extract and own resources from those bodies — a distinction that has become the central fault line in contemporary space law.
A near-term annual demand for 450 metric tonnes of lunar-derived propellant represents a potential revenue stream of $2.4 billion — and not a single binding international rule governs who may extract it.
The United States resolved this ambiguity domestically through the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, which explicitly grants American citizens the right to possess, own, transport, use, and sell resources extracted from asteroids or other celestial bodies. Japan enacted a similar Space Resources Act in 2021. Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, and several other nations have passed comparable domestic legislation. These laws share a common interpretive position: that the OST prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies as territory, but does not prohibit the ownership of extracted resources — analogous to the principle that no nation owns the high seas, but fishing vessels may own the fish they catch.
This interpretation is contested. Russia and a number of developing nations argue that it represents a unilateral reinterpretation of the OST that effectively privatises the Moon's resources for the benefit of technologically advanced states. The 1979 Moon Agreement, which would have treated lunar resources as the "common heritage of mankind" — subject to an international regime governing extraction and benefit-sharing — was rejected by the major spacefaring nations and has been ratified by only 18 states, none of them significant space powers.
The Artemis Accords: Norms Without Enforcement
The Artemis Accords, initiated by the United States in 2020 and now signed by over 40 nations, represent the most significant recent attempt to establish norms for lunar activity. They affirm that space resource extraction is consistent with the OST, establish the concept of "safety zones" around operational sites, and commit signatories to transparency, interoperability, and the deconfliction of operations. They are, however, explicitly non-binding. They are a statement of intent by a coalition of the willing, not a treaty with enforcement mechanisms.
The Artemis Accords are not a treaty. They are a statement of intent by a coalition of the willing, and their enforceability in the face of competing national claims remains entirely untested.
China and Russia have declined to sign the Accords, characterising them as an attempt by the United States to impose its preferred legal interpretation on the international community. China's own lunar programme — the Chang'e series, with Chang'e-7 targeting the lunar south pole — is advancing on a parallel track, with no formal coordination mechanism with Artemis. The prospect of two major powers operating extraction activities in the same resource-rich polar regions, under incompatible legal frameworks and with no agreed dispute resolution mechanism, is not hypothetical. It is the trajectory the current governance vacuum is producing.
The Governance Gap: What Is Missing
Legal scholars have increasingly drawn parallels between the current state of space resource governance and the pre-UNCLOS era of ocean governance — a period characterised by competing national claims, unilateral resource extraction, and the absence of any international authority capable of managing conflicts or ensuring equitable access. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), negotiated over nine years and entering into force in 1994, established the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to govern mineral extraction from the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction. The ISA model — an international regulator with licensing authority, revenue-sharing mechanisms, and a specialised dispute resolution chamber — has been proposed as a template for lunar governance.
The Artemis Accords are not a treaty. They are a statement of intent by a coalition of the willing, and their enforceability in the face of competing national claims remains entirely untested.
The analogy is instructive but imperfect. The deep seabed is governed by a principle of common heritage that the major spacefaring nations have explicitly rejected for the Moon. The ISA itself has faced criticism for slow decision-making and inadequate environmental protection as commercial deep-sea mining has approached operational readiness. And the geopolitical context for lunar governance is more fraught than the ocean governance negotiations of the 1970s, conducted in a period of relative superpower détente.
Environmental Stewardship: The Overlooked Dimension
NASA's framework for "responsible ISRU" identifies a set of environmental obligations that commercial operators should observe: minimising surface disturbance, protecting permanently shadowed regions of scientific interest, avoiding the contamination of resource deposits that future missions may need, and ensuring that extraction activities do not generate debris that could compromise orbital operations. These are sensible principles. They are not, however, legally binding on any actor.
The permanently shadowed regions at the lunar poles are among the most scientifically valuable environments in the solar system. They contain a preserved record of the early solar system's volatile inventory, including water ice that may have been deposited by comets billions of years ago. Unregulated extraction in these regions could destroy irreplaceable scientific data before it is collected. The analogy to terrestrial environmental governance — where the principle of prior scientific assessment before industrial development is now well-established — suggests that the absence of equivalent protections for the lunar environment is a significant governance failure.
The Infrastructure Problem: Who Builds the Roads?
A functioning lunar resource economy requires infrastructure that no single commercial actor can provide: landing pads, power systems capable of operating through the two-week lunar night, communications relays, and eventually transportation networks connecting extraction sites to processing facilities and orbital depots. The question of who finances, builds, and governs this infrastructure — and on what terms other actors may access it — is unresolved.
The terrestrial analogy is the early history of railway networks, where the absence of common carrier obligations and interoperability standards produced fragmented, inefficient systems that required decades of regulatory intervention to rationalise. The lunar infrastructure problem is more acute: the capital costs are higher, the operating environment is more hostile, and the number of potential actors is smaller. The risk of infrastructure monopolisation — where the first actor to establish a power system or landing pad at a resource-rich site effectively controls access to that site — is real and underappreciated.
Competing Visions: The Geopolitical Dimension
The governance vacuum is not merely a legal problem. It reflects a deeper geopolitical contest over the norms that will govern the next era of space activity. The United States and its Artemis partners are advancing a model premised on commercial activity, private property rights in extracted resources, and bilateral or multilateral coordination through voluntary frameworks. China and Russia are advancing a model that emphasises state-led activity, common heritage principles, and the primacy of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) as the appropriate forum for governance negotiations.
These are not merely procedural disagreements. They reflect fundamentally different visions of who benefits from the lunar resource economy and under what conditions. The common heritage model, if applied, would require revenue-sharing with developing nations that lack the capacity to participate in extraction activities. The commercial model, as currently structured, concentrates benefits among technologically advanced states and their private sectors. The political economy of this choice will shape the international order in space for generations.
Helium-3, once the province of theoretical physics, now has a signed customer agreement. The Moon is open for business. The question is whether it is open for governance.
Helium-3, once the province of theoretical physics, now has a signed customer agreement. The Moon is open for business. The question is whether it is open for governance.
Pathways Forward: What Adequate Governance Would Require
The governance gap is not inevitable. Several pathways exist toward a more adequate framework, each with different political feasibility and different distributional consequences.
A Multilateral Treaty on Space Resources
The most comprehensive solution would be a new multilateral treaty specifically addressing space resource extraction — one that resolves the ambiguity in the OST, establishes an international licensing authority, creates revenue-sharing mechanisms, and provides for binding dispute resolution. The political obstacles are formidable: the United States has shown no appetite for a treaty that would constrain its commercial sector, and China's participation would require concessions that the US Congress is unlikely to accept. But the absence of a treaty does not make the problem disappear; it merely defers it to a moment of crisis.
Expanding the Artemis Accords
A more politically feasible near-term approach would be to strengthen the Artemis Accords — adding more specific provisions on safety zones, environmental protection, and infrastructure access, and creating a more formal coordination mechanism among signatories. This would not resolve the fundamental legal ambiguity or bring China and Russia into a common framework, but it would establish clearer norms among the nations most likely to be active in the near term.
COPUOS as a Negotiating Forum
The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space remains the only universal forum for space governance negotiations. Its consensus-based decision-making process is slow and often produces lowest-common-denominator outcomes, but it has the advantage of including all major spacefaring nations. A dedicated working group on space resource governance, with a mandate to produce a framework agreement within a defined timeframe, would at minimum create a structured negotiating process where none currently exists.
The Urgency of the Moment
The window for establishing adequate governance before commercial extraction begins is narrowing. Interlune's 2027 resource development mission and 2029 pilot plant timeline are not outliers — they reflect the broader trajectory of an industry that is moving from planning to operation. Once extraction activities are underway, the political economy of governance changes: established operators have strong incentives to resist rules that would constrain their activities or require revenue-sharing, and the first-mover advantages of early extraction create facts on the ground that are difficult to reverse.
The history of terrestrial resource governance offers a consistent lesson: governance frameworks established before extraction begins are more equitable, more environmentally protective, and more stable than those negotiated after commercial interests are entrenched. The deep-sea mining regime took decades to negotiate and remains contested. The Antarctic Treaty System, negotiated before significant resource extraction began, has proven more durable. The Moon's governance moment is now — and the international community is not yet treating it with the urgency it deserves.
The commercial lunar economy is not a future scenario. It is an emerging present. The governance frameworks needed to manage it equitably, sustainably, and without conflict are not keeping pace. That gap — between the speed of commercial development and the slowness of international governance — is the defining challenge of the cislunar era.
