Far from over the moon about fights to come
It is little more than the size of a phone box, but the Odysseus lander is carrying a nation’s hopes. By Thursday, if all goes smoothly, it will become the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since 1972.
Last week, NASA chief Bill Nelson spoke of the mission with reference to Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step” speech. It was, he said, “a giant leap for humanity as we prepare to return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century”.
British philosopher A.C. Grayling is less enthusiastic. “A space Wild West is coming into existence,” he writes in his new book Who Owns the Moon?
Professor Grayling, 74, fears conflict over resources on the moon all but inevitable.
“Somebody only has to hit gold, figuratively or literally, for there to be a real elbowpushing race to get access to it,” he said. “There is an all-toopossible potential for conflict between private and state agencies who become very heavily invested in exploiting resources on the moon.”
Any lunar conflict, he fears, will result in new conflict back on Earth. A willingness to fight over resources is such a common theme of humanity’s story it is almost a “law of history”,
Professor Grayling said. He said the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, under which the moon is “the province of all mankind”, was “quite insufficient”.
“The moon contains many common minerals, including basalt, iron, quartz, and silicon, and the strong possibility that there are ores of … chlorine, lithium, beryllium, zirconium, uranium, thorium, and the rare earths,” he writes.