China, US race to make billions from Moon mining
“There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it,” US President Joe Biden said after Russia’s war in Ukraine upended global geopolitics. Far from Earth, that transition is already happening.
Just like in the era of Sputnik and Apollo more than half a century ago, world leaders are again racing to achieve dominance in outer space. But there’s one big difference: Whereas the US and the Soviet Union hashed out a common set of rules at the United Nations, this time around the world’s top superpowers can’t even agree on basic principles to govern the next generation of space activity.
The lack of cooperation between the US and China on space exploration is particularly dangerous in an era where the cosmos are becoming more crowded. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos along with emerging markets such as Rwanda and the Philippines are launching more and more satellites to bridge the digital divide and explore commercial opportunities.
The stakes are even higher when it comes to the US and China, which are erecting economic barriers in the name of national security as ideological divisions widen over the pandemic, political repression and now Vladimir Putin’s war. Their inability to cooperate on space risks not only an arms race, but also clashes over extracting potentially hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of resources on the moon and elsewhere.
“Our concern in the West is more about who sets the rules of the road, particularly access to resources,” said Malcolm Davis, a former official with Australia’s defense department who now researches space policy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra.
“The biggest risk is you have two opposite set of rules,” he said. “You could have a Chinese company on the moon in the 2030s claiming territory with a resource on it, in the same way the Chinese have claimed the entire South China Sea.”
The geopolitics of space, once a frontier that brought rivals together for the good of humankind, are now mirroring the competition on Earth pitting the US and its allies against China and Russia. And just as Beijing and Moscow have blamed American military alliances in Europe and Asia for stoking tensions over Ukraine and Taiwan, Chinese staterun media has warned the US now wants to set up a “space-based NATO.”
At the center of the dispute is the Us-drafted Artemis Accords, a non-legally binding set of principles to govern activity on the moon, Mars and beyond. The initiative, which NASA says is grounded in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, forms the foundation of the space agency’s effort to put astronauts on the moon this decade and kick-start mining operations of lucrative lunar elements.