Artemis Accords
A nonbinding statement of principles, launched by the United States in 2020, that governs civil activity on the Moon and the extraction of its resources.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bars national appropriation of celestial bodies but says nothing about using their resources or about several missions sharing a site. The Artemis Accords fill that gap with political commitments: transparency, interoperability, registration of objects, preservation of historic sites, debris mitigation and, above all, safety zones, within which a signatory notifies others of its operations to avoid harmful interference. They also state that extracting resources does not amount to national appropriation, a reading China and Russia contest by building their own lunar station program. For insurance, they sketch who may operate where, under what neighborly rule, and therefore to whom damage between two lunar operators can be attributed. They also turn lunar space into bloc territory, bringing political risk into a field once thought purely technical.
On October 13, 2020, eight countries signed the Accords: the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom; France joined on June 7, 2022, and signatories numbered more than fifty by 2025.
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