During the Cold War’s space race, the Apollo moon missions were driven by the US need to prove its superiority. Having made that political and technological point with the 1969 moon landing, the contest between Moscow and Washington petered out. A new dash across the skies begins this year, reigniting geopolitical competition under the guise of “peaceful exploration.” The moon’s south pole is emerging as the most valuable real estate in the solar system, offering “peaks of eternal light” for solar arrays and ice deposits in craters shielded from the sun.
The US and a China-led bloc are eyeing the lunar surface and its potential to control a post-terrestrial economy. Space had been humanity’s last commons, supposedly shielded by the 1967 UN outer space treaty that bans state exploitation of the heavens. It is vague on private claims — a loophole that is fueling a scramble for the stars led by the ultra-rich. The aim is obvious: to act first, shape norms and dare others to object. Two lunar missions launching this year— NASA’s Artemis II and China’s Chang’e 7 — are competing for strategic supremacy.
To hasten the commercialization of space, US President Donald Trump is shrinking state support for NASA, which would have its smallest budget since 1961. Washington wants space exploration to be led by the private sector, a wish anchored in the Artemis Accords. Signed by more than 40 nations, the accords are a vision of extending terrestrial ownership structures into space — and one embraced by tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Little wonder, then, that Musk aims to float his space exploration firm SpaceX this year for US$1.5 trillion.
Illustration: Tania Chou
By contrast, the International Lunar Research Station — China’s joint effort with Russia and global south partners — embodies a state-led approach that seeks to escape an US-led system. China and Russia say that they are in compliance with UN rules because their lunar bases would be under an international “collaborative” consortium not of any single state’s control.
SUPERPOWER RIVALRY
The result is a rivalry with two camps publicly invoking “peaceful exploration” while engaging in strategic competition for lunar resources. Already there are theories that water could produce rocket fuel and sustain life. Others speculate whether moon rock might be useful for construction. These are essentially rhetorical claims — such as the oft-repeated assertion that space’s helium-3 is a potential fusion fuel. These are arguments, however thin, for governments to justify lunar spending with the promise of future payoff.
Nuclear fission on the moon, by contrast, is a concrete engineering race, with the US and China-Russia already funding reactor designs necessary to support human lunar colonies. NASA intends to do so within five years; China and Russia say theirs would be running by 2035. The technology is not new: Small fission reactors in space were part of Cold War competition. The moon might be a proving ground. Reliable nuclear power during the 14-day lunar night cycle might be needed for permanent human bases. Once solved, the same power technology can be taken to Mars. Trump has already said US astronauts would plant the US flag on Mars.
The 1992 UN principles on the use of nuclear power sources in outer space provide a framework for safety and risk reduction, but not a regulator. The nation that works out how to achieve reliable off-world energy systems could determine the balance of industrial and digital power for the next century.
The drive to leave Earth is often characterized as humans’ need for discovery and exploration. However, there might be something more pressing: humanity is using up natural resources 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate them. There are essentially three ways out: become more efficient by squeezing more GDP per unit of energy; green the production, distribution and consumption of the economy to bring capitalism in line with ecological limits; or move energy-intensive processes off-world.
Much of Silicon Valley favors the last techno-optimist option rather than the first two Earth-based approaches. Google wants datacenters in orbit powered by solar energy. Energy and computer arms races have merged in a startling admission that Earth-based datacenters are approaching ecological and political limits. Google is to put them in the skies. As artificial-intelligence demand and electrification accelerate faster than terrestrial grids can decarbonize, the incentive for off-planet, continuous solar energy would grow stronger. What begins as pragmatic innovation could end as a new phase of extraction: a search for energy and computational capacity once Earth’s limits have been reached.
RED MARS
Life might be imitating art. Kim Stanley Robinson’s classic Mars trilogy opens in 2026 with humanity’s first colonial voyage to the planet. In its first book, Red Mars shows Earth’s nations and corporations over decades competing to control the new frontier. Robinson’s “transnats” foreshadow today’s private contractors and state conglomerates. Echoes of the novel’s debates — nuclear versus solar, terraforming versus preservation — can be found in the real space race today. And just as the colonization of Mars was justified by Earth’s ecological decline, today’s lunar exploration is rationalized by “resource utilization” — using the moon’s resources to reduce dependence on the home planet. The logic subtly inverts the problem: planetary overshoot becomes a license to expand it.
Red Mars ultimately warns that humanity would poison new worlds with its old politics, with disastrous results. Before occupying another planet, the novel’s message is that we must first learn to live sustainably on our own. We can escape Earth but, the novel asks, can we escape ourselves? Yet today, space law is being fashioned to allow appropriation under the guise of peaceful, commercial activity. The US’ 2015 Space Act permits the mining of asteroids as if they were open ore seams. NASA’s moon rock returns helped the US Congress justify space property rights — opening the door for humanity’s last commons to slide into corporate hands.
In the last installment of Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, by the year 2225 settlers are living in harmony with the world they have made. Humans terraform Mars and begin, at last, to inhabit it responsibly. One can only hope we understand that far sooner.
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