The Missing Argument for the Lunar Space Race

Why does America need to get there first?

A photo of the U.S. flag on the Moon, deployed by the crew of Apollo 17. (NASA/JSC)

The Race to Claim Territory Establish a “Keep-Out Zone” on the Moon

It’s hard to keep up with the news these days, but several weeks ago, acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy directed NASA officials to accelerate existing plans to send a nuclear reactor to the Moon to study how nuclear power could be used by a future lunar base. Nuclear power is one of the only usable power sources in a space environment like the surface of the Moon, which has no local fossil fuels, wind, or water, and experiences two weeks of darkness during lunar night. But this airless environment will also require changes to the typical terrestrial reactor design, to allow reactor cooling directly into the vacuum of space. Duffy’s directive ordered NASA to aim to send a 100 kW reactor to the Moon by 2030, about the time that China hopes to land their first astronauts on the Moon.

This timing is no coincidence: Duffy’s directive noted that if another country establishes a reactor first, that country could “declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit the United States.” This is a reference to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the major international treaty concerning human activities in space. While Article II of the treaty forbids “national appropriation” of territory in outer space, it also states in Article IX that if one country’s planned activities in space would “cause potentially harmful interference” with another country’s activities, the first country should “undertake appropriate international consultations before proceeding.” Many space lawyers have pointed out that this suggests a workaround for the prohibition on territorial claims: If one country manages to establish a base for any sort of activity— mining, solar power generation, astronomical observation, or a nuclear reactor, for example— they could claim that anyone coming with in a certain distance of that base would be causing “harmful interference” (by kicking up dust, blocking sunlight, producing vibrations, emitting radio signals, etc.) and must go through some kind of “consultation” process first.

So Duffy’s directive expresses the fear that another country to use this argument to legally “claim” territory on the Moon and keep the U.S. out… and implies that therefore, we¹ should do it first. After Politico reported on the directive, Duffy was asked about it at a press conference and reiterated this argument explicitly: “There’s a certain part of the Moon that everyone knows is the best. We have ice there, we have sunlight there. We want to get there first and claim that for America.”

But Why?

But Duffy’s press conference remarks and earlier internal NASA directive don’t give a strong reason for why we need to get to the Moon before China does. As the argument goes, if China gets there first, they’ll be able to exclude the U.S. from the area around the Chinese reactor, potentially prevent us from accesses or extracting valuable resources in that area. So why do we need to prevent this? So we can do the same thing to China, and hoard the resources for ourselves? One of the primary motivations for the drafting of the Outer Space Treaty was to avoid repeating our shared history of resource and colonization wars in space. Do we just need to win this new space race (back) to the Moon? Why? The U.S. already won that race, what do we need to prove now?

Duffy’s remarks were in response to a journalist’s question during a press conference that was primarily about changing regulations for the U.S. commercial drone industry (Sean Duffy is also the U.S. Secretary of Transportation). Despite Duffy’s assurance in his opening remarks that “we’re talking about the commerical use of these drones,” as opposed to “how drones are used in another capacity” (i.e., for military operations), the title of the press conference was a hyper-aggressive “Unleashing American Drone Dominance.” Duffy even talked specifically about retaking the commerical drone market from China, “one of our main adversaries.” So the tone of the press conference was already extremely militarized and focused on the U.S. “reassert[ing] global leadership in advanced aviation.”

This framing echoes NASA rhetoric that I wrote about in 2023 after I attended the Artemic Space Ethics Workshop at NASA Headquarters. At the workshop, I pointed out that the rhetoric around the Artemis Accords repeatedly references the importance of international partnerships, but clearly prioritized “American leadership in space.” (This generated a debate about whether the two concepts are mutually exclusive.)

Convince Me

Then and now, I don’t believe that NASA is doing a good enough job explaining why American leadership in space is important— and I say this as an American who is pro-human space exploration! I should be an easy sell! I want humans to return to the Moon and travel to Mars, but I’m not yet convinced that rushing to beat another nation there is worth the cost and safety risks.

What is the downside of China getting to the Moon first? Is it simply that they will be able to “stake a claim” to valuable and finite resources that the U.S. will then not be able to exploit? If so, then this is purely an economic argument, and NASA should say so (and they should put some dollar values on it so we all understand that we’re explictly talking about a Gold Rush). Private space companies certainly aren’t shy about making these kinds of arguments to their investors.

Is the downside of losing the new space race simply that China will do “bad” things on the Moon, if given the opportunity, while the U.S. will do “good” things? If so, NASA and the broader U.S. government need to explain what exactly China is planning to do differently in space than the U.S. would do. So far the stated plans for both nations are “get there first,” with an implied or explicit “keep other nations from getting the good spots.” Perhaps the argument is that China has a terrible history on human rights, and should therefore be prevented from carrying these policies into space? In that case, NASA should explain how human rights will be protecting in U.S. space exploration efforts. NASA can no longer simply assume that Americans automatically understand their own government to be “the good guys”— tell us why we deserve to be the leaders.

1. I’m an American, so I’ll be using “we” and “us” in this post to refer to the U.S.