The Moon Is Not a Destination — It Is a Question About Who Decides

The Apollo missions were a government program. Funded by taxes, run by a federal agency, their achievements — and their meaning — belonged to everyone. When Armstrong stepped on the Moon, the message etched on the plaque read: "We came in peace for all mankind." There was no asterisk.

The space industry being built today is different in kind, not just in scale. It is predominantly private, predominantly American, and predominantly the project of a small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals who have decided that space is the next frontier for their ambitions. This is not inherently bad. Private capital has always driven exploration. But the legal and philosophical vacuum that surrounds these ventures is beginning to look less like freedom and more like a problem we are choosing not to address until it is too late.

Consider the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which remains the foundational document of international space law. It states that no nation may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies. But it was written before private companies existed as meaningful space actors, and it says nothing — nothing at all — about what private entities can do.

The United States, followed by Luxembourg and several other countries, has passed national legislation asserting that American companies can own and profit from resources extracted from space. This is not illegal under the Outer Space Treaty. It is also not how the treaty was understood when it was negotiated. The legal scholars who wrote it assumed that space activities would remain governmental. The window for that assumption closed sometime in the late 2010s and nobody noticed until afterwards.

We are now in a period of active norm-setting. The Artemis Accords, promoted by the US and signed by dozens of allied nations, are an attempt to create a framework for commercial space activity. They are also, depending on your perspective, an attempt to lock in Western and American legal principles before China or Russia can negotiate alternatives. China has called them a "space NATO." This is not entirely inaccurate.

What gets lost in the technical and geopolitical framing is the deeper question: who gets to decide?

Space is the first genuinely new commons in human history since the deep ocean. We have spent fifty years arguing about how to govern the ocean floor and have not solved it. The governance vacuum above the Kármán Line is filling faster, with higher stakes, and with less democratic input.

When a company mines an asteroid, the profits will not flow to all of humanity. They will flow to shareholders and, if the company is lucky, to national governments through taxes. The rest of the world gets nothing except the externalities: the debris fields, the light pollution from satellite megaconstellations, and the precedents that make all future space law harder to negotiate.

I am not a pessimist about space. I think humans in space is genuinely important, both practically and in some harder-to-articulate way about what kind of species we want to be. But I am worried about the gap between the speed of the technology and the speed of the institutions that are supposed to govern it.

The Moon is not a destination. It is a question about what kind of political economy we want to take with us when we leave this planet. We are answering that question right now, mostly by default, and mostly in favor of the entities that are already there.