Scientific American 201907

(Rick Simeone) #1

62 Scientific American, July 2019


Back in the 1960s, it seemed like just a matter of
time before humanity would slip the bonds of Earth
and begin a slow crawl out into the universe. Although
it has taken longer than many expected, something
like that moment may soon arrive. Around half a doz­
en governments, as well as a handful of private com­
panies, all have moon missions planned for the near
future—a situation ripe for conflict.
The Outer Space Treaty, which the U.S., the U.K.
and the Soviet Union signed less than two years be ­
fore Apollo 11 (and which now has 109 countries par­
ty to it), stipulates that space exploration must be
conducted peacefully and for the benefit of all
nations. It also holds that no one can claim territory
on a celestial body. But lower down in the treaty is a
loophole: two “noninterference clauses,” which re ­

quire all signatories to avoid causing harm to anoth­
er’s probes or outposts—for instance, by landing near
or on top of them. This sounds reasonable enough,
but it also creates an opening for a nation or private
entity to monopolize a desirable spot simply by arriv­
ing there first.
Should one nation or entity try to stake a claim, it
“might trigger a ‘scramble for the Moon’ comparable
in some respects to the ‘scramble for Africa’ which
began with the identification of mineral resources in
the Congo in the 1880s,” wrote astrophysicist Martin
Elvis of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard Uni­
versity and the Smithsonian Institution and his co­
authors in a 2016 paper in the journal Space Policy.
Sure enough, several missions scheduled to take
place in the next few years all target the same terri­

A

grainy black­and­white image plays across the screen in one of bob
Richards’s earliest memories—spacesuits, a lander and astronauts
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking their historic first steps across
the lunar surface. Richards, who was barely out of his toddler years
at the time, recalls sitting in his family living room north of Toronto
while his dad futzed with the rabbit­ear antenna, trying to improve the
broadcast streaming over from Buffalo, N.Y. “ Apollo 11 was a defining

moment for humanity,” says the founder and CEO of Moon Express, a company that hopes to


sell transportation to our natural satellite and eventually mine materials there. “The inspira­


tion of Apollo is very prominent in what’s happening today in space.”


Adam Mann is a journalist specializing in
astronomy and physics. His work has
appeared in National Geographic, the Wall
Street Journal, Wired and elsewhere.

IN BRIEF

A large number of countries and private compa-
nies are aiming to launch missions to the moon
in the coming decade.

International law says no one can own property in
space—yet it also says that once an entity has landed
somewhere, others should avoid disturbing that site.

This loophole creates the potential for a race
to stake claims on some of the moon’s highest-
value real estate.
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