Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Credit: NASA

The growing interest in extractable resources on the Moon may have a problem: there ain’t enough to go around.

Toss in for good measure the lack of international policies or agreements to decide “who gets what from where.”

A team of researchers believe tensions, overcrowding, and quick exhaustion of resources to be one possible future for lunar mining projects.

These views are fleshed out in a paper recently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

Room for conflict

“A lot of people think of space as a place of peace and harmony between nations. The problem is there’s no law to regulate who gets to use the resources, and there are a significant number of space agencies and others in the private sector that aim to land on the Moon within the next five years,” said Martin Elvis, astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the lead author on the paper, “Concentrated lunar resources: imminent implications for governance and justice.”

The South Pole-Aitken Basin on the lunar farside.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/University of Arizona

“We looked at all the maps of the Moon we could find and found that not very many places had resources of interest, and those that did were very small. That creates a lot of room for conflict over certain resources,” Elvis adds in a Center for Astrophysics press statement.

Robust protection?

On one hand, while treaties do exist — like the 1967 Outer Space Treaty—prohibiting national appropriation—and the 2020 Artemis Accords—reaffirming the duty to coordinate and notify — neither is meant for robust protection, the researchers contend.

Tony Milligan, a Senior Researcher with the Cosmological Visionaries project at King’s College London, and a co-author on the paper said the biggest problem is that everyone is targeting the same sites and resources: states, private companies, everyone. “But they are limited sites and resources. We don’t have a second moon to move on to. This is all we have to work with,” he adds.

Dusty denizen of deep space.
Credit: NASA/Jeff Williams

Local measures

Alanna Krolikowski, assistant professor of science and technology policy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) is also a co-author on the paper. In her view a framework for success already exists and, paired with good old-fashioned business sense, may set policy on the right path.

“While a comprehensive international legal regime to manage space resources remains a distant prospect, important conceptual foundations already exist and we can start implementing, or at least deliberating, concrete, local measures to address anticipated problems at specific sites today,” Krolikowski said.

Image of Erlanger crater near the Moon’s north pole was captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Only the upper rims of the crater, which measures about 10 kilometers wide, ever receive sunlight. Perhaps lurking deep within the crater are quantities of water ice – but how much? Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Scant resource locations

The researchers make the case that there is a risk that resource locations on the Moon will turn out to be more scant than currently believed.

“We need to go back and map resource hot spots in better resolution. Right now, we only have a few miles at best. If the resources are all contained in a smaller area, the problem will only get worse,” said Elvis. “If we can map the smallest spaces, that will inform policymaking, allow for info-sharing and help everyone to play nice together so we can avoid conflict.”

To access the paper – “Concentrated lunar resources: imminent implications for governance and justice,” (One contribution of 16 to a discussion meeting issue “Astronomy from the Moon: the next decades”) go to:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2019.0563