NASA is hopeful that a new international coalition will help propel its return to the moon.
Saudi Arabia is not known for a space program. Its space agency is barely four years old. It has never launched a rocket and claims a single astronaut: Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family who flew on the space shuttle in 1985.
“The reaction from the international community was palpable — the excitement, the hope for the re-engagement for the U.S. to again lead,” said Mike Gold, a space industry official who was one of the key framers of the accords at NASA. “Our partners don’t want to work with the Chinese, by and large, but if America fails to lead, they’ll have no other choice.”. Israel and India tried in 2019 to land spacecraft on the moon.
Today’s space race is also far more dynamic than the one that took place 50 years ago. Instead of just reaching the moon, the United States and China want to mine it, laying claim to the water that exists in the form of ice and other precious resources, such as metals and even oxygen stored in the lunar regolith.
In an interview, Pam Melroy, the deputy NASA administrator and a former astronaut, said she was concerned about how China and others might act on the moon, particularly when extracting resources, such as water ice. “Does it make me nervous?” she said. “Yes, especially with China.” An international coalition would also help efforts to create rules of the road in the now largely lawless expanse of space, which is becoming increasingly polluted with debris that threatens sensitive satellites and even the ISS.
The accords also offer another potential benefit: to make it more difficult for future presidential administrations to kill the Artemis program, a trend that has plagued NASA’s deep space exploration efforts for decades. That was the thought of the architects of the accords, and it proved true after the Biden administration picked up where Trump’s left off, keeping the program and continuing to recruit other nations to join.
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