The world’s eyes have once again been turned to the Moon, thanks to NASA's Artemis II mission in April 2026. The successful mission saw four astronauts travel around the Moon and return to Earth – a small step towards the agency’s overarching aim of establishing a lunar base.
For those who remember the Apollo programme of the 1960s and 70s, though, the pressing question this return journey raises is: Why bother sending humans back to the Moon at all?
The first Moon base
There are plenty of compelling scientific reasons to return to the Moon, from collecting samples to study the formation of the Solar System to placing a telescope there for a clearer view of the stars, free from the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere. But recent decades have seen scientific concerns take a backseat to geopolitical realities.
America’s decision to return humans to the Moon is a direct response to geopolitical tensions with China. China has made no secret of its intention to establish a scientific research station on the Moon, and has been ramping up its robotic and human lunar exploration programmes over the last two decades.
The Artemis programme, established in 2017, can be seen as a response to that. It specifically seeks to establish a permanent lunar base with the US at the helm before China – a goal that led US Senator Ted Cruz to describe the situation the US now finds itself in as a “21st-century space race.”
Although the images of the Moon and video footage of the astronauts at work captured during Artemis II have been uplifting, the underlying motivations for the mission have remained largely in the background.
The geopolitical nature of this situation isn’t new, according to Dr Priyanka Dhopade, a researcher in sustainable space engineering at the University of Auckland.
“Space and geopolitics have always gone hand in hand,” she says. “The difference we’re seeing now is there’s a stronger push to establish a longer-term human presence on the Moon, with the help of companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
“The scientific case for this is weaker than, say, more robotic exploration or establishing international space stations like the Lunar Gateway (with significant contributions from Europe), which would arguably allow for more science to happen than establishing a crewed base on the Moon.
“Instead, we’re seeing budget cuts to US science missions and an effective cancellation of the Gateway programme. So, geopolitics and economics seem to be driving the agenda rather than scientific curiosity.”
Indeed, though the Artemis programme has been promoted by NASA as being for scientific reasons, the main driver is laying claim to lunar territory and resources such as water ice.
Dr Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, acknowledged the competing narratives around the Artemis programme in a recent video, addressing the stunning images of Earth captured during the Artemis II mission.
“Although these images are incredibly beautiful, they’re closer in definition to art than they are to science images,” she says. “The motivation for the missions is not science. It has always been political and economic. So, we’re in another space race again, [this time] with the US wanting to beat China to putting humans on the Moon.”
Chris Lee, former chief scientist at the UK Space Agency, went further and described the Artemis programme as an “iron geopolitical hand in a velvet glove.”
Even famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has been a strong proponent of America’s space ambitions, acknowledged in a recent interview with CBC (Canada’s public broadcaster) that the underlying impetus of the mission was about the US beating China to the Moon.
While he praised the importance of Artemis II for its achievements – taking humans the furthest we’ve yet travelled into space, its inclusion of a Canadian astronaut, as well as a woman astronaut and a man of colour – he also highlighted the Earthly concerns operating in the background.
“There’s a geopolitical force operating that’s underpinning all of this,” he said. “And not enough people are admitting that.”
Who owns the Moon?
If space programmes are to be funded, they need to maintain public support, and the Artemis II mission certainly achieved that. But that enthusiasm also obscured the ongoing debate over ownership and use of the Moon.
The Outer Space Treaty prohibits any nation from laying claim to the Moon or establishing a military base there. However, the US has recently led over 60 countries to sign the Artemis Accords, a non-binding agreement over the use of the Moon.
This affirms commitments to the peaceful use of the Moon and the sharing of scientific data, but it also includes specific allowances for resource extraction and the establishment of “safety zones” around areas of activity. This could, in effect, allow nations to control regions of the Moon.
The allowance of resource extraction is particularly controversial. The fact that there’s water ice accessible on the Moon is of significant importance for human exploration and the establishment of long-term bases, as water is needed for fuel production as well as for drinking.
The water ice is a valuable resource for use in situ, and although few people would likely object to astronauts making use of it, the ice also raises the question of how extraction of other resources will be legislated.
The Moon is known to host rare earth elements, for example, as well as helium-3, which could be used for fuel, though the exact amounts and accessibility of these resources is unknown. Currently, there’s nothing to prevent private companies from going to the Moon, extracting these resources and bringing them back to Earth to sell for a profit.
The only reason it hasn’t been done yet is that the technological challenges of a Moon landing are still significant, as demonstrated by the limited success of private Moon landings from companies such as Intuitive Machines, ispace and SpaceIL.
“There’s nothing to stop NASA, the Chinese space agency or even a commercial company from landing at a given spot on the Moon and laying claim to all of the resources there that they could mine and then make money from,” Smethurst says.
Aside from the resources that the Moon has to offer, it has strategic value as well. It’s an ideal staging point for further exploration into deep space, such as missions to Mars, and could be useful for observing Earth. And the far side of the Moon is a potentially useful location for the development of technologies without observation or oversight.
The actual monetary value of the Moon is impossible to calculate until we have more information on the availability of resources there, and on its potential strategic use. So, the current lunar race is primarily about staking a claim to whatever is there that does turn out to be of value.
“The real question is who will benefit from all of this? Historically, government-driven space exploration, even when geopolitically motivated, has still managed to benefit broader society through innovation, like the invention of GPS during the Cold War era,” says Dhopade. “But now with profit-driven commercial entities playing a much bigger role, it raises questions around whether innovation will be widely shared or increasingly monetised, which could potentially widen existing inequalities on Earth.”
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