Colonization of the Moon

• 1. Introduction

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  The colonization of the Moon has already begun in one odd, physical sense. After 1959, the first artificial objects reached the lunar surface. Soviet Luna landers scattered pennants of the Soviet Union across the ground. Apollo astronauts planted U.S. flags at their landing sites. Yet no nation claims ownership of any part of the Moon's surface. So what does it mean to settle a place that nobody is allowed to own? Who gets to use the Moon, and for what purpose? And why do some people now object to the word colonization itself?

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• 2. From Wilkins to Mars

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  In the first half of the 17th century, John Wilkins imagined settling the Moon in a book called A Discourse Concerning a New Planet. The idea sat on paper for a long time before anyone could test it.

  When U.S. astronauts did land, many read the achievement as a statement about economics. It was taken as evidence that the free-market model of the U.S. could succeed in spaceflight, in exploration, and eventually in a human presence that looked like colonization.

  The mood then turned. In the 1970s, NASA discouraged both the word and the goal of colonization. Funding and attention drifted away from the Moon, and Mars became the favored target.

  Civil actors and space advocacy groups never stopped pressing for a permanent human settlement, from the earliest days of spaceflight onward.

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• 3. Law Without Landlords

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  In 1967, the Outer Space Treaty described the Moon and all of outer space as the "province of all mankind". Russia, China, India, and the U.S. are all party to it. The treaty limits the Moon to peaceful purposes. It explicitly bans military installations and weapons of mass destruction there.

  Under international space law, laying claim to the Moon is illegal. No state has tried, even though several have left probes and other artificial remains on the surface.

  A second agreement went further. The 1979 Moon Agreement aimed to restrict the exploitation of the Moon and its resources, and the U.S. opposed it. As of January 2020, only 18 nations had signed and ratified it. None of them runs its own human spaceflight program.

  That thin support leaves the commercialization of the Moon a contentious issue for both national and international lunar regulation.

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• 4. Moonbases, Not Colonies

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  The first moonbase was temporary. It was Tranquility Base, set up in 1969 by Apollo 11, the first crewed mission on the Moon. Since then, states have avoided the language of colonization and have made no territorial claims, in line with the bans on such claims.

  Their plans have aimed instead at advancing spaceflight and exploration. The U.S.-led international Artemis program intends to set up, with private contractors, a state-run way-station in lunar orbit in the late 2020s. China has proposed, together with Russia, the International Lunar Research Station for the 2030s. Its larger goal is an Earth-Moon Space Economic Zone, to develop by 2050.

  Both programs support in-situ resource utilization, which means using materials found on the Moon itself. That requires prospecting for lunar resources. To complement Artemis, private commercial space enterprises and services have been enabled and contracted.

  Prospecting needs a target, and the first big one turned out to be frozen water.

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• 5. Water at the Poles

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  In 2008-2009, India's Chandrayaan-1 mission, run by ISRO, found water ice in the soil at the lunar poles. U.S. missions in the 1990s had already hinted that it might be there. The confirmation renewed interest in the Moon.

  Lunar scientists had debated the question for decades. One report says they are now "confident that the decades-long debate is over". It adds that "The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places; not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth." The Chandrayaan results are also described as "offering a wide array of watery signals."

  At the north pole, the estimate is at least 600 million tons of ice. It lies in sheets of relatively pure ice, each at least a couple of meters thick.

  Water could also become fuel. Propellants made from it could be stored at depots between the Earth and the Moon, ready to resupply rockets or satellites in Earth orbit.

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• 6. Mining the Moon

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  A settlement meant to last would need to be close to self-sufficient. Mining and refining lunar materials on-site could serve both the Moon and other places in the Solar System. Launching goods from the Moon takes much less energy than launching them from Earth, which gives lunar supply an edge over deliveries from home.

  Sending material back to Earth is a harder sell, because transport is expensive. One suggested exception is helium-3, which the solar wind carries to the Moon and which has built up on the surface over billions of years. It is rare on Earth.

  The lunar regolith may hold between 0.01 and 0.05 parts per million of it, depending on the soil. In 2006 it traded at about $1,500 per gram, or $1.5 million per kilogram. That is more than 120 times the value of gold by weight, and over eight times that of rhodium.

  Helium-3 might someday fuel thermonuclear fusion reactors. About 100 metric tons would produce the electricity that Earth uses in a year, and the Moon may hold enough to supply that for 10,000 years.

  In 2024, an American startup called Interlune announced plans to mine helium on the Moon for export to Earth. Its first mission intends to reach the surface through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

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• 7. Building Above Earth

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  Microgravity allows materials to be processed in ways that are hard or impossible on Earth. One example is "foaming" metals, in which gas is injected into molten metal that is then annealed slowly. On Earth, bubbles rise or sink depending on their density. In zero gravity, they do not.

  Annealing keeps a material very hot for a long time so its molecular structure can realign, and that takes a great deal of energy. Space may be more efficient here too. The vacuum sharply reduces heat transfer, apart from radiative heat loss.

  Gerard K. O'Neill, noting the high cost of launching things in the early 1970s, proposed building Solar Power Satellites in orbit from lunar materials. His reasoning rested on the era's estimates of Space Shuttle launch costs.

  On the 30th of April 1979, General Dynamics Convair Division delivered a final report under NASA contract NAS9-15560. It was titled "Lunar Resources Utilization for Space Construction". It concluded that lunar resources would be cheaper than terrestrial materials for a system of as few as thirty such satellites, each rated at 10 GW.

  By 1980, NASA's Shuttle cost estimates had proved grossly optimistic. O'Neill and colleagues then published another route, with much lower startup costs. It leaned on partially self-replicating systems on the lunar surface, controlled by telepresence from workers on Earth, and relied far less on people living in space.

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• 8. The Colonialism Question

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  Critics describe the shift from exploration toward exploitation of the Moon as colonialist. Lunar and space colonization as a whole has become contested because it can perpetuate colonialism and its exploitive logic beyond Earth. Current projects mainly aim at exploration, but increasingly they also aim at enabling commercialization.

  Alternatives have been put forward. The organization For All Moonkind argues for conservation. The Open Lunar Foundation, chaired by Chris Hadfield, advocates collaborative stewardship of the Moon.

  The Declaration of the Rights of the Moon draws on the concept of the Rights of Nature. It proposes a legal personality for non-human entities in space, which would treat the Moon itself as something with standing of its own.

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