The New Space Race and National Programs

The United States leads its return to the Moon through NASA's Artemis program, named for the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, which launched its uncrossed Artemis I test flight around the Moon aboard the Space Launch System rocket and an Orion capsule in November 2022, ahead of a planned crewed lunar flyby, Artemis II, and an eventual crewed landing near the lunar south pole. Central to the program's geopolitical dimension are the Artemis Accords, a set of non-binding bilateral principles for lunar and deep-space cooperation first signed in October 2020 by eight founding countries, the United States, Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, and expanded to more than forty signatory states by the mid-2020s. The Accords explicitly build on the Outer Space Treaty but add provisions, notably on the extraction and use of space resources and on establishing "safety zones" around lunar operations, that Russia and China have criticized as an attempt by Washington to set unilateral rules for lunar activity outside the UN framework.