“There are two ways to interpret the Artemis agreements: those who say it’s open bar for business and the Americans who say it’s not”, explained Wednesday June 8 on franceinfo Olivier Sanguy, in charge of space news at the Cité de l’espace in Toulouse, while France joins the Artemis agreements, the NASA program on the exploration of the Moon. These agreements envisage in particular the creation of “safety zones” to protect extraterrestrial resources.
franceinfo: What do these agreements imply?
Olivier Sanguy: It’s kind of an interpretation of the 1967 space treaty that’s more or less decoupled from the Artemis program of returning to and on the moon. The Artemis agreements are a kind of interpretation of space law and in particular the definition of a safety zone. If a machine lands on the Moon, we can say that it should not land too close because that could pose security problems. It is not national ownership, just a safe zone say the Americans and the signatories of this agreement.
What is at stake?
There is the possibility of using lunar resources for exploration because we think that maybe in the future we will be able to extract water from the lunar soil. You have to plan for it because NASA wants private companies to do it for them. The United States says this will be possible as part of an exploration for the good of humanity, but other countries, such as China and Russia, are opposed to this interpretation.
So we will be able to do business?
There are two ways to interpret Artemis chords. Those who say it’s open bar for business and the Americans who say no, that it’s supervised and that we can only do it for reasoned exploration and if it’s for science.
What can we find exploitable on the Moon?
First, there is the Moon itself, as a scientific object. To understand the Moon is to understand the Earth. The Moon was formed in a huge collision. An object the size of the planet Mars with the Earth, more than 4 billion years ago and it extracted the Moon. It is therefore an extract of the primordial Earth. When we analyze the Moon we understand the Earth from the beginning and therefore there is a major scientific interest. On a more technical level, preparing for long-duration lunar missions means preparing for more ambitious exploration, for example Mars.
What about the mission preparation tests?
A little late like any very ambitious delay. Initially, we were supposed to land on the Moon in 2024 with the next man and the first woman. Joe Biden added that we need someone from diversity, from the minority, so we expect that there will be a Hispanic or African-American astronaut among the crew. We are officially talking about 2025 for the mission but it will rather be 2027 or before 2030.
Will once a crew have landed on the Moon we will be able to install a human presence there?
We can imagine it. First, there will be a human presence around the Moon, it is seen in the NASA plan. In this kind of second smaller space station, Europe will bring modules and we will have the right to have three astronauts who will stay in this station around the Moon.