How should the moon and Mars be governed?

With the Artemis program going full out to establish a base on the moon and with dreams by SpaceX’s Elon Musk to build a city on Mars, the question arises about how these worlds will be governed once humans are living on them. Adriana C. Ocampo Uria, a planetary scientist and self-described space ethics specialist, has taken to Space News to propose one answer.

Ocampo, perhaps averse to the current space race between the U.S. and China, proposes a new model. At the core of her proposal is the creation of a “Planetary Stewardship Council” which would be “a permanent, U.N.-affiliated body with the ethical authority to define and implement ethical guardrails, adjudicate resource claims, designate ‘preservation zones’ around biologically sensitive sites and mediate landing-rights disputes.”

The proposal drew the disdain of NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Bureaucracy has already throttled space exploration,” he noted on X, “and this article proposes creating a UN-affiliated ‘Planetary Stewardship Council?’ As a species, there are few things we actually agree upon here on Earth, so how could this possibly advance progress in space?”

Isaacman is spot-on. More importantly, there is a pretty good chance that such a council would be dominated by nations inherently hostile toward the U.S. and its allies. Peter Hague, an astrophysicist, software engineer, and a space industry analyst, suggests that such a council would place undue restrictions on space exploration and would likely prohibit the colonization of the moon and Mars. The proposed council would be staffed by people who would prefer to keep outer space a protected preserve for scientific study, much like Antarctica.

Besides, an excellent model already exists for governing in space. The model is called the Artemis Accords .

The Artemis Accords began during the first Trump administration. They are a nonbinding agreement among nations that define the rules for operating on celestial bodies such as the moon and Mars. The accords define everything from data-sharing and transparency to deconfliction, a particular area of concern in Ocampo’s article.

The Artemis Accords facilitates deconfliction by establishing safety zones around lunar bases and Mars settlements, for example, beyond which other parties are prohibited from going without permission. The clause mitigates the possibility of interference in one country’s activities by another.

So far, 70 nations are parties to the Artemis Accords, ranging from major space powers such as the U.S. and India to smaller countries such as Rwanda and Singapore. Every country has agreed to bind itself to the provisions of the accords equally.

The objection to the Artemis Accords is that two of the major space powers, Russia and China, have not yet signed them and therefore will not feel bound by their provisions. Russia’s refusal likely will not matter, as President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine is rapidly eroding his country’s status as a space power. Indeed, recently, Ukraine attacked the rocket factory that produces, among other things, Russia’s launch vehicle that sends cosmonauts to and from the International Space Station.

China has declined to sign the Artemis Accords because it refuses to constrain its imperial space ambitions. Beijing does not want to cooperate with other nations in space — rather, it wants to dominate space at their expense.

A feel-good U.N. council would not make matters better and would likely make them worse, as it would provide a vehicle for China to pursue its ambitions for a space-based empire.

The best that can be done, for the time being, would be for the civilized world, under the Artemis Accords, to restrain China until such a time as changes its attitude and its policies. Fights over space resources, in other words, can be answered by Earth-based economic sanctions.

Someday, China’s President Xi Jinping will go the way of Mao and be replaced as China’s leader. Perhaps the next leader noting the harm that his predecessor has wreaked on China, will be a reformist on the model of Deng Xiaoping or Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev and recognize that the only path forward for China is cooperation with the rest of the world, not confrontation and conflict. Beijing might then sign the Artemis Accords, heralding the end of the new space race and the beginning of a new era.

Then and only then will we expand into the high frontier of space as a single species.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration titled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond , and, most recently, Why is America Going Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner .