In April 1970, the crippled spacecraft was publicized when Apollo 13 went round the back of the moon and was the subject of global stress test of engineering and decision-making, which was observed by over 40 million individuals throughout the world. That play had never just been about survival, it was also about what competence had been in a space race that was characterized by unique accomplishments. Artemis II, and its four-crew orbit around the moon and back, again places human beings in deep space intentionally, but there is a larger purpose behind it: it will assist in determining who has permission to normalize the utilization of the moon.
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The current competition is not similar to the two-lane race of the Cold War. Agendas are still stipulated by national agencies, commercial operators are constructing critical systems, and multinational partnerships are planned at the beginning. There, “winning” is less a matter of an initial footprint and more one of repetition: appearing frequently, functioning safely, and establishing patterns which can be worked around by other players.
Artemis II is not a landing intentionally. Its worth is that it drives a human-rated transportation stack into low Earth orbit and challenges it to work as a predictable system, including life support, navigation, communications, reentry, etc., on a mission that can be planned on by its mission partners. It is that reliability that transforms a program into a program into infrastructure and it is why a flyby can bring strategic weight. The mission is also an intermediate step on the way to Artemis III where NASA has proposed landing on the lunar south pole, an area which is both a scientific focus and an operational challenge due to the lighting conditions and potential presence of water ice in permanently shadowed areas.
And that is where law and operations begin to come in conflict. Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty demands “due regard” and non-harmful interference, a term that was largely abstract in the days when there were not many actors capable of accessing space and the moon itself. These words are procedural a crowded south pole adds: who is saying what they are doing, how close can the vehicles and surface systems work, and how the issue can avoid disputes before it becomes mission-threatening.
The American response has been to construct a structure on the surface. Artemis Accords stipulate expectations that specify how the general treaty commitments can be turned into everyday practices: transparency, interoperability, support to astronauts in distress, registration of space objects, free provision of scientific information, and preservation of heritage sites. The operationally the most narrow idea is deconfliction with temporary “safety zones” in which participants communicate the location and broad nature of actions and agree not to obstruct each other in a manner harmful to the other- without possessing territory.
The lunar structure of China refers to another paradigm: centrally oriented, strictly disciplined, and selectively allied. Its program has had an incremental capability with robotic missions, including far-side missions and sample-return missions, and it has publicly declared an intention to a crewed landing on the moon by 2030. It is also gaining traction on a south pole outpost via the concept of the International Lunar Research Station, jointly with Russia, proposing surface, orbital and terrestrial segments.
Such ambitions are not enclosed in the air. The follow-up project of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 is another important robotic mission to the south pole, called Chang’e 7; it will be a complex campaign consisting of an orbiter, lander, rover and a hopper designed to explore permanently shadowed areas. It will carry 18 scientific instruments, one of them being the payloads designed to locate and characterize water ice around the Shackleton Crater, and it has international instruments, a tactic that is a mix of selective cooperation and a program whose coordination plan is relatively obscured.
The Artemis II is hence not primarily a vote on nostalgia or the success of a single flight. It is a trial of whether an open, coalition-oriented style can swiftly transform principles of law into practice on a scale to count–before the most valuable lunar real estate is saturated and the first serious efforts of industry to go near the moon make every player define, practically, what constitutes “due regard.”