Since 1967, international law establishes that No State can appropriate the Moon. The Outer Space Treaty states this clearly. No nation can claim it as its own. For decades, that principle worked without much friction, because the human presence on the satellite It was sporadic, limited and, above all, reversible. You arrived and returned. There was nothing to dispute in practical terms.
That balance is changing and he recent success of the Artemis II mission illustrates it with particular eloquence. The mission has not violated any rules, but it does not need to. What is happening in the contemporary space race It is not a declared appropriation, but an operational one. A accumulation of presenceinfrastructure and control over resources which, until recently, were purely hypothetical.
The rhetoric accompanying this moment does not leave much room for ambiguity. Jared Isaacman, billionaire and current administrator of NASA, has said that Your goal is to return to the Moon and not let anyone else take it. That nobody is China. NASA’s plan contemplates a first lunar landing in 2028, with the aim of establish permanently inhabited lunar bases from 2032. China, for its part, hopes to land on the moon in 2030. The race has dates and a particularly relevant objective: the Shackleton crater, at the lunar south pole, where the largest known reserves of frozen water are concentrated.
That water is the real object of competition. It can be converted into breathable oxygen, into hydrogen for fuel, into the central element of any permanent settlement outside Earth. Whoever controls that resource will not have claimed the Moon in legal terms, but will have acquired something functionally equivalent: the ability to determine who can stay and under what conditions.
International law did not resolve this scenario because, when the relevant treaties were drawn up, it was unimaginable. The 1967 Treaty prohibits national appropriation of the celestial body, but remains silent on the functional appropriation of its resources. It does not establish what happens when an actor is the only one capable of extracting water or generating energy at a specific point on the satellite. That omission, irrelevant for years, It becomes central today.
Although there was a serious attempt to solve it. The Moon Agreement, adopted by the UN in 1979, proposed that lunar resources be considered the common heritage of humanity and that their exploitation would require an international management regime. It was a legally coherent proposal, but also It was politically unviable, since none of the space powers ratified it.so the agreement exists only formally.
What has filled that void are the Artemis Agreements, promoted since 2020 by the United States with support from the European Union. These agreements do not explicitly challenge the prohibition of appropriation, but they circumvent it by create security zones around space operations and recognize the right to use resources extracted from space. Are ambiguous enough so as not to contradict the 1967 Treaty, and functional enough to organize lunar access around whoever arrives first and with greater capacity. China, which has not signed these agreements, does not seem to care about the legal framework, but only about accelerating its space program independently.
The focus of analysis today is not a potential violation of the 1967 Treaty, since probably no one will do so explicitly. It is, rather, whether that treaty, as drafted, has the tools to prevent the Moon from being appropriated in practice by a state or even a group of business giants. And if the answer is negative (as everything seems to indicate), the time to build an effective international regime is not when the first permanent settlement is operational, but now, while there is still something to regulate.
Costa Rica has not signed the Artemis Agreements. But the list of Latin American signatories (Brazil, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Panama, ColombiaEcuador) suggests that this absence could be temporary. Joining implies being part of the framework that today organizes international space cooperation and that has the support of more than 60 States. Not doing so means being left out of conversations that will define the rules of access to resources. that, although distant, They will be strategic.
What does seem clear is that a decision of this nature deserves an informed debatewhich goes beyond diplomatic formality and considers what type of spatial order suits a country that has made international law one of its main foreign policy instruments.
