The Artemis Accords, read for miners
Seventy-seven countries have signed a non-binding document about the Moon. Two sections matter if you plan to dig.
The Artemis Accords were launched on Oct. 13, 2020, by eight countries: Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States. As of this week the State Department counts 77 signatories, after Uzbekistan signed in Samarkand on Oct. 19. The document is non-binding, short, and mostly restates the Outer Space Treaty. Two sections are new enough to matter to anyone who wants to extract something.
Section 10 covers space resources. Signatories affirm that extracting resources “does not inherently constitute national appropriation” under the treaty, and commit to informing the UN Secretary-General, the public and the scientific community about their extraction activities. That second commitment gets less attention than it should. A transparency pledge means a signatory’s company can’t quietly prospect a site and keep the assay results secret, at least not the fact of extraction.
Section 11 covers deconfliction, and it introduces the “safety zone”: the area where nominal operations or an anomaly “could reasonably cause harmful interference,” inside which an operator notifies others and coordinates. The text says safety zones should be sized by commonly accepted engineering principles and that they “will ultimately be temporary, ending when the relevant operation ceases.”
Read that as a miner. A mining operation that runs for years, kicks up dust and moves heavy equipment around a shadowed crater has a strong engineering argument for a large zone, for a long time. The Accords never call that a claim. In practice it may work like one.
Notice also who isn’t on the list. China and Russia haven’t signed, and China is building its own south pole program, which is why our coverage of the delayed Chang’e-7 mission sits in the same series as NASA’s rover plans. Payload’s analysis counts 17 new signatories in 2026 alone, the biggest year since 2024, so the coalition is growing quickly. It is not becoming universal.
Our view: the safety-zone clause, not the resources clause, will decide who mines where. The first operator to publish a zone around an ice deposit sets the precedent for everyone.
What would change our mind: signatories agreeing on a hard cap on safety-zone size or duration, which would turn the clause back into pure traffic control.
Not affiliated with NASA, SpaceX or any agency or company mentioned. Not investment advice. Disclaimer.