Uzbekistan makes 77 Artemis Accords signatories. The resource clause rides along
Each signature is another government endorsing the U.S. reading of who may own extracted space resources. 2026 has added 17.
Uzbekistan’s foreign minister, Bakhtiyor Saidov, signed the Artemis Accords in Samarkand on Monday, Oct. 19, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio present, making the country the 77th signatory. NASA’s announcement notes that Uzbek students are working toward the country’s first CubeSat by 2028 and that Uzbekistan is scheduled to host the International Astronautical Congress that year.
Nobody expects Uzbekistan to mine the Moon. That’s not why this matters.
Every signatory accepts Section 10 of the Accords, which says resource extraction “does not inherently constitute national appropriation” under the Outer Space Treaty. In a legal system with no court and no registry, the closest thing to settled law is what a large share of states say the treaty means. Payload’s count put the club at about 40 percent of the world’s countries and roughly two-thirds of Outer Space Treaty parties even before Uzbekistan, with 17 additions in 2026, the biggest year since 2024.
For a company planning to sell lunar helium-3 or water, that is quiet de-risking. The legal argument that its product can be owned and sold now has dozens of governments on the record, which matters to lenders and buyers long before it matters to anyone on the Moon.
The limit is unchanged. China and Russia are still outside the Accords, and they’re the two other powers with south pole plans. A majority view is not a universal one, and the places where disputes will happen are the handful of craters everyone wants.
What we’re watching: whether the signatories’ working meetings produce anything concrete on safety zones, the clause our Accords explainer argues will matter most. A headcount past 80 is likely. A common rule on how big a zone around a mine can be would be news.
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