Does Space Need Environmentalists?

Within the next year, a small lander will likely touch down on the surface of the moon’s South Pole bearing an 80-pound drill. It will extend a thin drillbit and, whirring, bite into the slate-gray regolith. The goal is to see how much water might be captured from the small pile of moon dust that emerges from the hole.

Water in space, as it is on Earth, is life, but it’s also a key ingredient for producing rocket fuel. Making use of water found on the moon is crucial for establishing a livable toehold there that could propel us to Mars, the asteroid belt and beyond.

The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1) mission, a collaboration between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Houston-based space exploration company Intuitive Machines, is billed as the first-ever test of in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU, on the moon.

ISRU, or using resources found on-site in space, is of increasing interest among astronomers and venture capitalists alike, as the prospect of living in space becomes more technologically viable. The moon and bodies like asteroids contain not only water but also minerals like iron, nickel, lithium and platinum that could be used to manufacture spaceships, factories and Martian outposts. They will also likely make some people fantastically rich, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson notes, the first trillionaire will be made in space.

But amid such promising developments are worries among some scientists and environmentalists who fear humans will repeat the errors that resource extraction has wrought on Earth. There have been multiple ecological catastrophes — from the mountains beheaded in West Virginia to the tailings dams that poison watersheds in South America — resulting from our efforts to mine coal, gold, lithium, and other minerals to sustain ever-more-complex supply chains and fuel human growth.

If we have mining in space, do we need a preemptive anti-mining campaign to protect our solar system from rampant exploitation before it is too late? Earth-bound environmental advocates and astrobiologists alike have concluded that, indeed, we need an environmental movement in space.

“Everywhere that humans go, they cause ecological problems. The environmental history is clear about this,” Daniel Capper, an adjunct professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, who is a vocal proponent of such a movement, recently told me. Capper, who has a Walt Whitman beard and speaks with a genial kind of urgency, argues that commonly-held beliefs about the value of land and wilderness on Earth should hold just as much sway in space.

He is part of a small but growing chorus of intellectuals who argue that we must carve out protections sooner rather than later — backed by a concrete theoretical and legal framework — for certain areas of the solar system. The United Nations has convened a working group on the use of space resources, and the International Astronomical Union has set up a different working group to delineate places of special scientific value on the moon.

Some researchers have proposed creating a planetary park system in space, while others advocate for a circular space economy that minimizes the need for additional resources. The nonprofit For All Moonkind is advocating for the protection of space sites of cultural importance, like the Apollo 11 landing site. And the Astra Carta, backed by Britain’s King Charles, advocates for making sustainability a key component of space activities.

The necessity of such a celestial environmental movement — when humans have barely ventured beyond Earth, let alone begun to colonize the cosmos — may seem dubious. But consider that our solar system contains natural wonders that match or even exceed those found on Earth: Olympus Mons on Mars is roughly 72,000 feet tall, or equivalent to nearly two-and-a-half Everests; Saturn’s largest rings are some 170,000 miles in diameter and made almost entirely of pure water ice; and deep grooves, like talon marks scar the Martian moon Phobos, potentially made by gravitational forces pulling the moon apart.

“Wouldn’t it be a horrible tragedy if humans marred the rings of Saturn forever so that they were never the same?” Capper said.

Vast Is Not Infinite

Martin Elvis, an astronomer with the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution, is another leading voice in this new field of space environmentalism. Elvis studies supermassive black holes, monstrous objects at the heart of galaxies that cast blinding storms of radiation into space, some of which reach Earth where astronomers can see them. The bigger our telescopes, the more we can learn about the universe, and it was a desire for just such a telescope that got Elvis thinking about protecting space in the first place.

In the permanently dark craters of the moon, scientists could build radio telescopes big enough to listen to the faint whispers of hydrogen from the universal Dark Ages before the first stars or galaxies were formed, according to Elvis. Such telescopes, which are possible in few other places, “would make the James Webb Space Telescope look like a toy,” he told me.

A simple way to bring the cost of doing so down is to mine asteroids for minerals like iron and copper, to avoid having to launch everything from Earth. Indeed, space start-ups like Karman+ are already testing the technology to capture and process nearby asteroids.

Elvis told me there are perhaps a dozen near Earth worth mining with our current or near-future technologies. Many more reside in the asteroid belt, and elsewhere in the solar system, but these are more difficult to get to, given our existing technological capabilities.

Intrigued by the notion of using resources from asteroids, Elvis decided to sketch out the path of a civilization whose use of iron doubles every 20 years — a rough match of humanity’s consumption of the resource since the Industrial Revolution. According to Elvis’ calculations, we have about 400 years’ worth of resources at hand in the solar system if growth continues on the same trajectory. Absent the invention of faster-than-light travel, which would perhaps enable us to reach other far-flung solar systems, that’s all the iron we would ever get.

“People get amazed by the vast amount of resources and think it’s practically infinite,” he told me. “Vast is not infinite.”

These asteroids also likely hold scientific treasures that rival their mineral wealth.

“There are dozens of minerals found in meteorites in tiny quantities that are not formed on Earth or if they are formed, they’re destroyed too quickly,” Elvis said. “There may well be things we could benefit from, but we’re too ignorant now to even know that they’re there.”

Perhaps, he thought, we need to think about stopping long before we burn through our solar system’s resources and preserving some of what remains. That means protecting not only places like Daedalus Crater on the moon’s far side — prime real estate for a radio telescope — but also keeping entire swathes of the solar system free of human influence to head off the frightening math of exponential growth. To do so, Elvis proposed setting aside 7/8ths of the solar system as wilderness, in a paper published in 2019 in Acta Astronautica that he coauthored with King’s College London philosopher Tony Milligan.

“There should be places that we do not touch and have value for that reason,” he said.

The space environmentalism movement today may appear overly optimistic, or wildly aspirational. Certainly, it lacks cohesion, both philosophically and structurally. But space environmentalists do share a yearning with the people who dream of establishing space cities and lunar outposts.

“Perhaps in space we have a chance to redeem ourselves,” Capper said.

Missiles Above Our Heads

But that redemptive arc is off to a worrying start. Low-Earth orbit is the first place humans have seriously started pursuing commercial activities in space. Thousands of satellites whirling above our heads enable GPS systems, ATM transactions, internet connectivity, military operations and more. This valuable space is increasingly, dangerously crowded.

“The garbage problem is growing exponentially,” said Moriba Jah, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and chief scientist for Privateer, a Maui-based company whose services include orbital collision management. “In a busy year, like five, 10 years ago, we launched a satellite per month. Now we’re launching 60 every three weeks.” Indeed, it may be even more, as 2023 saw around 50 satellites launched per week, for a total of 2,664.

As a teenager, Jah spent five years at the Captain Pedro María Ochoa Morales military boarding school in Venezuela, where he wrote that one of the many arbitrary-seeming components of his education was an occasional drill that entailed standing outside on a parade ground, at attention, for eight hours from sunset to sunrise. It was during these long hours of enforced quietude that he began to contemplate the sky above him, the brilliant points of light it contained, and the many secrets it surely concealed. Now, the celestial light that trickled down to him as a bone-tired cadet is filtered through a scrum of human-made objects: satellites, rocket boosters, spacecraft parts, and countless tiny pieces of scrap metal from satellite collisions.

Agencies like NASA have been warning of the dangers of orbital debris for years, as it poses real dangers to satellites and human beings in space. At orbital speeds, a hunk of metal just inches across can pack inertial energy equal to several pounds of TNT.

This orbital junkyard inspired Jah to begin pushing for efforts to clean up low-Earth orbit and to advocate more broadly for environmental protections in outer space. He speaks about orbital debris with intensity and directness, in soundbites suggesting he’s argued the point many times before.

Jah has advocated for creating a circular space economy to reduce waste, as well as bringing Indigenous values that center respect for the natural world into space. Beyond that, he sees opportunities to apply environmental laws such as so-called ecocide laws that deal with the destruction of nature on Earth to space, too.

“If space becomes unsustainable, then sustaining Earth becomes unsustainable,” Jah told me.

Going To Space In Earnest

To date, more than 40 private and public missions have reached the moon, primarily in the 20th century, but a renewed interest in the moon is building as technologies and our understanding of the resources available on the moon improve. In recent years, various countries and private companies have announced a dozen missions to the Moon.

NASA’s ambitious, and much-delayed, Artemis program plans to deliver human astronauts to the Moon once again beginning in 2026, with plans to add an orbiting lunar space station in 2028. China has also announced plans to put humans on the Moon by 2030.

Proposed unmanned missions aim to test new technologies, return samples, and, like PRIME-1, gather data on the lunar environment in preparation for human visitors. One NASA mission, contracted out to Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, is set to launch in November and is known as the Blue Ghost Mission 1. It carries experiments that will study how lunar regolith sticks to various materials, how solar radiation affects electronics, and chart how plumes of dust created by landers behave, among other things.

NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative has outlined a plan for advancing six key areas of research needed to establish a human presence on the moon, including ISRU, power generation and excavating and transporting materials found on the moon. Other researchers are studying how to use electrolysis to extract oxygen from lunar soil and conduct thermal mining on the Moon.

As ISRU gains momentum, many in the space environmentalism movement worry regulations to protect places like Olympus Mons or the moon’s dark craters will lag. Current rules largely stem from the venerable Outer Space Treaty (OST), established by the United Nations in 1967. 

The OST, which predated the moon landing by two years, was a sweeping document meant to lay the groundwork for how nations conducted themselves in space. Along with the later international agreements that expanded on it, the treaty includes directives for rescuing lost astronauts, salvaging spacecraft, using nuclear power, and determining liability for any damages. Most space-faring nations have ratified the OST, but experts worry that it contains few clear rules about what can and can’t be done in space.

The lack of clarity is especially worrying because decisions made today about space could codify regulations and norms that will shape coming decades of space exploration. If the views of space environmentalists aren’t taken seriously by governments and corporations, and incorporated into ongoing plans, they could miss a major opportunity to help shape things.

One obvious starting point for protecting space is to preserve the site of the Apollo 11 landing, Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer and president of For All Moonkind, told me.

In addition to that site, Hanlon is lobbying to protect “culturally significant” places like the site of Luna 2, the first spacecraft to land on the moon, and therefore the first human-made object to touch the lunar surface. Absent specific protections, indelible moments in human history like the first human footprints on the moon might be destroyed, Hanlon said.

“We think that we can set the standard for other environmental protections, whether it’s natural heritage, or whether it’s a different concept of looking at the environment,” Hanlon said.

Another way to do this might be to take ideas that work on Earth and take them to space, noted Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist who has proposed creating planetary parks in space.

“Rather than trying to preserve all these things through different laws and different regulations, different mechanisms, just put them all together under planetary parks,” he told me.

As with national parks on Earth, planetary parks would prohibit mining or development, preserving the wilderness character of special places. We might even have a Planetary Park Service, Cockell said, staffed by spacefaring nations.

Proposed locations include permanently shadowed craters on the moon, “type specimens” of representative asteroids, the grooves of Phobos, and the miles-high cliffs of Uranus’ moon Miranda — so tall a fall from the top would take a full 12 minutes in the low gravity.

“Perhaps it’s a good idea at this stage, even long before humans, to think, ‘Well, it might be a good idea to decide there are certain areas we want to keep pristine because we don’t know what we’re going to learn there,’” he said.

But moving from sentiment to reality may be more challenging.

Negotiating The Final Frontier

Today, more than 100 nations have ratified the core OST, more formally known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. The OST remains the most significant legal document addressing space and, as such, contains most of the current principles concerning the protection of the environment in space.

The OST’s principles do carry real weight, Antonino Salmeri, a space lawyer and director of the Lunar Policy Platform, told me. Its rules are binding, he said, “meaning they are enforceable under international law against any state that would violate them.”

But the OST is also frustratingly broad and open to interpretation, according to Jah and Salmeri. Beyond language stating that the exploration and use of space is “the province of all mankind,” and an admonition to “conduct exploration of [planetary bodies] so as to avoid their harmful contamination,” there is little to direct humanity’s actions.

Attempts to be more explicit have been met with mixed success, like the 1979 Moon Agreement, put forward by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), which contains more forceful language around sustainability, such as declaring the moon the “common heritage of mankind,” and stipulating measures to “prevent the disruption of the existing balance of its environment.” The treaty is yet to be ratified by any major spacefaring nation.

That leaves the uses of outer space up to interpretation. Notes Hanlon, “from a legal standpoint, we have no idea what space, the space domain is.”

Yet the lack of norms — clear rules and regulations around space — is one of the most pressing threats to the space environment, advocates say. What might happen, for example, if the United States simply began scooping up asteroids for platinum, or if Blue Origin established a mine at the lunar South Pole without securing consensus from others?

“We do not have good answers to those questions right now,” Hanlon said. “This is something that I’m really concerned about.”

Much of the legal basis for the space environmentalism movement is currently contained in just one article of the OST, said Christopher Johnson, the director of legal affairs and space law at the Secure World Foundation. Article 9 of the OST contains the harmful contamination language and says actors must pay “due regard” to the interests of others. It also stipulates that “harmful interference” with the activities of others must be avoided. Those phrases could be interpreted in multiple ways and have yet to be meaningfully tested. 

Outside of legal boundaries, acting ungenerously in space also risks international opprobrium, which may help keep space players honest. On the other hand, there are big advantages to moving first — and fast — in space. Resources are scarce, so getting there before anyone else lets you pick the best and easiest targets. Acting first also allows nations and corporations to set the precedent, which could be quite valuable in a realm where few exist.

Those precedents are beginning to take shape. The Artemis Accords, a set of principles for exploring and using resources in outer space established by the U.S. in 2020, argues that resource extraction does not constitute national appropriation, and is therefore allowed by the OST.  It’s an initial step toward securing a consensus on space regulations, and one that’s to date received the signatures of 47 nations including Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Germany (though China and Russia are notably absent). Signing the Artemis Accords allows nations to participate in the Artemis program, and also play a role in shaping future norms in space, Johnson said, a potentially lucrative incentive.

Much of the Artemis Accords are based on the OST, though they go slightly further in a few areas, such as the use of space resources, protections for cultural heritage, and calls for transparency among space actors. Some argue that one clause allowing for “safety zones” could be used to exclude others and rope off resources, but Johnson said that likely wouldn’t hold up in practice as it violates the OST.

Furthermore, the Accords are political commitments, not a binding treaty. In practice, Johnson told me, how nations and other entities operate in space will likely come down to a deliberative process.

“Both science and commerce are given equal protection in space law as legitimate peaceful uses,” he said. “But we will need to do some type of balancing of interests.”

Salmeri similarly sees the Accords and other agreements as the first step of a long, messy negotiation over how we’ll use space. We’ll preserve places like the moon, he told me, by having transparent conversations about wants, needs and plans, and discussing who will bear the costs and reap the rewards. This collaborative, negotiated approach — one that’s undergirded COPUOS for decades — is far likelier to succeed than simply excluding people or activities from any one area, he argues.

Those discussions are happening, though slowly. The UN’s COPUOS, the same one responsible for the OST and the Moon Agreement, published a working paper in 2019 that laid out voluntary guidelines for the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. 

Recommendations from the committee’s working group on principles for the use of space resources are due in 2027, and Johnson said draft guidelines are likely to emerge in early 2025. The COPUOS has repeatedly acknowledged the importance of sustainability and environmental protection in documents and statements, though its recommendations have yet to result in anything approaching international law.

Writing The Future Of Outer Space

Space is incomprehensibly vast. Perhaps it can accommodate miners and Martian John Muirs alike. But it’s worth remembering we’ve been in similar situations before. The French-American author Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur wrote wonderingly of the vastness of the American continent in the latter part of the 18th century, saying “many ages will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled. Who can tell how far it extends? Who can tell the millions of men whom it will feed and contain?”

That was almost 250 years ago. In another 250 years, humanity may have grown even greater in both its capabilities and needs. The rings of Saturn, for example, contain millions of billions of metric tons of water ice, perhaps enough to refill Mars’ ancient northern ocean as part of a terraforming project, according to Elvis. Would our admiration of their beauty check our desire to create another Earth to live on?

Humanity has yet to test the boundaries of its appreciation for the majesty of the cosmos. Our numbers include those like Jah, awed by the light of the stars, and others equally awed by the potential for human conquest beyond Earth. Agreeing on the value of space is much less of a challenge than actually deciding how and what to preserve.

For now, with legal guardrails likely years away, the will to conserve space may need to come from within. Like it or not, we may need to hope Elon Musk and his kin harbor a sense of appreciation for the solar system’s inherent majesty.

“Valles Marineris on Mars is the most amazing canyon in the solar system. And so I think I should respect it whether I’m ever going to Mars or not,” Capper said. “I think that we all culturally need to be developing this kind of ecological respect.”

That sense of ethical obligation for the non-living features of our universe echoes the values of many cultures on Earth. There is a growing appreciation for Indigenous knowledge, whether that pertains to traditional fire management practices, or considering the needs of future generations when managing resources. Perhaps we can extend those perspectives to the cosmos. 

One day, our descendants might live among the stars. But we must ask ourselves, what kind of place will they inherit?