Twenty years into the future, a human moon landing by any other nation will not constitute serious competition for the United States. The US will remain the first nation ever to land a human on another celestial body. Therefore, this accomplishment by other countries several decades later will not be a concern. By then, the current Artemis program will have been completed, resulting in a human return to the lunar surface, a base camp on the lunar surface, and a getaway station in lunar orbit. These capabilities will be used to train astronauts for a mission to Mars.
In addition to this, lunar missions are costly, complex, and often fail. Bartels, 2017 wrote about the possibility of India beating the US back to the moon, pointing to the lack of a clear timeline in the moon program proposed by the Trump Administration (now Artemis), as opposed to the precise timeline of the Indian Chandrayaan-2 mission (Bartels, 2017). However, while the Indian orbiter was successfully inserted into lunar orbit, the mission’s lander crashed. A new attempt is planned for this year. However, this is just one story that shows that spacefaring is not easy.
Early, 2014 writes about the importance of expanding spacefaring endeavors from an exclusive club of just a few to as many as 44 states with satellites in orbit (Early, 2017, 55). The author focuses on the political motivation that drives states to become spacefaring nations. Politics and power, in the form of either hard power (military) or soft power (diplomacy or economic), have always been and remain the main drives behind spacefaring.
In the next two decades, the United States will not be primarily challenged by lunar missions but rather by the development and utilization of space systems designed to attack and cripple other space systems, including satellites (Hamre, 2017). This new use of space to cripple enemies is even more of an issue as the current regulations on the utilization of outer space were created at the beginning of the spacefaring era and do not include references to this type of endeavor (Peoples, 2011, 76). The most important step going forward is to revise these regulations to meet the needs of the 21st century.
It is also important to mention the issue of space debris and how it will impact space activities in the next two decades. Space debris results from the orbital attacks mentioned above meant to cripple the space systems of competing states. More such attacks mean more space debris. Space debris is not only a threat to satellites in orbit, but it could cause the Kessler syndrome to take effect (Mosila, 2023, 20). Creating more and more space debris will lead to a “cascade effect” that will increase the quantity of debris exponentially, as new debris will create more debris and so on, leading to the incapacitation of the low earth orbit, making the zone entirely unusable (Hermer-Frie, 2019, 260). If this happens in the next two decades, no state is going to the moon or anywhere else.
To conclude, competition for moon missions in the next two decades will not significantly impact global security or international relations, nor will the United States’ global position as a leader in spacefaring. However, the further development of antisatellite technology and similar tools specifically designed to cripple space adversaries will become a serious concern to global security. A space race as we know it from the Cold War times will not repeat but rather occur at a whole different level, especially if regulations will not be updated to meet the new challenges of spacefaring.
Bibliography
Bartels, Meghan. “India Is Going to Beat Us Back to the Moon.” Newsweek, October 24, 2017. https://www.newsweek.com/india-going-beat-us-back-moon-heres-their-plan-691828.
Early, Bryan R. “Exploring the Final Frontier: An Empirical Analysis of Global Civil Space Proliferation.” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2014): 55–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12102.
Hamre, John. 2017. “Challenges We Face in the National Security Space Domain.” Hampton Roads International Security Quarterly, 14–.
Hermer-Frie, R.L. 2019. Kessler syndrome: A United States’ statutory solution for satellite debris removal and the mitigation of orbital collisions. The Journal of International Business & Law, 18(2), 259–.
Mosila, Andreea. 2023. The Political Dimension of Space Exploration. Space Education & Strategic Applications Journal, Vol. 4, Issue 1, 2023. https://doi.org/10.18278/001c.75419
Peoples, Columba. 2011. “The Securitization of Outer Space: Challenges for Arms Control.” Contemporary Security Policy 32 (1): 76–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2011.556846.