Artemis vs ILRS: parallel systems and the new space geopolitics
“The Moon has ceased to be a symbol. It is an asset. And the blocs are already positioning themselves to contest it.”
The return is not scientific, it is systemic
The return to the Moon no longer responds solely to scientific exploration. It responds to structural positioning.
The United States is not returning simply to plant another flag, take photographs, or repeat the heroic gesture of 1969. It is returning to build architecture. The Artemis program seeks to establish a sustained presence, coordinate allies, set standards, and prepare a cislunar economy in which transportation, communications, energy, data, and resources become part of a broader system.
China advances along a different path. It is not competing only for a mission. It is competing for autonomy, access, rules, and value chain control. Its Chang’e program is not patriotic improvisation. It is a sequence: arrive, land, explore, extract samples, return, map, and prepare infrastructure. In parallel, the International Lunar Research Station, driven by China and Russia, appears as an alternative to the U.S.-led framework. Two systems. Two standards. Two architectures.
The Moon, therefore, has ceased to be a destination. It has become a platform. The competition will not simply be about arriving first, but about staying longer, operating more efficiently, controlling nodes, and setting rules. The old species looks upward with the language of cooperation, but with very familiar instincts. The stage changes. The primitive does not entirely change.
Artemis: networks, allies, and standards
Artemis is more than a space program. It is a diplomatic, technological, and industrial architecture. The United States seeks to return human beings to the Moon, develop a sustained presence, and use that learning as a stepping stone toward Mars. But behind the scientific narrative lies an evident geopolitical construction: whoever defines standards, procedures, interoperability, and operational zones begins to shape the board before others arrive with sufficient weight.
The Artemis Accords, promoted by NASA and the U.S. Department of State, already bring together dozens of countries. NASA recorded Paraguay as the 67th signatory in May 2026, demonstrating that Artemis is not merely a U.S. mission, but an expanding diplomatic network. In official language, there is talk of peaceful exploration, transparency, cooperation, and responsible use of space. All of that matters. But so does the uncomfortable question: who writes the rules when the new territory still has no owner.
The United States is building an open ecosystem under its rules. It integrates agencies, allies, private companies, contractors, launch providers, modules, landing systems, orbital stations, and supply chains. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and multiple partners are part of that machinery. The Moon will not be conquered by a single rocket, but by an entire industrial ecosystem. In the 21st century, power does not arrive alone. It arrives with suppliers, standards, software, insurance, contracts, and financing.
Chang’e and ILRS: autonomy, sequence, and an alternative system
China advances with a different logic. The Chang’e program speaks less and does more. Chang’e 4 achieved the first landing on the far side of the Moon. Chang’e 5 returned lunar samples to Earth. Chang’e 6 went further: it brought back samples from the far side in 2024, from the Aitken Basin near the lunar south pole, a scientific and operational milestone that no other country had achieved.
The sequence reveals purpose. These are not isolated milestones. They are cumulative tests of reconnaissance, navigation, landing, extraction, ascent, docking, return, and analysis. China is not only observing. It validates a full chain. In geopolitics, that changes the weight of the actor. It is not the same to declare ambition as to demonstrate capability.
The ILRS, presented by China and Russia as an international lunar research station, seeks to build a scientific installation on the lunar surface and in lunar orbit. China has indicated that the basic model is projected toward 2035 in the lunar south pole region and an extended model toward the 2040s. It has also reported the incorporation of 17 countries and international organizations, in addition to more than 50 research institutions.
The China–Russia alliance is not merely circumstantial. Russia contributes historical experience in space systems, launch, and operations. China contributes industry, financing, scale, and long-term discipline. Together they offer an alternative to the Western lunar order. This does not imply perfect equality between them. China leads with greater momentum. Russia accompanies with experience and strategic weight. The logic is clear: if power on Earth is moving toward multipolarity, space will not remain immune.
BRICS and the extension of non-Western power
The new lunar geopolitics cannot be understood without observing the shift of global power toward non-Western structures. BRICS, with China and Russia as its main axes, not only articulates a financial, energy, and commercial alternative on Earth. It also begins to project that logic into space.
The Moon thus appears as the next territory where non-Western systems can test an architecture independent of frameworks designed by Washington and its allies. This is not multipolar poetry. It is about access to resources, infrastructure, data, communications, energy, and technological prestige.
On Earth, blocs compete over currencies, critical minerals, energy, maritime routes, submarine cables, and digital platforms. On the Moon, they will compete over water, orbits, communications, landing zones, surface energy, and resupply capabilities. The board changes color, but not its logic. Power always seeks to extend itself wherever it finds advantage.
Lunar resources: water, regolith, and helium-3
Interest in the Moon is not abstract. Polar ice can become water for life support, oxygen for breathing, and hydrogen for fuel. Regolith can serve as in-situ construction material. Solar energy in certain lunar regions can power bases and equipment. The Moon is not merely a celestial body. It is a potential service station, quarry, laboratory, and logistics platform.
Helium-3 occupies a special place in this strategic imagination. It is not an immediate solution. Its commercial exploitation depends on still uncertain advances in nuclear fusion. But in geopolitics, a resource does not need to be exploitable today to be contested. It is enough that it could alter the energy balance tomorrow. If fusion consolidates in the coming decades, lunar helium-3 could become a resource of enormous strategic value.
That is why the Moon is being studied, mapped, and projected with such seriousness. Not only for what it provides today, but for what it might enable. Oil shaped much of the 20th century before many fully understood its full political weight. The lunar question operates under the same anticipatory logic. Whoever arrives late to the future resource will not be able to claim innocence. Only miscalculation.
Infrastructure: the real power
Lunar power will not lie only in landing. It will lie in controlling infrastructure. Orbital stations, cargo and crew transport, communication and navigation networks, surface energy systems, refueling capabilities, autonomous robots, operational artificial intelligence, and the ability to repair equipment far from Earth. Whoever controls these nodes does not need to formally own the Moon. Controlling access is enough.
The global space economy already exceeded USD 600 billion annually in 2024, according to the Space Foundation, and various projections place the sector above the trillion-dollar threshold in the coming decades. These figures do not describe a distant fantasy. They describe a system under construction. Communications, navigation, Earth observation, defense, data, launches, satellites, insurance, advanced manufacturing, and artificial intelligence already form part of the everyday space economy.
The drop in launch costs, rocket reusability, and the entry of private actors have changed the equation. The Moon no longer depends solely on heroic state budgets. It depends on public–private ecosystems capable of sustaining long investment cycles. That is the real shift. The space frontier ceases to be only national epic and becomes economic infrastructure.
Rules, treaties, and effective power
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits national appropriation of the Moon and other celestial bodies, and also prevents the placement of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies. But the treaty does not sufficiently clarify the exploitation of resources nor how rival powers will coexist in areas of high strategic value.
The Artemis Accords propose operational principles. China and Russia do not recognize them as a universal framework. The ILRS proposes another architecture. That is where the problem lies. There is no absolute vacuum of norms, but there is a gap between norms and power. Rules exist, but their effectiveness depends on who can sustain them, interpret them, and enforce them.
Direct militarization of the lunar surface is formally prohibited. But the real frontier shifts toward dual-use capabilities: communications, sensors, navigation, interference, cyber operations, satellites, orbital platforms, and systems capable of denying or degrading an adversary’s access. This is not about imagining nuclear missiles falling from the Moon as crude science fiction. It is about something more probable: the control of critical infrastructure from above.
Energy, minerals, and artificial intelligence
Lunar competition is part of a broader convergence between energy, critical minerals, and artificial intelligence. The energy transition increases demand for lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and rare earths. Artificial intelligence accelerates electricity consumption, demanding data centers, advanced chips, cooling systems, satellites, communications, and distributed computing capacity. Everything begins to connect.
In this context, space appears as a potential extension of that value chain. Not only as a future source of resources, but as a platform for broader energy, logistical, and technological systems. Lunar bases, surface solar energy, autonomous robots, experimental mining, cislunar communications, and deep-space navigation form part of a single architecture.
Competition is no longer defined by a single domain. It is defined by the ability to integrate multiple systems: energy, materials, data, transport, and infrastructure. And within that integration, power ceases to be visible on the surface. It becomes structural.
Lunar geopolitics: extension of terrestrial power
Lunar geopolitics does not inaugurate a new logic. It extends an existing one. The same powers, asymmetries, and capabilities that structure power on Earth are projected beyond it. There will be no spontaneous neutrality or automatic balance. There will be dominant positions and dependencies defined by technology, industry, financing, and sustained operational capacity.
The Moon will not belong to those who claim it, but to those who can use it continuously. And that is not a matter of principles. It is a matter of power. The United States builds networks. China and Russia build an alternative system. Europe, Japan, India, and other actors seek not to be left out. The Global South observes, signs, negotiates, or joins according to convenience. The old human story repeats itself, now in pressurized suits.
Humanity is not returning to the Moon. It is extending its system of competition. And in that process, power is no longer defined only by territory. It is defined by who controls energy, resources, infrastructure, data, and access—even beyond Earth.
Darwinian closing
Technological advancement alone does not change the nature of the actor that wields it. The first hominid who raised a tool to survive initiated an ambiguous history: cooperation and violence, creation and domination, adaptation and destruction. Today, the species that left the cave builds orbital stations, probes, lunar modules, and algorithms. But it carries with it the same ancient question: whether it will be able to use its intelligence without becoming captive to its own appetite.
Darwin would have understood the paradox. It is not necessarily the strongest who survive, but those who best adapt. The question is whether humanity, now capable of extending its power beyond Earth, will also be capable of adapting to the consequences of that power.
“Because the Moon will not be a new beginning.”
“It will be the same system in another setting.”
“And what happens there will not depend on lunar geography, but on the decisions made, as always, down here…”
Bibliography (abridged)
NASA, Artemis Accords
NASA, Artemis Program
China National Space Administration, International Lunar Research Station
United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, Outer Space Treaty
Space Foundation, The Space Report 2025
OECD, The Space Economy in Figures
National Science Review, studies on Chang’e
