CROUCHED in an area of permanent shadow, the soldier looks out over a landscape of craters and dust in a thousand shades of grey. A few kilometres away, the enemy’s transportation buggy is parked in what they must have thought was a discrete location. But as they should have learned in training, tracking enemies is easier on the moon because tyre marks aren’t eroded by the elements. Now all it will take is a squeeze of the trigger.
For now, scenes like this are, of course, distant science fiction. But it is fair to say military organisations are keeping an increasingly watchful eye on the moon. The US, Russia and China – competing powers on Earth – have ambitions to send missions back to the moon in the next decade or so. They will all be heading for roughly the same place: the moon’s south polar region, with its precious resources, such as water ice. Even before that, these nations have been sending up a steady stream of satellites.
What would the military’s role be on the moon?
With this renewed push for the moon, and the lucrative returns that might result, military interest is inevitably following. “The United States is certainly aware the moon could have tremendous long-term economic potential,” says , a defence expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a US think tank. “The military doesn’t want an outpost to be threatened due to the lack of a sheriff.” Yet even in these tentative early stages, there are concerns that military activity could snowball. If we are to return to the moon, how much of a role, if any, are we comfortable with the armed forces playing?
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US military interest in lunar space dates back to the dawn of the space age. In 1959, the US Army proposed a crewed military outpost on the moon called Project Horizon. Notions of such bases, as well as nuclear testing on the moon, had supporters during the cold war too.
Those proposals never gained traction, but recently there has been more concrete interest and action. The US and Chinese militaries have spoken about conducting surveillance beyond Earth orbit for years, says space policy expert Bleddyn Bowen at the University of Leicester, UK. This would include things like using satellites to track debris from rockets in order to prevent collisions between spacecraft in lunar orbit. “If the moon is going to be a busier place, you’re going to need more infrastructure to support it,” he says.
Evidence for this came in March, when a discarded rocket booster, believed to be of Chinese origin, hit the moon, having been untracked for years following its launch in 2014. “Eventually there will be astronauts on the moon,” says , a space tracking expert at the University of Arizona. “The chance is very small of them getting hit by something. But we’ve clearly seen that it is a possibility.” Part of the military’s role in relation to the moon could be preventing such accidental impacts.
The US Space Force
The US Space Force, the sixth branch of the country’s military that was founded in 2019, is now taking action on this. In March, it announced it was developing the satellite in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory. The plan is for this craft to test technologies to track objects up to and beyond the orbit of the moon for the first time. Prototype proposals have been submitted, with a contract due to be awarded to a manufacturing company soon.
Experts agree that tracking of this sort will be useful. But it is “not clear why this has to be the military and not a civilian programme”, says astronomer at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Having the US military involved in our future on the moon could lead to a scenario where the forces of other countries, such as China, feel the need to escalate their activity. There was an incident earlier this year in which in a geostationary orbit about 36,000 kilometres above Earth came into close contact and manoeuvred to get a better look at each other.
“You’ve got the US and China each casting suspicions about what the other might do,” says Brian Weeden at the Secure World Foundation, a US think tank that promotes the peaceful use of space. “That is going to send exactly the wrong signal.”
Only the US appears to have made public its lunar military ambitions so far, though. “No one else has expressed a military interest in the moon,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, US. “There’s a danger that the rhetoric that the US military is playing with will generate military interest in the moon where there really is no need for it.”
How China’s military is involved in space
While Russia has been relatively lacklustre in terms of moon exploration lately, China is generating concern among some Western observers. China’s ongoing lunar programme – which has included sending a rover to the far side of the moon – has already raised some red flags, says Garretson, with the West struggling to figure out what to make of the intentions of a civilian-built but military-run effort.
China’s equivalent of NASA is the China National Space Administration, a civilian organisation. But the body actually in charge of human space flight is the China Manned Space Engineering Office, which is part of the military. Similarly, infrastructure such as launchpads and satellites are mostly run by the People’s Liberation Army. China has also recently sent up a communications satellite called Queqiao and Garretson says this could be used for military applications.
Further in the future, the US envisages a more established presence on the moon, including business ventures. By that time, a military presence may be unavoidable, says Garretson. “The intent is to make sure we have eyes in that area and ensure freedom of operations, in order to deter anybody from thinking they could get away with some level of coercion, or blockade, or that sort of thing.”
Others want to see more open discourse between the US and China. “I am worried that the lack of communication and the inclination to assume the worst is potentially going to create a bad situation,” says Weeden.
We are unlikely to see troops on the moon any time soon. But within a decade, it is feasible that US and Chinese astronauts will be simultaneously operating there in close proximity, near to the south pole. Perhaps there will be valuable mining robots from other nations and companies too. “This is a good time to be figuring out how we’re going to make this work,” says McDowell. “Before it gets too fractious.”
