Artemis II: Geopolitical rivalry and extractive capitalism shape humanity’s lunar return—will we repeat colonial patterns or pioneer equitable space governance?

Artemis II’s splashdown marks not just a technological milestone but the crystallization of a 500-year-old colonial project—now extended to the Moon.

The mission’s framing, shaped by NASA and aerospace oligarchs, embeds extractive capitalism into lunar governance, repeating the errors of Antarctic treaties and deep-sea mining. Yet non-Western alternatives—from African Ubuntu governance to Māori celestial sovereignty—offer a path beyond ‘flags-and-footprints’ nationalism. The Moon’s future hinges on whether humanity treats it as a dead rock to be mined or a living entity to be stewarded, a choice that will determine if space becomes a new frontier of inequality or a shared heritage. The absence of Indigenous and Global South voices in Artemis is not accidental but structural, reflecting how space exploration has always served the powerful. Without radical reform—ratifying the Moon Agreement, banning lunar property rights, and centering marginalized knowledges—the Artemis program risks becoming the first act of a new celestial enclosure movement, where the cosmos is carved up by the same forces that carved up Earth.