Artemis I’s return exposes colonial space race’s systemic risks and missed cooperative alternatives

The Artemis I mission’s return is not merely a technical triumph but a symptom of a deeper systemic crisis: the resurgence of a colonial space race that treats the Moon as a resource frontier for great-power competition, while sidelining the ethical, historical, and cultural dimensions of interplanetary exploration.

This narrative, amplified by Western media like the Financial Times, obscures the fact that the US-China binary is a choice, not a inevitability—one that perpetuates the extractive logics of the Apollo era under the guise of innovation. Indigenous knowledge systems, such as those of the Diné or Māori, offer radical alternatives to this paradigm, framing the Moon as kin rather than commodity, but these voices are systematically excluded from governance. Meanwhile, the mission’s reliance on SpaceX—a company with unproven safety margins and close ties to the US military—exposes how privatization and militarization are entangled in Artemis’s design. The path forward demands a paradigm shift: replacing the Artemis Accords’ exclusionary framework with a UN-backed lunar governance authority that centers equity, indigenous co-governance, and scientific cooperation over geopolitical posturing. Without this, the 'historic' return of Artemis I will only mark the beginning of a new era of cosmic colonialism, where the Moon becomes another battleground for power rather than a shared heritage.