‘Prime lunar real estate’: Australia’s lawyer to the stars – and the moon – is worried

April 12, 2026 — 5:00am

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Dr Cassandra Steer is an internationally recognised expert in space law and the chair and founder of the Australasian Centre for Space Governance. She is now director of policy research with Space Strategies Consulting Ltd. She spoke to me from her Montreal home on Thursday.

Fitz: Dr Steer, thank you for your time. In this week of Artemis II boomeranging around the far side of the moon, I seek an overview of the whole space thang. Where it’s up to, and where it’s going? They tell me you are one of the world’s leading legal experts in the field. How did you, as an Australian, get into “space law”, something I think a lot of us didn’t quite know exists.

CS: [Laughing] I was always interested in the humanities, philosophy, languages, international relations. My background is international law and international conflict, and it was in the course of working in that field that I started to become interested in what technology is doing to warfare. “How do we look at who’s responsible?” “How do we restrain states?” “How do we limit the impacts on civilians of warfare?” And it was actually military lawyers who I worked with who said, “Well, you’ve got to look at space.“

Fitz: A difficult place to put up a shingle, but, OK?

CS: I hadn’t even thought about space, but the more I started to look at it, the more I realised space is just another domain where all of these issues are playing out, where nations and corporations need legal help in navigating all the agreements, protocols and treaties that are supposed to control what happens there.

Fitz: What’s happening there right now, and making headlines, is the whole Artemis program – named because in Greek mythology Artemis is the sister of Apollo. But as opposed to the Apollo program, it is not, according to The New York Times, a “flag and footprint” exercise.

CS: Yeah, it’s a race for dominating prime lunar real estate in the long term, not just landing and leaving.

Fitz: The NYT said this week that this race now is no longer between America and Russia; it’s between America and China, and it looks like the Chinese are winning, with the big deal being who is first to get to the south pole of the moon.

CS: Yes, but while the US likes to paint it as a Cold War 2.0, it’s not just China in the race with them, because we’re not in a bipolar era politically. We’re in a multipolar era where you’ve got countries like India, Japan, and even Israel, trying to get to the moon. And importantly, you’ve got commercial players who are very much part of it.

Fitz: But why go to the moon at all, beyond the wonder of it? Does the moon have minerals that we don’t have on Earth, and could we get them back here in commercial quantities? And what is the big deal about the south pole?

CS: The reason the south pole is so interesting is because it has ice, which means a space station established there can use it for water. And it probably has helium-3, which is a highly rare gas, and it can be used for fuel. But there really is an interesting question mark around what is the justification here, really? Because we keep being told we’re going back to the moon to have a long-term human presence on the moon. Well, why are we doing that? Yes, well, to get the resources. Well, why do we want the resources? Well, to support a long-term human presence on the moon? But why do we want that to get the resources? So it’s this circular argument.

Fitz: It certainly is.

CS: All these companies are involved because they’re trying to make a case that there’s trillions of dollars worth of profit to be made, but we’re still not quite sure how. So this is not about bringing those resources back to Earth. There’s no business case for that.

CS: In the shorter term, it’s just about dominating the next politically important piece of space, at a time when everyone also recognises the growing military and economic benefits of near-Earth space. For one thing, satellites now are integral to just about everything we do on Earth, so it really is important. But who gets to the south pole first to establish a base is hugely strategically and symbolically important.

Fitz: And so, good Lord willing, and the creeks don’t rise, in early 2028, the Americans will land on the moon, unload the sleds, get out the huskies, put on their space-helmets and head to the south pole. Mush you dawgies! I said mush!

Nuclear-powered villages could be on the moon within 10 years. Where do we fit in?

CS: [Laughing] Yes, but my bet is on China getting there first. The US, as we know, is in total and utter internal turmoil. Trump keeps chopping and changing, and recently cut the NASA budget to levels it hasn’t seen since before the Apollo program of the ’60s, and then Congress tried to put the budget back in place, but the new administrator just said he’s in favour of the cuts. And their timelines have changed, and I’ve lost count of how many times they’ve changed their goals, of whether this is about the moon or Mars. They just cancelled, two weeks ago, a thing called “the Gateway”, which was supposed to be a critical piece of infrastructure for Artemis. The Canadians and the Europeans are saying, “Hang on, we’ve spent billions of dollars on this already. The research and development timelines go for years. You can’t just cancel it last minute.”

Fitz: So, it’s a typical Donald Trump shambles?

CS: Yes, exactly. You can’t run space programs and planning with that kind of shambles, while the Chinese have extremely consistent internal governance. It has a dictatorship, but that means it has very consistent programs and funding and timelines that do not diverge from what was put in place already more than 10 years ago. Everyone works towards a single goal, and it’s a very clear timeline, and they’ve always said they’ll be on the moon by 2030 and there’s no question in my mind that they will.

Fitz: Whoever gets there first, you told me previously, will establish an exclusion zone?

CS: Yes, as this is prime lunar real estate, and we’re pretty sure there are resources there. Whoever is first will set up shop pretty quickly, and then they’re going to say we need to put a safety zone around these operations because lunar dust is really highly abrasive, and any small movement will kick it up, and it could become very destructive to equipment and possibly threaten human lives if there are humans around.

Fitz: OK, let’s just say that the USA gets there first and sets up a lunar space station with a, let’s say, 20-kilometre radius around their exclusion zone on the south pole of the moon. And let’s say the Chinese then land 18 kilometres away. Would you expect a phone call from the Americans? You know, “Better call Saul ... nah, let’s call Dr Cassandra Steer. She’s space lawyer to the stars, and the moon!”

Fitz: I mean, how is the law up there enforced? Who runs the show?

CS: Yeah, I want to be clear. There’s no law around this. This is actually something that’s being asserted in the non-binding Artemis Accords and also in China’s own principles around its own program for its International Lunar Research Station. In this, America and China’s principles are very much the same. They are not going to try and infringe on that safety zone because it means they won’t be able to set up their own safety zone. But it’s not actually an enforceable law at all.

Fitz: But it is a whole lot of treaties, to start with?

‘Like the Wild West’: Who owns the moon and what’s up there?

CS: Yes, and the foundation stone is the UN’s Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which is like a constitution, and it puts down organising principles and values, and it says “all space activities should be for the benefit of all nations, regardless of their scientific or economic status”. It is prohibited to claim territory in space, and the treaty says by claims of sovereignty or by any other means, it prohibits nuclear weapons in space, and it prohibits military bases in space. So what it did was put in place key principles that the world agreed upon.

Fitz: But in the age of Trump, when $300 will just about let you fill up your tank with diesel, what’s the value of that American commitment to any treaty? American commitments are surely worthless?

CS: The Americans still basically support the Outer Space Treaty. But they also say, “We interpret non-appropriation as still allowing for resource extraction because that’s not a territorial claim.“ So this was hotly debated in 2015 under president Obama when the US introduced national legislation to this effect, but then they put in place something called the Artemis Accords, and they said anyone who wants to be part of this new, exciting Artemis program to return to the moon has to agree with that interpretation and has to sign this accord. It includes saying that mining of space resources is not appropriation and is allowed under the Outer Space Treaty. Australia was one of the first seven countries to sign on to that because we were very keen to be part of the Artemis program.

Fitz: Let’s go back to you, as a space lawyer. When it’s 9am on a Monday, and your phone rings, who is it? What do they want from you?

CS: A lot of my contracts are with defence departments, particularly Canada’s and Australia’s where I’m explaining to them a bit about what we’ve just discussed, but also things like how the laws around conflicts apply to satellite operations, what the impacts are on civilians. I am currently on a team writing doctrine for Canadian defence about how they can operate in space. And I do a lot of education about policy and strategy, and some of it is the civil side, like the Australian Space Agency, thinking about sustainability in space and how we can make a good regulatory environment for Australian companies.

Fitz: Sustainability in space? Put your potato peels in worm farms? I get that on Earth, but what is the concept of sustainability in space?

Data centres in space? That’s less crazy than you think

CS: Because of our global dependencies on satellites, we have a huge problem of space traffic. In the first 50 years of space activities, we went from zero satellites to about 300. But in the last 20 years, we’ve gotten up to 16,000 satellites, most of them in low Earth orbit moving at 10 times the speed of a bullet. There’s an ever-growing risk of collision between satellites, or between bits of debris and satellites. There’s been a few events in space like collisions or actual deliberate military testing to destroy satellites which have created enormous amounts of debris. So although there’s this huge commercial competition to launch more and more satellites, that is simply unsustainable. So these things have to be worked out.

Fitz: And Australia in all this?

CS: The Australian government doesn’t really get it. Our space agency is sorely underfunded and constantly being shrunk down in size, and it’s crippled. It can’t do anything that it should be able to do. Europe thoroughly understands how important space is, both for the civil side and economy, global trade, and also for the military and strategic side. But right now, Australia is not a good environment for space companies.

Fitz: What a strange turn your career has taken that you start out studying arts, and find yourself as a sheriff in the badlands of the space frontier. When you’re with your Canadian partner on a starry, starry night, and you gaze up at the moon, does it change the way you look at it?

CS: It does! I mean, when I look up at the moon now, I apologise to it, and I say, “I’m really sorry. We’re about to come and f--k things up.”

Fitz: How? How are we going to ruck things up? Why? What is the ruck-up that’s coming?

CS: There are historical heritage sites, like the first human footprints on the moon that could be destroyed by this competitive activity. We have a custodian responsibility for space as much as for Earth. There are all sorts of cultures around the world who have sacred relationships to the moon. And what’s going to happen is, entities like Elon Musk’s company are going to speed things up. We’re going to have commercial and militarised competition on the surface of the moon to extract as much as possible, as quickly as possible, with very little concern for the natural environment. And I just think that’s really sad.

Fitz: Thank you for your time.

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