This paper serves as a background summary of recent lunar exploration activity in the context of relevant stakeholder interests.

Sustained presence in outer space requires a categorical shift in thinking, going beyond “exploration” to think instead about tenure: policies rooted in experience, lessons learned from historic engagements with frontiers, and long term thinking, in order to construct strong foundations and longevity of presence.

This new province of humankind is closer than ever. The Outer Space Treaty (OST) continues to provide the foundations for our activities in outer space. General guidance must now become specific, and we must figure out those specifics with diverse voices, together.

The need for collective action and joint problem-solving is more important and urgent than ever if we are to create peaceful and sustainable lunar development. Coalescing the objectives of the diverse (public and private) stakeholders in the space industry is an undertaking that has yet to be achieved.

This Backgrounder on lunar norms is intended to succinctly summarize the norms (rules, laws, principles, and guidelines) applicable to lunar activities (whether governmental or nongovernmental). Although legal in nature, it should be understandable to those without a legal education.

This paper focuses on the global-scale dispersal of dust expected to result from the increasing cadence and size of lunar missions and explores landing pads and/or “spaceports” as a means of mitigating these effects.

What is the meaning, purpose and life cycle of lunar legal norms? In December 2019, we co-hosted a workshop with the Secure World Foundation to explore these questions. Explore the results.

Policy analogs enable the application of insights from familiar domains to new contexts—referencing physical, legal, procedural, or economic properties that are shared between the source and target domains. Here, we introduce an array of potential analogs for lunar governance and summarises their uses and limitations.

The math in this memo enabled us to include radiometric range and range-rate measurements in our linear covariance analysis, which gave us an estimate of the certainty we'd have about our position and velocity at lunar orbit insertion.