Calls to avoid moving Earth's territory-based views of ground to the Moon and provoking conflict ignores that people from Earth will naturally bring that view learned on Earth to the Moon. Political vacuum will be filled even in literal vacuum.
I'm sorry, but this is naive in the extreme and just paves the way for China to grab important chunks of the Moon and fence it off:
Unlike the South China Sea, the moon resides under an established international legal framework that forbids sovereignty claims. A Chinese taikonaut planting a flag, as a symbolic act, would not legally translate into sovereignty any more than the planting of the U.S. flag by the Apollo 11 crew did.
China claims almost all of the South China Sea under farcical domestic theory of control that violates both customary sea law and the Law of the Sea treaty (LOST) that China signed. But China doesn't care if it has the power to make others accept their theory.
China and others may have breathed a sigh of relief that America didn't begin carving up the Moon back when only America could land on the moon. That will not stop rivals from carving up the Moon when they have the knives to do so. Claims of cooperative space programs do not represent a cancellation of national rivalries as the author asserts.
Perhaps we can keep the Moon unclaimed. But we can only do that if we keep the power to unilaterally claim it if others start a scramble for Africa the Moon.
Did the Pope limit competition to own the New World? Did America limit carving up China into trade zones dominated by the zone authors when China was weak?
So you are damned right this is a race. A race we must not lose lest China draw a nine-dash line to encompass the moon.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 continues here.
NOTE: You may also like to read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved. Go ahead and subscribe to it. It's the right thing to do!
