Chinese and Russian space officials announced plans for a joint International Lunar Research Station to put humans on the moon by the mid-2030s, following the US Artemis Accords and similar lunar exploration initiatives by Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. This contemporary space competition transcends traditional geopolitics, serving as an absolute mandate for civilisational states seeking grandeur and permanent dominion beyond Earth.
The democratisation and cost reduction of space technologies since the 1990s have enabled powers worldwide to pursue independent spaceflight and infrastructure. Unlike Cold War rivalries aimed at terrestrial ideological dominance, today's race leverages a trillion-dollar space economy to establish habitable lunar bases and project cultural values into the solar system. While critics highlight terrestrial challenges like climate change and poverty, space exploration remains an inescapable civilisational imperative driven by domestic validation, power, and influence.
The pursuit of permanent lunar infrastructure by civilisational states fundamentally alters the astropolitical balance by transforming celestial bodies into sovereign extensions of terrestrial identity. When actors like China and Russia align through the International Lunar Research Station while Washington advances the Artemis Accords, lunar cartography ceases to be merely scientific and becomes an exercise in preemptive normative dominion. This mirrors the early-modern colonial scramble for maritime choke points, where establishment of outposts dictated long-term commercial and strategic exclusion zones. Consequently, the establishment of habitable bases at the lunar southern pole risks codifying permanent space-based spheres of influence before any comprehensive international resource regime can be enforced.
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