The Moon Is About to Get Extremely Crowded

Full disclosure: "colonize the Moon" is doing a lot of work here.

Nobody has an approved blueprint for Lunar Detroit, complete with subdivisions, a Dollar General, and somebody arguing with the HOA about the height of their regolith fence.

What countries actually have are plans for sustained human presence: repeat crewed landings, research stations, pressurized habitats, cargo landers, rovers, power systems, communications networks, resource-extraction experiments, and eventually crews staying for weeks or months at a time.

That is not a colony yet, but it is the exact pile of boring infrastructure you have to build before "people live on the Moon now" stops sounding like science fiction.

And, as of August 26, 2026, a surprising number of countries are actively working on pieces of that pile.

The United States has turned Artemis into an explicit Moon Base program. China is building toward both a crewed lunar landing before 2030 and the International Lunar Research Station. Russia is tied deeply into that Chinese-led project while trying to rebuild its own robotic lunar program. India has a slower, deliberate path toward putting an Indian astronaut on the Moon by 2040. Japan is working on a pressurized Moon RV. Europe is building cargo landers, habitats and lunar communications. Canada has the robot arms. The UAE is building a Gateway airlock. Australia is sending a rover to dig around in lunar dirt.

The Moon is about to get busy.

NASA concept art, public domain. This is an older Artemis Base Camp concept rather than the exact 2026 Moon Base architecture, but it is a good visual for the kind of sustained lunar infrastructure NASA has been working toward.

One warning before getting into the countries individually: a lot of articles about the "new Moon race" are already out of date.

Artemis II flew from April 1 through April 10, 2026, carrying Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen around the Moon. NASA also reworked the missions that follow it. Artemis III is now planned as a 2027 Earth-orbit demonstration focused on testing rendezvous and docking with commercial lunar landers. The first Artemis surface landing has moved to Artemis IV, currently targeted for early 2028.

Meanwhile, three days before I'm writing this, China announced that Chang'e-7 will miss its planned 2026 launch window.

Welcome to lunar exploration, where the schedules are real and also made of wet cardboard.

1. United States: Artemis Is Slowly Turning Into an Actual Moon Base

The American Moon plan used to fit comfortably under the name Artemis. Now NASA is getting more literal.

NASA formally announced a Moon Base program in March 2026 and followed it with a directive in May laying out a unified effort intended to establish sustained American presence on the lunar surface by around 2030.

NASA does not expect a giant, permanently occupied base with dozens of astronauts by New Year's Eve 2029. The plan is phased.

The first phase, running through roughly 2029, covers reconnaissance, robotic missions, technology demonstrations, landing systems, surface mobility and preparation of the sites and infrastructure humans will eventually use. The second, roughly 2029 through 2032, moves toward early habitation and more substantial infrastructure. In the third, beginning in the 2030s, NASA starts talking about a true permanent outpost and much longer surface stays.

That is why Artemis is becoming more interesting than "Apollo again, but with newer spacesuits." Apollo was a series of expeditions. The current plan is to leave useful things behind: power systems, vehicles, cargo, communications, habitats and construction equipment.

NASA is trying to reach the point where every new mission does not have to bring an entire miniature civilization with it.

The crewed transportation backbone remains the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft. Orion carries the astronauts. SLS throws the whole thing toward the Moon with the subtlety of a controlled explosion the size of a building.

To get astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface, NASA is leaning heavily on commercial Human Landing Systems.

SpaceX is developing Starship HLS, the lunar version of Starship. Blue Origin is developing Blue Moon Mark 2 as another crew-capable lander. NASA's revised Artemis III mission in 2027 is supposed to test Orion rendezvous and docking with one or potentially both of these lander systems in Earth orbit before anybody bets a Moon landing on them.

The first crewed surface return is currently Artemis IV in early 2028.

Blue Origin also has the smaller Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander, now named Endurance. NASA's current Moon Base planning has Endurance targeted to land near the lunar south pole and deliver science and infrastructure before the larger human missions arrive.

Then the rovers start showing up.

Astrolab is developing CLV-1, a crewed lunar vehicle based on its FLEX rover architecture. Lunar Outpost is developing Pegasus. NASA selected both companies in 2026 for lunar terrain vehicle work, with the idea that these machines can operate robotically when astronauts are gone and then become transportation when a crew is on the surface.

A Moon rover that sits dead for eleven months waiting for astronauts is expensive furniture.

A rover that can haul cargo, inspect equipment, move science payloads and then hand the keys to a crew when they arrive is infrastructure.

Japan is also contributing an even more ambitious vehicle, which I will get to in a minute: a pressurized rover that doubles as a mobile habitat.

NASA's robotic buildup includes names like VIPER, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, which is meant to study water and other resources around the south pole. Firefly Aerospace is involved through Blue Ghost lunar landers and its Elytra spacecraft. NASA has also been working with small hopping systems such as MoonFall: little propulsive robots meant to explore terrain a wheeled rover would hate.

Beyond the spacecraft and rovers, the plan starts sounding less like a Moon mission and more like a construction project.

NASA's lunar surface technology work includes systems for excavating and moving regolith, compacting it, potentially microwaving or sintering it into useful structures, building landing pads and berms, mitigating lunar dust, extracting oxygen and water, storing power through the two-week lunar night and manufacturing useful things from material already sitting on the Moon.

Names that show up in that technology family include RASSOR-style excavators, the IPEx excavator, and Mason regolith construction technology.

The reason is brutally simple: dragging concrete from Florida to the Moon is a terrible business model.

If you can turn lunar dirt into roads, landing pads, radiation shielding, bricks or protective barriers, the economics of building anything substantial change dramatically.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy are also working toward a lunar fission surface power system by 2030. NASA's current architecture refers to Lunar Reactor-1 as part of that push. There is also work on radioisotope systems such as Harmonia for smaller, persistent power needs.

Solar power is great.

The two-week lunar night is less enthusiastic about it.

Another American advantage is that "American Moon base" is the wrong description. This is becoming a multinational system.

Europe supplies Orion's European Service Module and major Gateway pieces. Canada is building Canadarm3. Japan is contributing Gateway systems and its pressurized rover. The United Arab Emirates is building Gateway's Crew and Science Airlock. NASA has also promised astronaut flight opportunities to several partner countries.

Then there are the Artemis Accords, signed by 70 countries as of July 2026.

Those countries are not all building Moon hardware, and signing a document is obviously not the same thing as parking a bulldozer next to Shackleton Crater.

But the Accords matter because they are becoming the political rulebook around the U.S.-led lunar ecosystem: peaceful use, transparency, emergency assistance, scientific data sharing, protecting heritage sites, interoperability, resource use and practical "deconfliction" when multiple groups want to work in the same area.

That last word is going to become very important.

2. China: The Other Full-Stack Lunar Architecture

China's lunar plan is not a vague "maybe we'll go someday." It is a sequence: expand the Chang'e robotic program, land Chinese astronauts on the Moon before 2030, then turn the south-polar robotic network into the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS. A basic station is targeted around 2035, with a larger network expanding through the 2040s.

China has also named a lot of the hardware: the Long March 10 heavy-lift rocket, the Mengzhou crew spacecraft, the Lanyue lunar lander, the Wangyu spacesuit and the Tansuo crewed rover.

That is already enough actual hardware to move the conversation out of the "PowerPoint country" category.

China's first crewed lunar landing plan calls for two Long March 10 launches. One sends the Lanyue lander toward lunar orbit. The other sends the crew in Mengzhou. The vehicles rendezvous around the Moon, two astronauts descend to the surface, and then return to Mengzhou for the trip home.

China's space agency said in February 2026 that the program was still targeting a first Chinese crewed lunar landing before 2030 and that major development and testing work on Long March 10, Mengzhou and Lanyue was progressing.

The robotic side is supposed to prepare the ground.

Chang'e-7 is a particularly important mission because it is designed around the lunar south pole and includes an orbiter, lander, rover and a small hopping probe capable of investigating terrain including permanently shadowed regions.

Some of those shadowed regions contain water ice. Water is useful for the obvious reason—people like drinking it—but it can also be split into oxygen and hydrogen for life support and potentially propellant.

Finding accessible lunar water is not just planetary science. It is the difference between treating the Moon like a campsite where you pack everything in and treating it like a place that can eventually support its own logistics.

There is one fresh problem: on August 23, 2026, China's crewed space agency announced that Chang'e-7 no longer met the conditions for launch in its planned 2026 window.

As of this article, no replacement launch date has been officially announced.

Chang'e-7 was supposed to be one of the main reconnaissance missions feeding directly into the ILRS buildup.

That does not mean China's Moon program has collapsed. It means spaceflight remains spaceflight, and calendars remain aspirational documents with numbers on them.

Chang'e-8 is still planned as another major ILRS precursor and is supposed to conduct in-situ resource utilization experiments.

That is where the program becomes particularly relevant to "colonization": China wants to test whether lunar material can be turned into useful resources and construction products on the Moon itself.

The ILRS concept goes much further.

CNSA describes a station with surface facilities, orbital facilities and Earth-based infrastructure supporting power generation, communications and navigation, Earth-Moon transportation, scientific research, centralized control and eventually human activity.

The basic research station is supposed to be centered around the lunar south-polar region by around 2035, with a larger network expanding through the 2040s.

China is not doing this alone. Russia is the ILRS co-founder and its most important major-state partner.

By 2025, CNSA said cooperation documents for ILRS had been signed with 17 countries and international organizations, along with more than 50 international research institutions.

That is a much smaller diplomatic coalition than the Artemis Accords' 70 signatories, but those numbers are not perfectly comparable. The Artemis Accords are a set of political principles. ILRS agreements are tied to participation in a specific lunar station project.

China and Russia have also discussed nuclear power for the ILRS.

Chinese planning presentations have shown a lunar nuclear power system as one possible piece of the station's power architecture, and Russia has publicly discussed deploying an automated lunar nuclear power unit with China in roughly the 2033-2035 timeframe.

I would treat the exact reactor design and schedule as provisional, but the problem it is trying to solve is real.

If you want a serious south-polar outpost that operates through darkness, brutal temperature swings and long periods without direct sunlight, reliable power becomes one of the first things that stops being optional.

China's biggest advantage here may be that its crewed program, robotic missions, launch vehicles and ILRS planning all sit inside a relatively centralized state architecture.

The U.S. is building an ecosystem. China is building a stack. Both approaches have advantages, and both can fail in very different and extremely expensive ways.

3. Russia: The Moon Plan Is Real, but China Matters More Than Ever

Russia is in a weird position.

It is impossible to talk about lunar exploration without talking about the Soviet Union. Luna 2 became the first human-made object to reach the Moon. Luna 9 made the first soft landing. Lunokhod drove around up there years before anybody had a remote-controlled car worth owning.

The Soviet lunar program was absurdly capable.

Modern Russia has had a much harder time rebuilding that momentum.

Luna-25 was supposed to restart Russia's lunar landing program in 2023. Instead, it crashed into the Moon after an engine burn went wrong.

That was a huge setback, but not the end of the program.

Russia's Space Research Institute currently lists Luna-26, a lunar polar orbiter, as being prepared for launch with a target around 2028.

Luna-27 is the more interesting mission for future settlement: a south-polar lander with precision landing capability and a cryogenic drilling system designed to sample subsurface material while preserving volatile compounds such as water.

Current Russian mission pages put that part of the program around the 2029-2030 period, with NPO Lavochkin describing a 2030 target for the Luna-27 lander.

If you want to build anything near the lunar south pole, drilling into the ground and figuring out what is in it is not optional homework. It is the homework.

Russia is also China's founding partner in the International Lunar Research Station.

That partnership has become increasingly central to Russia's future lunar ambitions.

Russia brings decades of planetary engineering experience, nuclear power expertise and lunar science. China brings an active heavy-lift development program, a rapidly advancing human spaceflight program and a string of recent successful lunar missions. They fit together naturally.

Russia has publicly proposed an automated nuclear power unit for the Moon in cooperation with China, potentially in the 2033-2035 period.

That could eventually become one of the most strategically important pieces of the ILRS if it actually flies.

But Russia does not currently have a publicly defined near-term independent crewed lunar architecture comparable to NASA's Artemis/Moon Base roadmap or China's before-2030 landing plan.

Its most credible route toward a future human presence on the Moon increasingly runs through ILRS.

There is also an international dispute sitting in the middle of Russia's program.

After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the European Space Agency discontinued cooperation with Russia on Luna-25, Luna-26 and Luna-27.

That was not a Twitter argument. Hardware and instruments had to be reassigned.

European lunar technology that had been intended for Russian missions was redirected toward other programs, including U.S. commercial lunar missions.

So while people like to describe the future Moon competition as "America versus China," the actual partnerships have already been reshaped by geopolitics on Earth.

Apparently we could not leave that part behind.

4. India: The Long Game

India is the country I would be most careful about underestimating.

Its public lunar roadmap is slower than the American or Chinese plans, but the individual missions make sense as a technology ladder.

Chandrayaan-3 already proved India can softly land and operate near the lunar south-polar region.

The next major jump is Chandrayaan-4, a lunar sample-return mission officially planned for roughly 2027-2028.

Getting samples home is a science mission. It is also a beautiful excuse to practice nearly everything human exploration requires: landing, launching back off the Moon, rendezvous and docking, transferring material between spacecraft, and returning safely through Earth's atmosphere.

If those verbs sound suspiciously similar to the verbs involved in bringing astronauts home from the Moon, congratulations, you found the point.

India is also working with Japan on Chandrayaan-5, better known internationally as LUPEX, the Lunar Polar Exploration mission.

The partnership divides the mission neatly: ISRO is responsible for the lander, JAXA is providing the rover, and Japan's H3 rocket is expected to launch it.

LUPEX is designed to investigate water and other volatile resources around the lunar south pole in much greater detail.

Everybody keeps ending up at the south pole for a reason.

India's long-range Space Vision 2047 includes putting an Indian astronaut on the Moon by 2040.

That comes after Gaganyaan, India's human spaceflight program, and after the planned Bharatiya Antariksh Station in Earth orbit.

India is also developing a Next Generation Launch Vehicle intended to support heavier missions.

What India does not yet have is a published Moon-base construction architecture comparable to NASA's phased Moon Base program or China's ILRS—no equivalent of "here is the habitat, here is the nuclear power system, here is the rover fleet and here is the year we start leaving crews there for months." But the direction is clear. India is building the capabilities one layer at a time.

It also has diplomatic flexibility.

India signed the U.S.-led Artemis Accords in 2023, but its lunar program remains strongly independent and it continues to build major bilateral projects such as LUPEX with Japan.

That may become a common model for future Moon exploration: not "join one empire," but "build your own program, then plug it into whichever partnerships make sense."

5. Japan: Apparently the Moon Needs an RV

Japan may have my favorite piece of hardware in the entire Artemis architecture: the Lunar Cruiser.

JAXA and Toyota are developing a pressurized lunar rover that is less "Moon buggy" and more "small off-road spacecraft with wheels."

Astronauts could drive it without wearing spacesuits inside, then live, sleep and work in it while traveling far beyond the immediate landing site.

That radically expands the useful reach of a lunar base.

If your astronauts can only walk a few kilometers from the habitat, your "base" is basically whatever sits inside that circle.

Give them a pressurized vehicle that can travel for days and suddenly the base has a mobile branch office.

NASA and Japan formalized an agreement under which Japan will provide the pressurized rover and NASA will provide launch and delivery services.

NASA also agreed to provide two opportunities for Japanese astronauts to travel to the lunar surface. This is not a ceremonial partnership; Japan is providing one of the pieces that could make long-duration lunar exploration practical.

JAXA is also deeply involved in Gateway.

Japan contributes life-support and thermal-control hardware, batteries and other systems for Gateway modules, and is working on future cargo logistics.

Then there is LUPEX with India.

JAXA is developing the rover while India provides the lander.

So Japan is simultaneously inside the U.S.-led Artemis architecture and building one of the most important bilateral south-polar science missions with India.

If people eventually spend months at a time on the Moon, I would bet a stupid amount of money that some version of a pressurized rover becomes indispensable.

You can only stare at the same crater outside your habitat window for so long.

6. Europe: Build the Trucks, the House, and the Cell Service

Europe is not planning to plant an EU flag on the Moon and announce the Republic of Crater. The European Space Agency is building the kind of infrastructure everybody else is going to want.

Start with Orion: every Artemis Orion spacecraft depends on the European Service Module, built through ESA and European industry, for propulsion, power, water, oxygen and other systems in space.

Then there is Gateway. ESA is contributing Lunar I-Hab, one of the station's habitation modules; Lunar View, an infrastructure and logistics module; and Lunar Link communications hardware.

That is a substantial share of the small station meant to support future lunar missions.

But the project I think matters most for Europe's independent lunar future is Argonaut.

Argonaut is ESA's planned lunar cargo lander, with its first mission currently targeted for 2030.

The lander is designed to deliver up to roughly 1,500 kilograms to the lunar surface and remain useful there for years.

The payload could be science instruments, rovers, communications equipment, power systems, resource-utilization hardware, supplies for astronauts and, eventually, pieces of a base.

Argonaut gives Europe its own cargo-delivery capability instead of leaving ESA entirely dependent on another country to get equipment from lunar orbit down onto the dirt.

ESA is also developing Moonlight, a lunar communications and navigation network.

Think GPS and cellular infrastructure, except your phone still will not work and dropping it would be a much more expensive problem.

Moonlight is intended to provide navigation and communications services around the Moon, particularly supporting the heavily targeted south-polar region.

That sounds boring until you imagine coordinating ten landers, twelve rovers, a habitat, a cargo vehicle and a crew without reliable navigation or communications. Suddenly the space phone company looks pretty important.

Europe's model may be the clearest example of how lunar "colonization" actually happens: not one country building everything, but several countries becoming indispensable because each owns a piece of the stack.

7. Canada: Robotics Instead of Planting a Flag

Canada has spent decades contributing one robot arm and somehow making itself permanently necessary. Respect.

The newest version is Canadarm3.

Canadarm3 is being built for Gateway and includes a large robotic arm, a smaller dexterous arm and supporting equipment designed to operate with a high degree of autonomy.

It will be able to inspect Gateway, move payloads, help astronauts during spacewalks and assist with spacecraft and hardware around the station.

The Canadian Space Agency currently lists delivery no earlier than 2029.

Canada is also working toward a lunar utility rover, with launch currently targeted no earlier than 2033.

That rover is being conceived as a long-lived machine for moving cargo, supporting astronauts and conducting scientific work over many years.

One update matters because plenty of older articles now get it wrong: Canada's earlier Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program science rover mission has been terminated under current federal planning.

So if you find an article saying Canada's first little science rover is about to launch, check the date.

The larger utility-rover work and Canadarm3 remain active.

Canada has already gotten something tangible out of the Artemis partnership: Jeremy Hansen became the first Canadian to travel around the Moon when he flew on Artemis II in April 2026.

That is how the U.S.-led coalition is being structured. Not every partner needs to build a launch vehicle. Build something NASA badly wants, and astronaut seats become part of the negotiation.

8. United Arab Emirates: Small Program, Strategically Huge Hardware

The UAE shows why measuring space programs only by rocket size misses the point.

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre is developing Gateway's Crew and Science Airlock, often referred to as the Emirates Airlock.

That piece will support spacewalks, move experiments and equipment between the pressurized station and space, and provide additional docking functions. If Gateway becomes the staging station NASA wants it to be, the UAE is building one of the doors.

That is a very literal way to become hard to ignore.

The agreement also includes an opportunity for a future Emirati astronaut to fly to Gateway.

The UAE is also continuing its robotic lunar program.

The original Rashid rover was lost in 2023 when ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lander crashed during its landing attempt.

Rashid 2 is the follow-up, scheduled to ride aboard Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 2 to the lunar far side in 2026.

Rashid 2 is meant to study surface geology, thermal properties, dust behavior, material interactions and rover mobility.

That may sound less glamorous than "build a Moon city," but dust is one of those problems that gets funnier the farther away you are from being the person who has to deal with it.

Lunar regolith is abrasive, electrostatically troublesome and gets into everything.

Apollo astronauts hated it.

A permanent lunar base will have to learn how to live with it.

The UAE's role therefore covers both ends of the scale: a small rover doing surface engineering science and a major piece of crewed infrastructure around the Moon.

9. Australia: A Suitcase-Sized Rover With a Bigger Job

Australia's lunar contribution is called Roo-ver. Yes, they actually named the Moon rover Roo-ver. I have no notes.

The Australian Space Agency is developing it through the ELO2 consortium as part of Australia's Moon to Mars initiative.

Roo-ver is a roughly 20-kilogram, suitcase-sized rover intended to operate near the lunar south pole.

Its launch is currently planned for 2030 aboard an Intuitive Machines Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission.

The rover's main job is to interact with lunar regolith. It will carry a NASA instrument called the Multifunctional Nanosensor Platform to study the soil and support future work on extracting useful resources from it.

Australia is also using the mission to build expertise in remote operations, robotics, autonomous systems and lunar surface engineering.

This is not a crewed Moon program, but it is exactly the sort of supporting capability one needs.

A future lunar settlement is not going to be built entirely by astronauts with shovels.

The more work robots can do before the people arrive, the less time human beings have to spend outside wearing a personal spacecraft and trying not to fall over.

Okay, So Who Is Actually Closest to "Colonizing" the Moon?

If we use "colonize" to mean "build the first sustained human foothold," the United States currently has the most developed near-term multinational architecture.

Artemis II has flown. Orion works in deep space. Commercial landers are in active development, and NASA has explicitly reorganized the effort around a Moon Base program. Cargo landers, surface vehicles, power systems, Gateway hardware and robotic missions are all being developed in parallel.

The first surface landing is currently aimed at early 2028, followed by a buildup toward sustained operations around 2030.

That is a real advantage, not a guarantee.

NASA has approximately never met a major exploration schedule it could not eventually turn into a suggestion.

SpaceX still has to make Starship HLS work. Blue Origin still has to make Blue Moon work. NASA has to keep SLS and Orion flying, Congress has to keep funding all of this, and commercial lunar companies have to stop occasionally turning landers into very expensive craters. There are a lot of moving parts.

China is the strongest single-state competitor.

Its recent record includes the first-ever sample return from the lunar far side with Chang'e-6. It also has a crewed landing architecture with named spacecraft and an explicit before-2030 goal, an ILRS roadmap extending into the 2030s and 2040s, Russia as a major partner, and a growing network of participating countries and institutions.

The Chang'e-7 delay announced in August 2026 is a reminder that China does not possess a secret technology called "schedules always work." It does not make the broader plan unserious.

Russia remains important because of its experience, nuclear technology and ILRS partnership, although its standalone lunar momentum is much weaker than the Soviet legacy sometimes makes it sound.

India is taking the long route, which may be smart.

Sample return, docking, human spaceflight, its own space station, heavier launch vehicles, polar-resource science and then a 2040 crewed lunar landing is a coherent progression.

Japan, Europe, Canada, the UAE and Australia are proving something else: the first real Moon base probably will not belong neatly to one flag. It will be an ecosystem.

An American crew may launch in Orion using a European service module, dock at a station with Canadian robotics and a UAE airlock, sleep inside an ESA-built habitat, land in an American commercial lander, then drive away in a Japanese pressurized rover.

At some point, asking which country "owns" that mission starts feeling like asking which country owns the International Space Station.

The answer is mostly:

"It's complicated."

The Part Where Everyone Pretends This Isn't a Space Race

There is a tendency to talk about Artemis and the International Lunar Research Station as if they are two teams that have already divided the Moon in half.

Legally, that is not what is happening. The Outer Space Treaty remains the foundation of international space law.

It says outer space, including the Moon, is not subject to national appropriation by sovereignty, use, occupation or any other means.

You cannot legally land at the lunar south pole, plant a flag and announce that Shackleton Crater is now West Virginia 2.

The arguments begin one layer below that. The Artemis Accords explicitly support the idea that extracting and using space resources can be compatible with the Outer Space Treaty.

They also call for "deconfliction" and the creation of practical safety arrangements around operations.

The basic idea makes sense: if one country is landing a rocket next to another country's telescope, everybody should probably talk first.

If a mining robot is throwing regolith across somebody else's solar array, we have already failed at civilization.

But safety zones become politically interesting when the best lunar sites are limited.

Some south-polar ridges receive unusually favorable illumination, some permanently shadowed regions appear to contain concentrated water ice, and some locations offer better communications geometry.

You cannot claim them as sovereign territory. But if you land first, build infrastructure there and ask everybody else to stay a safe distance from your operations, the distinction gets awkward very quickly.

China and Russia have not joined the Artemis Accords. Instead, they are building the ILRS partnership network.

That does not automatically make the two systems enemies, but it does mean the United States and China are developing parallel hardware, partnerships, procedures and political norms for working on the Moon.

There is also a very specific barrier between them.

The U.S. Wolf Amendment, enacted in 2011 and reinforced through later appropriations language, restricts NASA from using federal funds for certain bilateral cooperation with China unless specific conditions and authorization requirements are met.

It is often described online as "NASA is banned from talking to China." That is too simplistic, but it does limit direct NASA-China cooperation and helps explain why the two largest lunar programs are evolving largely apart.

Then there is Russia.

ESA's decision to end cooperation with Russia on the Luna missions after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is probably the clearest example so far of an Earth dispute directly rearranging lunar exploration plans.

That rupture helped push European lunar technology toward other partners while Russia moved closer to China.

So no, there is not currently a territorial conflict on the Moon. Nobody is shooting at anybody, and nobody owns a crater. But the geopolitical lines are already visible.

The actual competition may be less dramatic than planting flags. It may come down to who gets there first with the infrastructure everybody else eventually needs.

Who has the reliable cargo lander?

Who provides navigation?

Who controls the communications relay?

Who has the power plant?

Who can refuel vehicles?

Who can process water?

Who has the rover fleet?

Who has a pressurized habitat already sitting on the surface?

Who has landing pads that do not sandblast every nearby spacecraft with lunar dirt?

That is how the Moon could become strategically divided without anybody ever drawing a literal border.

The First Moon "Colony" Is Probably Going to Look Kind of Terrible

I love science-fiction Moon cities: huge glass domes, hotels, maglev trains, a bar with a giant window looking back at Earth.

I would go there tomorrow.

That is not what the first sustained lunar settlement will look like. It will probably resemble an industrial accident that learned plumbing: cargo pallets, solar arrays, radiators, antennas, dust-covered rovers, pressure vessels buried under regolith, cables running everywhere, a nuclear reactor sitting a safe distance away, robots pushing dirt around, a landing pad that everybody is extremely proud of despite it looking like a parking lot, and a handful of astronauts trying to keep all of it alive.

That is the part I find genuinely exciting.

The first Moon colony, if we ever decide that word applies, will not begin when somebody unveils a shiny habitat and cuts a ribbon. It begins when infrastructure survives between crews: the rover keeps working after the astronauts leave, the power stays online through the lunar night, the communications network is simply there, and a cargo lander arrives with equipment for the next crew instead of the current one. It begins when a robot extracts water because somebody will need it later, and when the next mission finds a place waiting for them.

That is the transition: expedition becomes outpost, outpost becomes base, and base becomes something people live in.

And for the first time since Apollo, multiple countries are now building enough of the pieces that this does not feel like a hypothetical question for the year 2200.

Do I think there will be a giant lunar city by 2035?

No.

Do I think there could be pressurized habitats, reusable rovers, cargo depots, navigation satellites, robotic construction systems, resource experiments, surface power plants and crews rotating through a semi-permanent south-polar base?

At this point? Yeah.

That is starting to look less like science fiction and more like an engineering backlog.

And I cannot wait to watch everybody discover that the hardest part of colonizing another world is apparently going to be project management.

SOURCES

NASA / United States

• https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/
• https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-iv/
• https://www.nasa.gov/moonbase/
• https://www.nasa.gov/reference/moonbase-about/
• https://www.nasa.gov/moonbase-systems/
• https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-provides-update-on-moon-base-rovers-landers-missions/
• https://www.nasa.gov/lunar-surface-technology/
• https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-department-of-energy-to-develop-lunar-surface-reactor-by-2030/
• https://www.nasa.gov/reference/gateway-about/
• https://www.nasa.gov/organizations/oiir/artemis-accords/nasa-welcomes-mauritius-as-70th-artemis-accords-signatory/
• https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-japan-advance-space-cooperation-sign-agreement-for-lunar-rover/

China / ILRS

• https://www.cmse.gov.cn/xwzx/202608/t20260823_57750.html
• https://www.cmse.gov.cn/xwzx/202602/t20260227_57278.html
• https://www.cmse.gov.cn/xwzx/202502/t20250212_56288.html
• https://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/n6465652/n6465653/c10670178/content.html
• https://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/n6465652/n6465653/c10670333/content.html
• https://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/n6465668/n6465670/c6811967/content.html
• https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-led-lunar-base-include-nuclear-power-plant-moons-surface-space-official-2025-04-23/
• https://www.reuters.com/science/chinas-crewed-lunar-programme-eyes-astronaut-landing-by-2030-2026-04-02/

Russia

• https://iki.cosmos.ru/research/missions/luna-26
• https://iki.cosmos.ru/research/missions/luna-27
• https://www.laspace.ru/en/activities/projects/luna-resurs-pa/
• https://www.esa.int/Newsroom/Press_Releases/Redirecting_ESA_programmes_in_response_to_geopolitical_crisis
• https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/russia-china-are-considering-putting-nuclear-power-unit-moon-ria-2024-03-05/

India

• https://www.isro.gov.in/ISRO_Nationalsciencemeet_ch4.html
• https://www.isro.gov.in/ISRO_JAXA_CH5_Technical_Interface_Meet.html
• https://www.isro.gov.in/media_isro/pdf/AnnualReport/Annual_Report_2024_25_Eng.pdf

Europe

• https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Exploration/Argonaut_Europe_s_lunar_lander_programme

Canada

• https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/canadarm3/data-sheet.asp
• https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/moon-exploration/canadian-utility-rover-on-the-moon.asp
• https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/publications/dp-2026-2027.asp

United Arab Emirates

• https://www.mbrsc.ae/lunar-gateway/
• https://www.mbrsc.ae/rashid-rover/
• https://fireflyspace.com/news/firefly-aerospace-adds-uaes-rashid-2-rover-to-blue-ghost-mission-to-the-far-side-of-the-moon/

Australia

• https://www.space.gov.au/meet-roo-ver
• https://www.space.gov.au/moon-to-mars-initiative
• https://www.space.gov.au/news-and-media/critical-testing-begins-for-roo-ver-before-moon-journey-in-2030

International law / U.S.-China cooperation restrictions

• https://www.unoosa.org/pdf/gadocs/A_6431E.pdf
• https://oig.nasa.gov/news/nasa-investigators-safeguard-scientific-integrity-by-exposing-university-grant-fraud/

IMAGE SOURCES / LICENSE PAGES

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Artemis_Base_Camp.png
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yutu_rover.jpg
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maquette-Luna-Glob-Lander-b-DSC_0075.jpg
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chandrayaan3-landed.jpg
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toyota_JAXA_LUNA_CRUISER_Model_at_Japan_Mobility_Show_2023.jpg
• https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/11/Argonaut
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gateway_Lunar_Space_Station_Configuration_(jsc2024e041788_(1)).jpg