Free Republic

Japan will recruit a group of potential astronauts in 2021 with an eye on sending them to outer space as part of a U.S.-led lunar exploration project, the first time the nation has conducted an intake since 2008, the science minister said Friday. Minister Koichi Hagiuda said in a news conference the government will ask for applications around next fall, with Tokyo aiming to have a Japanese national on the moon for the first time in the latter half of the 2020s. As part of the Artemis program, the United States is aiming to send humans to the moon by...

All seven partners who have agreed to the accords with the US are natural collaborators on the Artemis Program and will easily adhere to the stated principles. Japan is keen to engage in lunar exploration. Luxembourg has dedicated legislation allowing for space mining and has also signed an additional collaborative agreement with the US. The UAE and Australia are both actively trying to establish collaborative links with the broader space industry, so this represents a perfect opportunity for them to build up capacity. Italy, the UK and Canada all have ambitions to develop their space manufacturing industries and will see...

NASA announced its intention to create the Artemis Accords back in May, after working with the US State Department and the National Space Council to come up with a draft set of rules for exploring the Moon. The document’s name refers to NASA’s Artemis program, an ambitious initiative that aims to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon. NASA hopes to partner with multiple countries for the program, and the agency created the Artemis Accords to ensure that other nations could agree on best practices for sending robots and people to the lunar surface. NASA released...

The Trump administration is drafting the legal language that will go into a new international agreement called the Artemis Accords that will create standards of behavior for moon mining practices. U.S. officials will formally negotiate the accords with several space-partner countries considered to have similar interests in lunar-mining endeavors. Some of the countries include Canada, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and those across Europe.