Malta and the Artemis Accords

Many have followed NASA’s Artemis programme with unusual interest in recent weeks.

Last month, the Artemis II crew completed a ten-day flyby around the Moon (the first crewed lunar fly-by since Apollo 17 in 1972), splashing down safely in the Pacific on 10 April, after travelling more than 400,000 kilometres from Earth. This is the greatest distance yet travelled by humans from our “pale blue dot”. Artemis III will remain in Earth orbit to test the lunar lander and associated systems, with the first return of astronauts to the lunar surface targeted for Artemis IV in 2028.

It is against this backdrop that, on 4 May 2026, Malta signed the Artemis Accords, joining a US-led framework that has grown in less than six years from eight founding nations to more than sixty. The Accords were announced 59 years after the Outer Space Treaty (1967) and 47 years after the Moon Agreement (1979). Signatories include the United States, Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India, Portugal, as well as Oman, Latvia and Jordan, the last of which signed only days ago.

For a republic of some half a million people, sharing a page with these countries is no small matter. It is worth asking what, exactly, we are signing up to and why it should matter beyond the foreign policy desk.

The Accords are not a treaty. Established in 2020 by NASA and the US State Department, building on the Artemis programme initiated under President Trump in December 2017, they are a non-binding set of political commitments (what international lawyers call soft law) grounded in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (to which we acceded in 2017) and related agreements.

Across ten sections, they articulate a shared approach to peaceful exploration, transparency of activities, interoperability of systems, emergency assistance, the registration of space objects, the public release of scientific data, the preservation of outer-space heritage, the responsible use of space resources, the avoidance of harmful interference and the mitigation of orbital debris.

Signing does not oblige Malta to enter into any particular cooperative undertaking with other signatories, nor does it preclude cooperation with countries that have not signed. It is, quite deliberately, a statement of alignment on principles rather than a commitment to any specific project.

That distinction matters and for a small state, the ability to align on principles without surrendering optionality is precisely the right kind of arrangement. A parallel lunar initiative led by China and Russia (the International Lunar Research Station) has drawn its own network of partner countries and most spacefaring nations have now leaned one way, the other, or in a few notable cases towards both.

There will be debate whether certain concepts in the Accords, particularly the notion of “safety zones” around lunar activities as well as the endorsement and use of space resources, represent a faithful interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty or an extension of it. Yet Malta’s diplomatic instinct has long been to anchor the country in multilateral frameworks of rules rather than blocs or spheres of influence and the Accords are the most developed rule-set currently in place. Remaining outside would have meant neither neutrality nor independence; it would simply have meant absence from the room in which those rules are being shaped.

There is, however, a deeper reason for Malta to take an interest, one that has gone largely unremarked. The principles underpinning the Artemis Accords and the wider architecture of space law share a direct intellectual lineage with a speech delivered at the United Nations on 1 November 1967 by Arvid Pardo, Malta’s first Permanent Representative to the UN. Addressing the General Assembly in the same year the Outer Space Treaty entered into force, Pardo urged that the resources of the seabed and the ocean floor beyond national jurisdiction should be regarded as “the common heritage of mankind”, reserved for peaceful purposes, safeguarded for future generations and managed for the benefit of humanity as a whole.

That speech set in motion the fifteen-year process that culminated in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and its language travelled further still. The same concept appears explicitly in Article 11 of the 1979 Moon Agreement, which declares that “the moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind”. When the Artemis Accords speak of peaceful use, transparency, the sharing of scientific data and the preservation of heritage sites (including the Apollo landing sites among the assets of humankind to be safeguarded) they are drawing on principles first articulated at the United Nations by a Maltese diplomat on behalf of a newly independent Malta.

The practical returns may follow in time through research partnerships, participation in the downstream space economy or the soft-power dividends of alignment with a coalition of like-minded states. The symbolic return is immediate.

Critics will ask whether a country without a launch capability or satellites of its own belongs among what are sometimes called moonshot nations. The answer is that the Moon is no longer simply a destination reserved for the capable. It is a legal and commercial frontier whose emerging rules will affect everyone. Malta has chosen, sensibly, to take its place at the table.

Alexei Pace is an avid astronomy enthusiast and has been following the space programme with interest since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.