In 1949, a group of prospectors looking for uranium in the Mojave Desert stumbled upon something much more consequential. Detecting high levels of radioactivity emanating from the Clark Mountain Range, the men began to dig, but instead of uranium, they found Bastnaesite—a mineral that is the source of the majority of extractable rare earth elements (REEs). Disappointed, the prospectors sold the Mountain Pass Mine to a local mining company. In doing so, they signed away what would soon become one of the most profitable land parcels in America. Conductive, magnetic, and heat-resistant, the rare earth elements discovered in the depths of the Mojave would become essential to modern technology, a pillar of today’s global economy

Within one and a half decades, the Mountain Pass Mine (later rechristened the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility) was the world’s main source of REEs. In the mid-1960s, these minerals would be pulverized and processed for use in color televisions; in the 1980s, for radar, precision guided weapons, electric engine starters, and door locks; in the 1990s, for computer hard drives and fiber-optic cables. Now REEs are integral components of smartphones, MRI machines, MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, semiconductor chips, Teslas, disposable vape pens, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of “smart bombs.”

The demand for rare earth elements has continued to rise exponentially; it’s expected to reach three-to-seven times current levels by 2040. This projected increase is based, among other things, on the greening of the global economy; REEs are critical components of lower-carbon technologies. Unfortunately, the sourcing of these elements comes at its own cost. Processing rare earth metals is chemically intensive even for a mining operation, and the surrounding environment rarely goes unscathed. Most REE mines are open pits, and developers rely on highly toxic chemical pools called leachate ponds to separate the rare earth metals from less desirable elements. These ponds are prone to leaking into groundwater veins. Even when the process goes off without a hitch, every ton of rare earths yields 2,000 tons of toxic waste byproduct.

The Mountain Pass Mine is a case in point. In the years before a toxic waste spill led to a two decade-long closure in 2002, the mine could be credited with approximately 600,000 gallons of hazardous waste flow into the Mojave. The 2002 spill was hardly the mine’s first – a federal investigation later found that some 60 additional spills, many unreported, occurred between 1984 and 1998. Some of the area’s native desert tortoises are still radioactive.

With environmental concerns and industry needs increasingly at odds, the military research arm of the American government has devised an ambitious solution to the looming shortage of rare earth elements: a true moonshot.

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In the words of Stephanie Tompkins, director of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “The U.S. sort of back[ed] away... from those expensive and environmentally painful processes. And so we need to find new ways.” Under Tompkins, the new LunA-10 project, announced this past December, aims to bring mining to the Moon. If all goes according to plan, LunA-10’s vision for “self-sustaining, monetizable, commercially owned and operated lunar infrastructure” will be viable by 2035—at a safe distance of 238,855 miles away from our planet’s delicate ecosystems.

DARPA is an infamously secretive organization which operates, as the historian Sharon Weinberger puts it, “below the radar [...] unencumbered by the typical bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific peer review.” But the impetus for LunA-10 is no mystery. Tompkins is a geologist who studied moon rocks as a senior staff scientist for the corporation SAIC and acted as the vice president of research at the Colorado School of Mines before assuming her current office. The DARPA director has said that her time at Mines was invaluable for understanding "critical mineral supply chains," which she describes as a “problem area” for the United States. “I would want [warfighters] to have whatever is needed wherever they are and not worry about having things delivered [...] from across the ocean,” she says.

The ocean Tompkins refers to is the Pacific. Today China controls around 85% of the world’s production of rare earth metals, leaving the U.S. military defense industry essentially reliant on Chinese exports. In particular, Neodymium is essential to missile guidance systems, Lanthanum in surveillance and reconnaissance, and Europium for plasma displays and nuclear reactors. Nearly all 17 elements are used by the U.S. military in a variety of applications. Lockheed Martin’s stealth aircraft, the F-35, requires more than 900 pounds of rare earth metals per plane. In recent years, the Department of Defense and the Biden administration have prioritized forging an American supply chain of rare earth elements, on the basis that depending on China poses a risk to national security. Crucially, reliance on China also limits the tech industry, which drives the U.S. economy. America is home to one-third of the global IT market; when the U.S. Department of Commerce imposed restrictions on China's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer in the first year of the pandemic, it contributed to a global shortage that cost the U.S. somewhere around $240 billion in 2021. Rare earth metals are also necessary for the development of quantum computing, which has been a priority for DARPA under Tompkin’s leadership.

At present, China is one of the only nations willing to risk the toxic aftermath of rare earth element purification and refinement. The Chinese government recently shut down many of its own mines, officially due to the environmental impact, but they still import around 200,000 tons of ore for manufacture each year from Myanmar, another rare earth metals giant. They also have their own Moon mission in the works: Chang’e 7, which is set to launch in 2026.

LunA-10 and Chang'e 7 are underway at a moment when NASA has spoken of a “lunar gold rush” and the Moon’s “hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resources.” According to research from Boeing, the Moon’s regolith is rich with rare earth metals. In addition to shipments back to Earth, other metals on the Moon like iron could also be utilized for the creation of a permanent lunar base, which would enable the exploration of more distant planets. In early December 2023, DARPA awarded LunA-10 contracts to 14 companies from the commercial worlds of mining, navigation, communication, robotics, power, and transit, including a contract with defense technology giant Northrop Grumman to develop a lunar railroad. Unlike Earth, there’s no living environment to protect on the moon, and an atmosphere so thin it’s called an exosphere. It’s a developer’s dream.

“A large paradigm shift is coming in the next 10 years for the lunar economy,” enthused LunA-10’s program manager at DARPA, Michael Nayak. “Just like DARPA’s foundational node of ARPANET grew into the sprawling web of the internet, LunA-10 is looking for those connective nodes to support a thriving commercial economy on the Moon.” Space, perhaps because we have yet to discover any indigenous inhabitants, is the last safe space for colonial exploitation.

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LunA-10 is only the latest effort in an international contest to occupy our planet’s sole natural satellite. Last August, India made history as the first country to land near the Moon’s South Pole, while in January, Japan’s SLIM spacecraft successfully landed only 34 miles off target—albeit upside down—representing the most precise lunar landing yet. The two nations will collaborate for the Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) in 2026 to explore the Moon’s polar expanses. The South Pole’s abundant craters of lunar ice makes it essential territory for space development: as a source of drinking water, a mechanism to cool equipment, and a way to manufacture fuel and oxygen, ice will be a key resource for lunar prospectors. A Russian spacecraft, the Luna 25, was also headed for the South Pole, though it crashed some 250 miles away from its intended landing site last August.

“The fact is that the rest of the world, including some of our greatest competitors like China and Russia, have started a new space race,” said Republican Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona in a House Committee hearing on the Mineral Supply Chain and the New Space Race. “It is a race to establish permanent, sustained space presence, that will allow these countries to tap into the vast resources in space, and subsequently control life on Earth in immeasurable ways.” Ideally, of course, it would be the U.S. that wields that kind of power.

Currently, NASA can’t even reliably get a lander on the Moon without compromising its equipment beyond use. The most successful American attempt since the Apollo 17 mission 40 years ago was a rocket launched in February built by private start-up Intuitive Machines with funding from NASA; it lost power in the lunar night after seven days of operation, locking within it forevermore a collection of scientific instruments and 125 sculptures by artist Jeff Koons.

The United States seems to be catching up to its ambitions. In conjunction with DARPA’s interest in the Moon, NASA’s Artemis program includes plans for an outpost on the Moon’s South Pole and a space station in cislunar orbit. DARPA has described LunA-10 as “complementary” to NASA’s objectives; the projected growth in commercial lunar enterprises and exploration of the lunar surface will require the kind of infrastructure LunA-10 can deliver. LunA-10 contract partner ICON, for example, will construct buildings using the iron from the lunar regolith, while Sierra Space, another LunA-10 partner, is working on extracting breathable oxygen.

The legality of all this is debatable. There’s minimal international policy writing on lunar resource extraction, but governments and private companies alike are already jostling to stake claims to the Moon’s lonely vistas. According to the most widely adopted international agreement, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no nation can claim ownership of territory on the Moon; yet there are no provisions in the Treaty pertaining to commercial operations. "We make our own rules, so to speak," noted the Defense Intelligence Agency’s John Huth, Chief of Space and Counterspace, "There's nothing that really precludes any one country from extracting minerals from the moon or other planets.” Theoretically any spacecraft that lands—even crashes—on the Moon or other celestial bodies could constitute an “exclusion zone” that grants it access to the resources therein. So, while nations are barred from claiming sovereignty over the lunar landscape, private entities are not. Private entities, coincidentally, being the means through which the U.S. is establishing lunar transportation and development under DARPA’s LunA-10 program and NASA’s Artemis program. In the words of Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for Air and Space Law, who also gave testimony at the House Committee meeting, “Winning requires only getting there first.”

Similar to LunA-10’s contracting system, NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) partners with private corporations to build landers, rovers, and rockets that NASA can pay to use, representing a departure from the traditional utilization of NASA-built equipment for American space ventures. Commercial landers built by the likes of SpaceX or Intuitive Machines that are fabricated through CLPS are not obliged to carry solely government-sponsored materials. Startups can also pay to ride—like Celestis and Elysium Space, which partnered with Astrobotic to transport cremated ashes to the Moon. 

While laws regulating outer space exploration have been minimal, in decades past they were at least subject to governments and thus at least theoretically to citizens. With the privatization of space research and development—embodied best, perhaps, by the planned crash of the International Space Station in 2030—the scientific community has raised alarm bells about the threats lunar industrialization might pose to international cooperation. “We are at risk of a Wild West scenario due to the rivalries between competing space agencies and commercial interests,” commented Joseph Silk, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and the Paris Institute of Astrophysics.

Contracting creates a legal loophole for government-led initiatives like LunA-10 or the CLPS program, and not just as it pertains to the Outer Space Treaty. Shortly before Astrobotic’s ill-fated Peregrin launch in February, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren petitioned NASA and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to halt the mission and consult with Indigenous Nations regarding the transportation of human remains to the Moon. As Alvin D. Harvey wrote for Nature on Nygren’s protest, “the Moon is a shared cultural space for humanity. Many people might instinctively feel uneasy about its incipient commercialization […] Diné (the people) of the Navajo Nation such as myself, feel a whole other level of unease.” For many Indigenous Peoples, Harvey explains, the Moon is a sacred entity. Depositing human remains or other materials on the lunar surface is tantamount to the desecration of a holy site.

In response, NASA stated in a pre-launch press conference that as a customer of Astrobotic, it doesn’t have the power to regulate payloads on the company’s spacecraft. Peregrin’s launch went through with the cremated human remains from Celestis and Elysium Space as cargo, though an engine failure caused the lander to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

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All of this sets a poor precedent for accountability in the burgeoning lunar industry. DARPA has been clear about the profit motive of the LunA-10 project, describing the envisioned lunar architecture as “not intended to support human exploration or scientific experimentation that does not have commercial value.” This has led some scientists to express concerns that unregulated rare earth metal extraction on the Moon’s South Pole could interfere with research on gravitational waves, black holes, the search for life on other planets, and the origins of our own oceans, which might be traced in lunar ice.

Austere as it is, the lunar environment is not indestructible. The Moon’s thin atmosphere will most likely be damaged by mining and rocket operations; the ancient, familiar light reflected by the lunar surface could very possibly be permanently altered by commercial development. The face that Earth’s inhabitants have gazed upon from time immemorial is in danger of some of the most extreme forms of corruption that land can sustain.

An international set of best practices for lunar exploration and resource acquisition was introduced by the U.S. Department of State in 2020, called the Artemis Accords after NASA’s Artemis program; but the document is notably vague with regards to preservation and accountability. Article 6, “Preserving Heritage,” states that signatories are committed to preserving historically important “human or robotic landing sites,” but offers nothing specific with regards to protecting the integrity of the Moon’s topography itself. Article 7, “Space Resources,” describes their extraction and utilization as “vital.” It also commits all undersigned—currently the Accords have 27 signatories, among them U.S. allies Japan and India, but notably neither Russia nor China —to “inform” the U.N. Secretary General, the public, and the scientific community of space resource extraction activities. It does not, however, necessitate their approval, nor provide a map for legal recourse.

Unlike the Artemis Accords, the Outer Space Treaty has been ratified by China and Russia, as well as the U.S. When it was negotiated in 1967, however, its primary purpose was as an arms control measure, not a mercantile agreement. In press releases and conferences on LunA-10, DARPA has emphasized that its project for lunar development is grounded in the Treaty, which states that any developments on the Moon be used “exclusively for peaceful purposes.” This might be true for LunA-10, but elsewhere the agency is taking a different approach. For another pithily titled initiative, BRIDGES—Bringing Classified Innovation to Defense and Government Systems—DARPA solicited “nontraditional defense contractors” to submit proposals for "new methods and technologies that may provide warfighters with disruptive options for protecting and defending space systems." In other words, DARPA is looking to develop space-based weaponry.

In the meantime, the Mountain Pass Mine in the Mojave Desert is swinging back into full operation after two decades of closure. MP Materials, its new owner, is also opening a manufacturing plant for rare earth metals in Texas, for which it has received a $58.5 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense. Before it shoots for the Moon, rare earth mining is coming home. ♦