Community Payload Guidelines

Hunch

Jan 1

Project Contributor: Abbhinav Muralidharan

Working to establish ethical standards for lunar payloads, promoting responsible space exploration.

Open Lunar Impact

Payload review enables our vision towards a portfolio of lunar utilities through: legal, governance, and regulatory systems to ensure the safe and responsible deployment of payloads on the lunar surface.

About the Project

This research investigated current payload assessments, with the aim of establishing a community led review process that incorporated broader considerations, such as environmental, sociocultural, heritage etc.

About the Need

Currently there are limited guidelines on what can be sent to the Moon, this gap has the potential to be exploited. A recent lunar mission by Peregrine highlighted this gap, with an attempt to send human remains to the lunar surface. This gap in regulation poses a number of risks and challenges:

Sociocultural: A number of communities hold the moon as sacred, and contentious payloads could lead to increased tensions with these groups.
Environmental: There is a risk of contaminating the lunar surface, as well as interfering with ongoing scientific experiments.
Guidance: There is a need for additional guidelines to reinforce the principles of the Outer Space Treaty and ensure the integrity of the Moon.

About the Solution

The research proposed a set of guiding principles to inform payloads assessments, as well as a voluntary certification model that could act as a stop-gap for regulation and additional requirements:

Social responsible behavior: The proposed framework would encourage better stewardship of the Moon from operators.
Guidance: The research has shown there is a desire from actors for more guidelines to inform their own assessments of payloads, which the proposed model could address.
Participation: Central to the model is broad and diverse participation of stakeholders, which would allow for concerns of actors who are not currently consulted to have a voice.