One species, one planet: The moon is our ethical dress rehearsal for Mars

Bruce Jakosky, Scott Hubbard and their colleagues have given us a masterclass in pragmatic systems engineering. Their recent SpaceNews editorial titled “Laying the groundwork for the first human mission to Mars” rightly argues that integrating engineering, human health, science and planetary protection from “day one” is non-negotiable for a successful Mars mission. Their workshop dissected the hardware, the biology and the contamination risks with surgical precision.

Yet, as I read their urgent call for NASA to charter internal workshops and launch new imagers, a profound and unsettling silence was felt. A key component is entirely missing from their architecture: global governance, international cooperation and explicitly space ethics.

We cannot build a Mars mission in a United States-centric vacuum. To send humans to Mars and bring them back safely, we must go not as a nation, but as a planet.

The authors of that editorial treat Mars as an engineering problem for NASA to solve. But a $500 billion mission simply cannot — and should not — be bankrolled or executed by a single country. More importantly, the political, legal and moral fallout of a unilateral footprint on Mars would be catastrophic. While fretting over the technicalities of back-contamination, they ignore the elephant in the room: resource conflict and ethical implementation. Their scenario includes mining subsurface ice for fuel and life support. But who owns that ice? Under the current Outer Space Treaty, celestial bodies are the “province of all humankind.” Yet the Artemis Accords, while well-intentioned and important, are bilateral agreements that risk carving the moon to Mars pathways into geopolitical fiefdoms. If many countries (China, the EU, India and the U.S.) all target the same equatorial landing site for its resources, do we really think a NASA-internal “integration committee” will solve that standoff without a more inclusive multilateral dialogue?

The missing pillar in their quad-chart is planetary diplomacy and space ethics. When a Mars crew faces a medical emergency that requires immediate evacuation — or worse, an irreversible, fatal decision — who holds the authority to make that call? The Mission Director in Houston? The science lead in Europe? This isn’t a hypothetical scenario; it’s an ethical minefield that demands a binding, pre-agreed international ethical code of conduct, not a last-minute conference call.

Furthermore, the authors advocate for “feed-forward from Artemis.” But Artemis is already demonstrating the dangers of this missing component. We are seeing delays and friction over lunar landing rights and surface safety zones. If we cannot align global interests at the moon, what makes us think we can sort them out while a crew is hurtling toward Mars with a two-way communication delay of up to 44 minutes?

To the authors of that editorial: You are the luminaries who built MAVEN, directed the Mars program and led Ames. Use your weight to demand a fifth table at your next quarterly workshop — one filled with diplomats, international jurists and the heads of space agencies from around the world. We don’t just need a high-resolution imager; we need a high-resolution ethical treaty that defines quarantine enforcement, emergency rescue obligations and the ethical boundaries of biological experimentation, ecological planetary conscience and protection on any native life we might find — and a roadmap that would benefit all in planet Earth.

Mars is not an American frontier. It is a universal heritage site. The first human footprint on Martian soil must represent a species, not a flag. If we launch a crew without a global mandate, we risk bringing our terrestrial squabbles to an alien world — and that is a failure no engineering fix can remedy.

Let us not wait for a crisis on the red plains to forge our unity. To that end, a broad coalition of space agencies, academic institutions, commercial sector and civil society organizations is laying the groundwork for a historic gathering: the International Space Ethics Congress, scheduled for late 2027–2028. We formally invite every nation — spacefaring or aspiring — to send diplomats, scientists and philosophers to this table. This is not merely a conference; it is our best and perhaps last chance to codify the moral architecture of our interplanetary future before hardware dictates our politics.

To ensure this forum yields more than lofty declarations, we must anchor it in actionable mechanisms. First, it is proposed the creation of a “Planetary Stewardship Council” — a permanent, UN-affiliated body with the ethical authority to define and implement ethical guardrails, adjudicate resource claims, designate “preservation zones” around biologically sensitive sites and mediate landing-rights disputes. Second, we need a binding Global Emergency Response Protocol, which would establish shared communication relays and mutual rescue obligations, placing astronaut survival above any single flag and develop standardized infrastructure parameters and requirements.

Third, it is urgent that an Open Science and Technology Pledge, where critical life-support and propulsion breakthroughs are placed in an international escrow trust, with enforcement monitoring capability, ensuring that no nation is left behind technologically and that the mission’s survival relies on collective genius for the benefit of all, not proprietary advantage.

Crucially, this encompassing philosophy cannot be an afterthought reserved for Mars. The moon is our ethical proving ground. All lunar efforts including Artemis are not merely a rehearsal for engineering and life-support — it is our only opportunity to test ethical planetary governance, resource-sharing protocols, and emergency cooperation in real time, just three days from home. How we navigate competing interests at the lunar south pole will directly script our approach to Mars. If we cannot share water-ice claims or coordinate safety and protected zones on the moon, we will carry those same failures to the Red Planet. Every dispute settled and every accord signed in cislunar space becomes a hard-earned lesson — not a crisis we must repeat 200 million kilometers away. The moon will write the first draft of our ethical interplanetary constitution; we must ensure it is a draft worth copying.

Mars will not care about our passports. Let us arrive as one species, guided not by the laws of any single capital, but by ethics we have forged together on the dusty plains of the moon and around the cooperative conference tables of Earth. The Space Ethics Congress is our invitation to that higher ground — let us ensure every nation accepts the call.

Let’s integrate the hardware. But let’s also integrate humanity. For when we arrive as one planet, our shared purpose becomes our greatest engine. United, we will not merely reach Mars — we will elevate all of Earth in the attempt and leave a legacy worthy of the cosmos and our species.

Adriana C. Ocampo Uría, Ph.D., is a planetary scientist and space ethics specialist dedicated to advancing responsible, cooperative and scientifically grounded exploration of the solar system.

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Reporting from SpaceNews contributed to this story.