Artemis and ILRS operators share no common authority. This could concern some. Yet, Aaron Mackey argues they don't necessarily need one to coordinate safely on the lunar surface.

As my time at Open Lunar shifts to start graduate school, I’m reflecting on the lessons, community, and mission that shaped my time here. I leave optimistic that cooperation—not competition—can define humanity’s future on the Moon.

Tomorrow’s Falcon 9 impact exposes a wider gap in lunar governance—objects beyond Earth orbit are not systematically tracked, nor is there a reliable record of what operators leave behind.

On the lunar south pole, the geology is given. There is a need to find a governance framework that works within it. Landing, living, and mining each demand different terrain, and the terrain that serves one disqualifies another. No single site is favourable for all three. Proximity is what's scarce, and the terrain itself shapes what kind of governance framework can work in a given area.

In this webinar, Open Lunar Foundation, JAOPS/Dymon, and COSPAR introduced the first lunar mission dataset to be made publicly accessible through Lunar Ledger, featuring data from the YAOKI rover mission flown aboard Intuitive Machines Mission 2.

In this research fellowship showcase, Vic Paulson presents her work on Designated Lunar Areas (DLAs) and Overlap, a digital simulation sandbox for testing DLA governance regimes at the lunar south pole.

Open Lunar Foundation is excited to welcome Nhat Nguyen to the core team. Read more about Nhat’s background and position in this blog post.

In this research fellowship showcase, Aaron Mackey presents his work on Designated Lunar Areas (DLAs) and the Ground Rules Toolkit, a proposed framework for coordinating lunar surface operations before conflicts arise.

Every proposed lunar governance framework borrows from Earth. UNCLOS, the Antarctic Treaty, UNFSA, ITU spectrum. Each encodes hard-won lessons about managing shared resources without sovereignty. And each of them breaks down when it is applied to the lunar south pole. Lunar water ice is finite, geographically fixed, and non-renewable on any human timescale. No existing framework was built with that in mind.

Open Lunar's Designated Lunar Areas framework offers a way for operators to declare their footprint, share the data behind it, and coordinate with their neighbors before conflicts become crises. Here's how the three-ring structure works, and why the window to adopt it is open right now.

The past few decades of lunar exploration relied on open data sharing from scientific missions. In this new era of exploration — with more lunar actors, and commercial companies looking to potentially collect proprietary datasets — enabling data sharing will be more important than ever. Learn how Open Lunar supports open source data sharing of lunar data through the Lunar Ledger platform.

Watch this recording of a recent webinar, where we explored a simple but important question: when is the Moon truly for everyone? The discussion brought together perspectives from governance, technology, culture, and community leadership to examine who shapes lunar futures and what more inclusive stewardship could look like. 

At NASA's Ignition event in March 2026, Administrator Jared Isaacman outlined a major shift in the Artemis program. Open Lunar board member Will Pomerantz breaks down what changed, what it means, and what to watch next.

This piece makes the case for Designated Lunar Areas: not as claims, but as coordination infrastructure, drawing on surprising parallels from FCC radio-silent zones to Antarctic governance. The stakes couldn't be higher, and the window to get this right is closing fast.

Artemis II marks more than a technical achievement. It is a reminder that humanity’s return to the Moon should reflect our highest aspirations, including collaboration, transparency, and a shared commitment to the future we build there.

As lunar missions multiply and converge on the same scarce, high-value sites, the absence of basic coordination frameworks isn't just a bureaucratic gap — it's a recipe for real conflict. Three international experts break down why information-sharing remains so hard, and what a practical path forward might look like.

The Open Lunar Foundation and the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on March 20, 2026, at the Earth-Space Governance Conference in Leiden, Netherlands. 

In this post, we explore Open Lunar’s role as a Permanent Observer to COPUOS. We speak with Hasan Abbas about how the forum functions in practice and how today’s debates are shaping the future of lunar governance.

Amid a global lunar rush, will we land peaceful norms alongside our spacecraft? 

Open Lunar is a nonprofit founded by a global community—some of the field’s most experienced and visionary minds. Open Lunar is dedicated to ensuring that when humanity returns to the Moon, we do so in a way we can be proud of.