Sometimes, space enthusiasts blind themselves with techno-optimism about all the potential cool technological things we can do and the benefits they can offer humanity. We conveniently ignore that there are trade-offs: If one group gets to utilize the water available on the lunar surface, that means another group doesn’t get to.

Recognizing and attempting to come up with a plan to deal with those sorts of trade-offs is the intent of a new paper by Marissa Herron and Therese Jones of NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, as well as Amanda Hernandez of BryceTech, a contractor based out of Virginia.

The paper deals explicitly with trade-offs on the moon, though most of the strategy could work elsewhere throughout the solar system. The moon is probably the most important, though, as there has been a concerted push by NASA and other space agencies to set up a permanent presence there and start utilizing some of its resources.

Reports like the 2022 National Cislunar Science and Technology Strategy and the 2020 Executive Order on Space Resources offer an impetus to utilize the moon for humanity’s benefit. However, ensuring it will be used for all humanity and not just a sliver of it is harder.

Lunar water is a good example of a relatively scarce resource that could be utilized in different ways. Some groups want to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, using it to refuel rockets that can return larger samples of regolith and other materials off the surface. Other groups want to purify the water and use it for biological functions like drinking or showering. Who is responsible for determining who gets access to what resources and ensuring that they are equitably shared across competing interests is still up in the air, which the paper hopes to lay out.

The authors lay out a three-step framework. First, they want to map out the 63 objectives of NASA’s Moon to Mars plan and figure out what, if any, requirements on lunar sites and resources are needed. They stress that collaboration from outside NASA, including other agencies and private organizations, is critical at this stage, despite the Moon to Mars architecture being a NASA-driven program.

The second step is a “Catalog.” Essentially, it is a list of “concerns”—anything that could disrupt the use of a location or resource. The water use example from above is one such example—others abound, and aren’t just limited to the surface. Orbits and Lagrange point locations are resources as well, and ensuring that they are fairly utilized is a key component of the framework.

The final step is the “Preservation” segment—essentially, it is the development of a plan to mitigate the concerns listed in the Catalog step. These mitigations could be the result of technological improvements like better solar collectors that could increase the overall power available at a specific location.

Or they could be operational—they could mandate the joint use of a regolith collection machine by organizations that want to collect the water vs. those that want to collect the iron for steel production. Finally, there could be policy practices, such as preserving historic sites like the Apollo landing sites or the final resting places of some of the recent lunar landers.

Both the Catalog and Preservation steps are intended to be repeated, with each being continuously updated. That would ensure that, if there are additional resources found somewhere unexpected, or another historic site comes into play for resource utilization, they are considered.

The authors stress that the policy would not result in a static document, but a series of interconnected policy and operational priorities that would allow for the successful and harmonious exploitation of resources as we start to expand throughout the solar system. Given the conflict that has arisen on our home planet over those same resources, trying to plan ahead with all the knowledge that we have now on conflict resolution seems the right thing to do.