SpaceOps 2008 Conference (Hosted and organized by ESA and EUMETSAT in association with AIAA)

AIAA 2008-3535

Lunar Mission Operations – Global Cooperation Thomas K. Cummings The Boeing Company, Space Exploration, Arlington, Virginia

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Nomenclature BNSC = COPUOS = Col-CC = Cx = DLR = ESMD = JEM = JSC = JWG = LAT = LEO = LMO = MCC = NASA = STS =

British National Space Centre Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Columbus Control Center Constellation German Aerospace Center Exploration Systems Mission Directorate Japanese Experiment Module Johnson Space Center Joint Working Group Lunar Architecture Team Low Earth Orbit Lunar Mission Operations Mission Control Center National Aeronautics and Space Administration Space Transportation System

I. Introduction We are going back to the moon! Only this time we plan to stay, to create a permanent presence, to build a future of lunar inhabitants starting with a colony. And the “we” includes international partners and potentially commercial entrepreneurs co-located with NASA. This Lunar Mission Operations (LMO) will be a 24/7/365 operation once the lunar colony is established. Emphasis will be placed on local autonomous mission control by the colony involving both humans and robots interacting. And this colony will be supported by tele-operations from earth focused on handling exceptional aspects like telemedicine. The construct for LMO is just now being fleshed out as part of defining the overall vision and plan for the lunar colony. These are exciting times for the space operations community. In May 2007 NASA and 13 other space agencies released a document, "The Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination" reflecting a shared vision of space exploration. This framework document allows for the establishment of a voluntary, non-binding mechanism by which space agencies can exchange information on their respective space exploration plans, including lunar operations. In addition to NASA, representatives from agencies in Australia, Canada, China, the European Space Agency, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, the Republic of Korea and Ukraine participated in these Global Exploration Strategy discussions. Key to this collaborative effort is a focus on interoperability standards and processes. At the 3rd Space Exploration Conference in Denver last February, the NASA ESMD team presented their latest version of the NASA vision for the lunar colony. This vision continues to mature and is rapidly becoming refined to a degree that NASA will baseline a lunar architecture at the Constellation program level this summer. One facet of the vision is conveyed in Figure 1 which shows an incremental approach to Lunar and Mars operations.

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Lunar Colony

Mars L di

Figure 1 - NASA ESMD Missions LMO will have to be quite different then the current LEO operations for Space Transportation System (STS) which is very focused on launch ops and intense short term on-orbit mission operations or ISS which is still being built and is just now getting to the condition for operations it originally was visualizing with a six person crew. Each launch of the STS entails large mission and flight operations teams with detailed planning efforts conducted for each mission, starting well in advance of the actual mission. With intense short duration mission, each trying to stuff as much operations as possible into a single mission and, based on the technology of the Space Shuttle, mission operations is a labor intensive effort for the STS program. Current International Space Stations (ISS) operations involve multi-national participants and a global distributed architecture for command and control. For ten years the ISS has been supported by the Russian Mission Control Center called TsUP in Korolev, just north of Moscow. The TsUP is integrated with a world network of mission-control centers, especially those in the United States, France and China. The close working relationship between the JSC MCC and the TsUP efforts have been very beneficial to all parties. The recent activation of ESA's Columbus Control Centre (Col-CC) that supports the European Columbus laboratory from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) facility in Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich, Germany, while interacting with the NASA ISS MCC at JSC, is an example of this global cooperative mission operations construct that has taken many years to create. Congratulations to both ESA and NASA for this achievement! And when the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) "KIBO" is installed on the ISS this global cooperative mission operations architecture will further expand. But LMO may be too different from ISS operations for the ISS model to easily extrapolate to the future. The ISS operations construct may serve as a starting model to LMO but the scale of complexity and number of players to support LMO may be significantly greater then ISS. Moreover, the ISS is a hard mated architecture for the international partners where as the lunar architecture may not be more of an information based loosely coupled architecture. Finally, there likely will be more partners involved in the future lunar operations than are currently involved on the ISS program. Figure 2 suggests we plan right to left for LMO to ensure we will mature to an interoperable architecture, keeping the end state in mind. Planning right to left means you define an end state capability (like an operational multi-national lunar colony) and then work back from that point to find key steps along the way to reach the end state. At each of these key steps you shape the effort to keep focused on the long range end state capability. This long range right-to-left planning is key to long term cost effective solutions that allows for incremental buildup and deployment of a long term lunar presence. Then as we evolve and execute left to right for the NASA Constellation architecture and the international counterpart architectures, we ensure the solution sets we put into place for LEO operations do not preclude us from evolving to a cost effective LMO construct. LMO will also include the international partners anticipated to participate in the Lunar Colony, as well as the entrepreneurs that could be involved in LMO but may not have yet raised their hands to participate. For now, these will have to be assumptions until international partners and entrepreneurs commit to a role in the lunar architecture proposed by NASA or unfold their alternate architectures. The recent The British National Space Centre (BNSC) and NASA report from their Joint Working Group (JWG) on lunar exploration outlined some possible UK - US space exploration cooperation

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efforts that could evolved into joint operations concepts. Similar joint efforts are in work across the globe. The momentum is growing for a international Lunar exploration plan that could give the space operations community an incredible opportunity to shape the next major step in space operations.

Plan Right to Left JSC

KSC GSFC

Consolidated Ops Construct

Mars Ops

Initial Lunar Ops

Out YearTerm Long Lunar Ops Lunar Ops

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JPL

Commercial

Cooperative Ops

Degree of cooperative ops will grow

Internationals

Figure 2. Plan Right to Left for a collaborative global operations concept

II. Stellar Opportunity Congratulations to NASA and their space agency counterparts for having the vision to establish a framework to work issues for the betterment of all space explorers and colonists heading to the lunar surface! NASA and thirteen other space agencies that signed the "The Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination," in May 2007 gave us a great opportunity to define and implement a space operations capability that is global in nature, supports lunar exploration, and provides us all with a way to accomplish mutual goals. The framework document allows for the establishment of a voluntary, non-binding mechanism by which space agencies can exchange information on their respective space exploration plans. Even though the document is non-binding, it’s contents are consistent with ongoing bilateral and multilateral discussions that many space agencies are conducting to establish cooperative agreements for specific projects. This is an exceptional example of on going global cooperation as we head to the moon.

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Figure 2 - The Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination partners This framework for coordination identified key enabling interoperability areas including communications, controls, life support, and docking systems. Unfortunately lunar based operations were not specifically listed like these other key areas. My suggestion is that any global cooperative effort to develop colonies on the moon needs to address these capabilities and enablers plus local Lunar ops standards for eventual multiple colonies linked together as distributed communities. There are continued high level cooperative efforts in work to translate the multi-national agreement framework into interoperable systems for the lunar architecture. Is the space operations community part of those efforts? The rest of this paper suggests some food for thought on this subject. No one has the “right” answers but not planning that far ahead may result in evolution of basic operations taking us down an unanticipated path. History has taught us again and again what happens if you do not visualize the future and plan for it.

III. Shackleton, a seed for the future Shackleton is potentially a great starting point for exploration, but will it eventually be the town center or the industrial park of a series of future lunar colonies, or will it always be an outpost of science? What it evolves into will eventually drive operations. Currently the concept of mission operations for the lunar site is being driven by engineering and science, while a town is more driven by economics and politics, or at least a balance of all these drivers. Will politics, economics, engineering or all of them drive the multinational lunar operations at Shackleton 50 years from now? Or will Shackleton be a “beachhead’ and the eventual site for the first actual colony be elsewhere. Can we even visualize that far out and postulate operations concepts that will represent standards for how we want multi-national towns to operate on the moon. As we pursue balancing these drivers, questions emerge concerning whose town politics, what economics drivers, and what engineering standards, and what science expectations are involved? How will you, the global space operations community, insert yourselves into this process? What will you recommend and how will you engage each other as a community? Day 1 of lunar operations can be visualized and is rapidly becoming firmer, but what about day 1000 or 10,000, which have far more unknowns then knowns. Initially, exploration will drive operations at Shackleton, but international and commercial decisions may drive a lot of the out year lunar operations. Eventually, lunar ops could be lunar wide, with the potential for multiple lunar colony sites. Some may be focused on mining or tourist or pure national pride for the country that creates the colonies. Will this be supported by an existing Earth based model of terrestrial global operations for individual lunar colonies by individual space agencies, or will these future town and cities on the moon be supported by a 4 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

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collaborative, borderless tele-operations construct that cuts across businesses who have endeavors on the moon working with multi-national space agencies and individual space agencies? How or when will there be multiple sites on the moon with permanent residents? Will each be operating as a standalone entities, or as a set of communities working together as a linked set of towns or cities? This vision is not in our foreseeable future. But we can, and should, put ourselves into that mind set and establish global collaborative rules for lunar operations. Of course this assumes that some day the moon will be home to multiple cities across it’s surface, each with all of the needs and expectations of earth bound cities. This is a vision we hope will become a reality over time. If the global space operations community does not get engaged then it is quite possible that what happens initially will set those Lunar ops standards by default. Considerable effort is being focused on what happens on day 1, led by a NASA Lunar Architecture Team (LAT) working hard to define lunar ops from the United States view, but in conjunction with other interested space agencies. To their credit, NASA is very sensitive to ensuring international partners and commercial partners are involved. Today the roles of U.S. vs International Partners vs Commercial ventures are still evolving. Understandably, NASA ops concepts focus on their initial efforts because “if these are not successful we sure can not be successful in the out years”. One interesting question is, who will actually do day 1 of the first permanent lunar settlements. There is a very real possibility that when the next manned lunar lander from NASA reaches the surface of the moon, China may be waiting for our arrival. Will that happen? No one knows for sure. Will that result in a potential for another case of initial ops from multiple cultures on different sections of the lunar surface evolving into a dichotomy of passing to the right vs left? The Space Operations community has a great opportunity in the "The Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination" to define and support lunar interoperability concepts for space operations.

IV. Global Cooperation - Local vs Remote Historically, space exploration has been controlled by ground ops for space probes, Mars rovers, satellite ops and to some extent, man space operations. The Shuttle has lots of ground ops crews working for the entire mission. The ISS also has significant mission operations support from the ground in the United States, Russia, and Germany. Long term lunar ops may need to focus on daily lunar operations being mostly locally controlled with minimum dependency on Earth. Traditional Mission Ops roles and responsibilities for launches or LEO operations may not be appropriate for lunar ops. But there are no international standards for space ops that could support multinational lunar ops that are local area lunar control centric unless you decide the ISS model extrapolates to the lunar colonies. If the moon does eventually become home to multiple lunar sites, then permanent multinational colonization of the moon provides a significant opportunity to create these standards. Again, the Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination provides a means for the space operations community to define local Lunar ops standards. Unfortunately countries like China who have lunar exploration intentions are not currently members of this framework team, which is open to all interested parties. All of us have multiple bosses with agendas, needs, and expectations. The same will be true for the colonists on the moon. Figure 3 may seem a bit far fetched, but could become all too real when the lunar towns grow to a point that multiple Earth bound players will be issuing operational instructions to the lunar inhabitants. Each country or company involved in Lunar colonies will want control of their assets and operations. It is pretty straight forward. Multi-national and entrepreneurial lunar teams will want to work to the basic principle of “If we paid for it, we control it”. Totally understandable and universal in it’s nature. The people that write the checks for those working and living on the moon will want to direct their operations. The recent activation of the Columbus control Center is just such an example.

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Ok, so are we in charge or are they?

“Start unloading Supplies”

“Check on drilling rig 2”

Commercial Operations

“Time to Exercise” NASA Operations JSC

GSFC

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KSC

Internationals Operations JPL

Figure 3 - Local Lunar Control to support multiple objectives Just as each of us have felt at time that if we were just told what the task was and what is needed we can plan our work ourselves and do a better job of managing the multiple tasks we perform. For the lunar inhabitants this would mean local lunar control. An operations construct that is based on the local lunar control with help from Earth operations when they ask for it would be a far different construct then manned or unmanned space exploration to date. Communication from Earth operations to their respective Lunar teams and facilities will require unprecedented cooperative efforts, protocols, and standards driven by local ops control concepts on the Lunar surface, and must be defined long before the first visit. This requires identification of standards that provide a high return on investment of time and money, and long lead time standards that will be accepted by space agencies, national interests, and commercial interests. An example of global standards for operations is the use of the English language for commercial air travel. Any airport you fly into for commercial aviation uses English for air traffic management. Some day on the surface of the moon we will have multi-national travel that should plan ahead for a communication standard like this, not just the electronics standards but the language and terminology to be used for lunar surface operations. A global space operations architecture that meets those standards is needed to support the local lunar controlled operations with the ability of terrestrial teams across the world backing each other up. Once again, the Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination provides a means to define these local Lunar ops standards

V. Isaac Asimov, was he right? Imagine what it might be like fifty years after the first permanent settlement becomes operational on the moon. By that time robots and humans could be co-mingled and as mutually dependent contributors to the daily lives of the lunar inhabitants. Today we have robots in space like the highly successful Mars rovers. And we have humans in space performing both science and daily chores on the ISS. And lots of effort has been spent on NASA’s Robonaut, a mechanical robot that “looks like” an astronaut, only on wheels. It can be mounted on various platforms that provide mobility, allowing it to support lunar operations, or least that is the plan. If we build on the previous premise of local lunar operations control based on universal standards, then we will need to address how robots and human work together on the moon surface, and how a robot from China or Russia or the U.S. would interact with a lunar citizen from Italy or Brazil or any one of the many countries that could have people on the moon. Or even how Robonaut will interact when it meets it’s counterpart from China. Can Issac Asimov’s three laws of ROBOTICS apply? Do they represent basic principals that could actually guide the development of rule of engagement for robots working with humans on the moon? Those three laws may be the basis for defining international standards for lunar operations and therefore drive the design of the robots that will operate on the moon. Let us review his three laws. The three laws of ROBOTICS; 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

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2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law This level of basic guiding principles could be captured in the Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination or an operations derivative as part of the operations community contributions to that effort. But far more importantly, how does this convert to a set of globally recognized standards that drive the designs of robots and operations such that decades from now, if a lunar transiting robot developed in India or Israeli comes into proximity to a human from Spain or Brazil on the moon, the robot will respond the same way regardless of who build the robot or what human they encounter.

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VI. Entrepreneurs at the Console

Many hope for the lunar colonies to grow and become permanent. Key to the success is attracting investors and entrepreneurs who will need assurances they can turn a profit with minimum government hindrances, even in local vs remote lunar operations standards and constructs. They will have people and resources on Earth and on the moon, working in tandem to accomplish their business goals. How they decide to split the work load up between Earth bound control and local control will be driven by their business cases as much as technical aspects. The good news is that business already knows how to operate together on a global scale and to a very large extent the global business environment is able to operate despite widely varying set of rules and regulation in the countries they operate in every day. It is hoped that good business sense will drive standards and concepts for lunar based businesses as much as the technical challenges. But, just like the first countries or space agencies that set up permanent residence on the lunar surface may also set the operations standards, will the first entrepreneurs that establish lunar ops set those standards? Just as in the earlier discussion of space agencies working together to establish interoperability using the Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination, entrepreneurs will find a way to work together to establish lunar based interoperability. Everyone will want the lunar colony to be a profitable village that draws business. This will necessitate a means for the global business community to establish operational concepts. These operational rules of engagement have to make it easy for a company to “plug and play” into the local Lunar operations. Without that long range globally based business coordination, we can find ourselves on the moon not being able to plug our hairdryers into one standard outlet across the lunar colonies just like we can not do it today across the globe. Where there is a will, there is a way, which is why we can log onto the Internet from anywhere on earth today. Of course one only has to follow the current battle of Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD or the old Beta Max vs VHS tape recorder battle to see that competition of standards can also results in a lack of interoperability. Remember the simple question, will lunar rovers pass on the right or the left as a lunar standard. It may seem absurd to pose that question today, but then is not anticipated in the industrial revolution that someday car manufactures around the world would be forced to offer both choices. The Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination does not currently have a commercial bent in it’s development but the charter of that document does recognize that need for industrial efforts to be included in developing global standards for lunar exploration and development. Or is there a need for a comparable commercially based global agreement on lunar exploration and utilization?

VII. Shackleton UN Ops Shackleton is a stepping stone to a much larger endeavor that will take decades if not centuries to materialize into towns or even cities across the surface of the moon. But if you believe that will eventually happen, and that it will be the result of global cooperative efforts, then you need to address the question of governance. What will be the model for Government regulation of co-located global based lunar teams and how will it drive operations? Will a Lunar United Nations be needed since the Shackleton village will be an international village? A United Nations approach to operations may be of value to consider even as strange as it may first sound. It may be a candidate solution to how we have local control of a multinational community. It is even possible that many of the potential resident companies and countries will want to have rotating leadership as a construct, much like the leadership of the UN is rotated between member states. We do that today on ISS.

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And of course there will need to be a forum to adjudicate issues beyond just technical aspects. Even today on the ISS, there are instances where global politics and business interests have clashed with pure technical operations. Dennis Tito was the first person to visit space as a tourist. But before he could leave the ground in the Soyuz, the Russian-US Bilateral Crew Operations Panel had to work out non-technical issues. After his visit, Yuri Malecnchenko and Ekaterina Dmitriev were married on the International Space Station and that is not something you would expect to cover in flight rules. The lunar colonies will create a vast spectrum of issues that will have to be dealt with on a regular basis. These couple of ISS unusual issues are a tip of an iceberg for lunar colonies. Can the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) move to the lunar surface to represent the lunar colonies? This Committee has two standing Subcommittees: 1. The Scientific and Technical Subcommittee and 2. The Legal Subcommittee. The Committee and its two Subcommittees meet annually to consider questions put before them by the General Assembly, reports submitted to them and issues raised by the Member States. The Committee and the Subcommittees, working on the basis of consensus, make recommendations to the General Assembly. This committee has been in existence since 1959. As the race back to the moon heats up, this may be a forum to discuss these governance issues or provide a forum for mediating grievances that occur on a lunar colony that could have representatives from many nations. The charter of this COPUOS includes a review of the scope of international cooperation in peaceful uses of outer space and to devise programs to study legal problems arising from the exploration of outer space. Will a future city on the lunar surface have a COPUOS representative in residence? Will there be a seat at the UN table for the representative of the Lunar Cities? How will all of this translate into concepts of operations for the future? Will the agenda for SpaceOps 2050 conference have a panel of lunar legal representatives attending virtually from their COPUOS office on the surface of the moon?

VIII. Evolution vs Revolution Evolution got us driving on the left in London and on the right in New York. Evolution in space operations has resulted in a very knowledgeable and capable space operations community. If you could look back at the last 50 years of space operations vs today would you say that evolution has resulted in the best space operations possible? Do we want the initial set up space operations for the lunar return to be the space operations for the next 50, or 100, years? Initial Constellation LEO Operations will tend to focus on evolution from current operations since the first set of Constellation missions will be with NASA assets in LEO operations, interacting with ISS, which are very well know operations. This will cause pressure to evolve from the current mission operation. After all, evolution has value because you are going from a known position to support a continuum of operations, with lower risk while keeping existing jobs, infrastructure, and roles. So evolution is not bad, as long as we understand where it will take us once towns on the moon start to form local autonomous operations and start to interact between the towns. But relying on evolution can have unexpected consequences. Drive on the left or drive on the right??? One thought is that lunar ops should start with a clean piece of paper approach as a revolutionary approach and plan from full up Lunar ops back to initial Lunar ops. Yes this has far higher risk but also has potential for significant gain if viewed through a very long lens. But who will drive this? Can the NASA centric Constellation LEO ops be separate from a globally based, business friendly lunar ops? Who pays for developing it? Or will it be driven by whoever arrives first getting to set the standards?

IX. Plan Right to Left Planning anything as large and long range as colonies on the surface of the moon is very hard to do and is fraught with unknowns. Not planning enough can be very dangerous and costly. Good planning starts with the desired end state and works backwards from that vision. Revolutionary concepts for lunar operations require a visionary approached to prevent the much easier evolutionary changes locking in traditional approaches for operations. Let us take a step back and try to define the 1,000th or 10,000th day of operations, not just the first day, and then create an operations construct that allows that 1,000th or 10,000th day to be a local Lunar controlled environment. Figure 5 restates what I said at the start of this paper (see figure 2), we must effectively plan right to left to have a success execution going left to right over time. Vagueness grows the further to the right you go, so lunar ops with internationals and entrepreneurialism is too vague at this point to define a right to left execution plan. Maybe it is possible for the Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination and United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to

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define a concept of mission operations to enable a global cooperation environment with commercial participants that do not depend of just traditional Earth based government missions operations processes or infrastructure. Maybe the commercial exploration paths will drive industry to define a globally supported lunar operations vision in parallel to the space agencies.

Plan Right to Left JSC

KSC GSFC

Consolidated Ops Construct

Mars Ops

Initial Lunar Ops

Out YearTerm Long Lunar Ops Lunar Ops

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JPL

Commercial

Cooperative Ops

Degree of cooperative ops will grow

Internationals

Figure 5. Plan right to left to effectively evolve left to right

X. Summary Lots of questions, not many answers. This paper is intended to pose questions to the space operations communality on where they want to be in the future when we gaze at the moon and realize it is inhabited by our grandchildren and their children. When there are multiple colonies on the moon with many nations working together. When business ventures decide to open a branch at the town of Shackleton and plan on market branding their lunar products. When you goggle ShackletonResupply.com and find a company offering to ship your Christmas packages to the moon with the same efficiency as sending them from London to New York. Lunar ops is far more then a technical challenge. Every country and company that has satellites in operations that span commercial, military and scientific efforts knows that today. But we can park our satellites far enough apart that we can control them as individual assets. And the STS missions may not be good models for lunar operations. Even ISS mission operations may not work best for the lunar operations concepts in the long run. That is why existing LEO ops may not easily extrapolate to lunar ops. If we visualize the future we may find local autonomous lunar operations as the norm, not the exception. And we will see robots and humans as lunar teammates, under rules of engagement that may find their heritage in Isaac Asimov stories from the first half of the 20th century. What international standards are in our future for all this? How will the operations community get engaged in shaping this future? Is it possible that Lunar towns may be more United Nations than extensions of space agencies across the globe like ISRO, RSA, NASA, ESA, JAXA? The challenge will be how we plan for these future lunar operations. How we arrive at a balance between the potentially conflicting priorities and approaches driven by business vs political vs scientific vs engineering solutions. There are a lot of good trade studies out there for space operations that will need a solid balance between these competing drivers and factors. I wonder what the SpaceOps 2050 panels will say about lunar operations. Interoperability is key to letting us all work on this together. We need to approach this as if we were born on the moon. I sincerely hope my great grandchildren will get the chance to see the moon as the new world we did right. Can The Global Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination and the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space help us establish local autonomous Lunar operations? Maybe…. But we gotta try

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