‘Prime lunar real estate’: Australia’s lawyer to the stars – and the moon – is worried

April 12, 2026 — 5:00am

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Dr Cassandra Steer is an internationally recognised expert in space law and the chair and founder of the Australasian Centre for Space Governance. She is now director of policy research with Space Strategies Consulting Ltd. She spoke to me from her Montreal home on Thursday.

Fitz: Dr Steer, thank you for your time. In this week of Artemis II boomeranging around the far side of the moon, I seek an overview of the whole space thang. Where it’s up to, and where it’s going? They tell me you are one of the world’s leading legal experts in the field. How did you, as an Australian, get into “space law”, something I think a lot of us didn’t quite know exists.

CS: [Laughing] I was always interested in the humanities, philosophy, languages, international relations. My background is international law and international conflict, and it was in the course of working in that field that I started to become interested in what technology is doing to warfare. “How do we look at who’s responsible?” “How do we restrain states?” “How do we limit the impacts on civilians of warfare?” And it was actually military lawyers who I worked with who said, “Well, you’ve got to look at space.“

Fitz: A difficult place to put up a shingle, but, OK?

CS: I hadn’t even thought about space, but the more I started to look at it, the more I realised space is just another domain where all of these issues are playing out, where nations and corporations need legal help in navigating all the agreements, protocols and treaties that are supposed to control what happens there.

Fitz: What’s happening there right now, and making headlines, is the whole Artemis program – named because in Greek mythology Artemis is the sister of Apollo. But as opposed to the Apollo program, it is not, according to The New York Times, a “flag and footprint” exercise.

CS: Yeah, it’s a race for dominating prime lunar real estate in the long term, not just landing and leaving.

Fitz: The NYT said this week that this race now is no longer between America and Russia; it’s between America and China, and it looks like the Chinese are winning, with the big deal being who is first to get to the south pole of the moon.

CS: Yes, but while the US likes to paint it as a Cold War 2.0, it’s not just China in the race with them, because we’re not in a bipolar era politically. We’re in a multipolar era where you’ve got countries like India, Japan, and even Israel, trying to get to the moon. And importantly, you’ve got commercial players who are very much part of it.

Fitz: But why go to the moon at all, beyond the wonder of it? Does the moon have minerals that we don’t have on Earth, and could we get them back here in commercial quantities? And what is the big deal about the south pole?

CS: The reason the south pole is so interesting is because it has ice, which means a space station established there can use........

© Brisbane Times