The Nuts and Bolts of an International Moonshot
What a recent NASA inspector general report on the global side of the Artemis Program tells us about the nitty-gritty of international industrial policy
As America looks to take an abundance agenda global and build an international industrial policy on the foundations of the national industry strategy pulled together by the Biden administration over the past two years, it’s important to make sure that America knows what it’s doing and that our policies can actually get the job done.
Right now, the Biden administration remains focused on a more defensive approach to industrial policy overseas. The apparently successful effort to bring Japan and the Netherlands — both major semiconductor manufacturers — on board with American restrictions on the export of advanced microchip manufacturing equipment to China testifies to this priority. It’s also had to deal with the unanticipated diplomatic fallout with allies in Europe and east Asia created by the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies for electric vehicle and battery manufacturing.
America’s international industrial policy can’t be wholly negative, however, predicated on denying China access to cutting-edge technology, and it can’t rely on domestic investments alone. The United States needs to offer a constructive international industrial policy agenda that offers America’s allies abroad opportunities for cooperation and collaboration, all founded on a forward-looking vision that encourages close partnerships between nations. To make this approach successful, though, the United States needs to get the nuts and bolts of international cooperation right.
That’s what makes a report on NASA’s international cooperation from the agency’s Office of the Inspector General interesting reading. The report shows that even an agency with decades of experience forging and running close international collaborations like the International Space Station can still face problems bringing overseas partners on board for ambitious projects like the Artemis Program to return astronauts to the Moon. Indeed, the challenges the NASA OIG’s report identifies and the recommendations it makes apply not just to Artemis or even NASA specifically but to any large scientific and technological endeavor the U.S. government might embark upon in concert with other nations.
Artemis provides a good test case for international industrial policy, one that can show the way forward for a constructive American international industrial policy — but only if we get it right. There’s no guarantee of that, despite NASA’s long history of collaboration with other nations in space. The technical, political, and legal issues inherent in a program the scale and scope of Artemis will require NASA and the rest of the U.S. government to think more expansively about international cooperation than they have in the past. Experience on the International Space Station provides only partial guidance at best, and the lack of a clear framework for Artemis has already started to inhibit international cooperation.
We can glean three main lessons on international cooperation from the NASA OIG’s report:
Focus on the whole, not the parts.
Right now, Artemis has enough of a general purpose and sufficiently specific goals — return astronauts to the Moon in 2025, landing somewhere near the lunar south pole, and build the Gateway space station in lunar orbit — to pique extensive international interest in the program. Beyond that, however, the program lacks adequate definition to cultivate broader international participation and cooperation. NASA has struck fifty-four separate Artemis-related bilateral agreements with other nations and space agencies, a series of deals that fragment the overall effort and makes international collaboration much less effective than it potentially could be.
An important exception the report identifies is the Gateway, which now has commitments for material contributions from the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency on everything from habitation and refueling modules to robotic arms and resupply missions. But this cooperation occurs under the legal and diplomatic framework used to build and run the International Space Station, and as NASA acknowledges this framework “cannot be used for Artemis activities beyond the Gateway.” Nor are the Artemis Accords of much help here; it’s a self-described “shared vision of principles” for space exploration, not a blueprint for active cooperation between space agencies.
NASA, as the report notes, has pursued international collaboration on Artemis piecemeal. As a result, the agency lacks “an overall cooperative framework that addresses the legal structure, program development, or partner roles and responsibilities.” There’s no wider diplomatic or legal understanding with these partners beyond the Gateway program, either, due in no small part to the fragmented, bilateral nature of existing Artemis international agreements. When it comes to international cooperation on Artemis, then, NASA needs an integrated, big picture framework that focuses on the program and its goals as a whole rather than just its constituent parts and components.
Have a concrete plan of action.
A concrete plan of action allows America’s international partners to clearly define and plan out their roles in any program. It fosters better and more effective cooperation with partners by letting partner space agencies and governments know what’s expected and needed from them moving forward. In the absence of this kind of plan — what’s known as a program “architecture” — NASA’s international partners do not have “a clear sense of NASA’s needs and the associated requirements” and lack “sufficient information to work with their governments to identify potential contributions to the effort.”
Without a concrete plan of action, in other words, it’s hard for NASA’s potential international collaborators to see where they fit into the overall scheme of things. This blueprint, the report helpfully informs us, “can then be used for planning and budgeting purposes and as a shared vision to ensure alignment across programs, mission directorates, and partner space agencies.” To put it another way, having a concrete plan helps keep NASA and its international partners on the same page and pointed in the same direction — and helps them communicate with one another more clearly.
As things stand, however, NASA lacks such a plan beyond Artemis IV and the Gateway program. Given the time required to build rockets, spacecraft, and “lunar infrastructure” for subsequent missions, the report urges NASA to come up with an overall blueprint for Artemis “sooner rather than later.” The absence of a wider Artemis blueprint makes it harder to bring international partners on board for the long haul and to get the most out of those who do sign up for the program.
Get out of our own way.
On a more prosaic level, the NASA OIG report details several ways in which regulations and red tape prevent international cooperation from reaching its potential — or even happening in the first place. Take export controls, which “routinely limit NASA’s Artemis collaborations with international partners and inhibit future collaborations.” These export controls also keep NASA from taking full advantage of the agency’s foreign astronaut corps; these astronauts only receive information relevant to their assignments at hand, meaning they cannot work on wider programs like Artemis or even the Gateway. Indeed, Japan declined to send an astronaut for Gateway training because the trainee would not have sufficient access to NASA’s space flight systems.
There are ways around these onerous regulations and controls, as the report itself helpfully explains. NASA could actually formulate a policy that would allow foreign astronauts to participate more widely in the agency’s programs, for instance, and it can request special export control classifications from the State and Commerce departments for Artemis as a whole — similar to those that already exist for the International Space Station and the Orion crew vehicle, and that NASA has requested for the Gateway. The agency could also create dedicated export control cells within Artemis and other international collaborations that would help streamline the overall process, a method the report observes was used to great effect on the James Webb Space Telescope.
Other issues abound on this front, such as the inability of the State Department to process NASA’s international agreements and export control requests in a timely fashion thanks to a lack of capacity. But the overall point remains: international cooperation on technically complex and demanding projects like Artemis requires the United States to get own own act together and stay out of our own way.
If the United States is to have a constructive international industrial policy moving forward and take an abundance agenda global, it will need to open avenues to greater and more intimate collaboration with long-standing allies and partners — even in otherwise sensitive areas like spaceflight, semiconductor manufacturing, and advanced nuclear power. America will need to be able to actually execute this policy, not confine itself to business as usual as it’s been defined since the end of the Cold War.
That’s what makes Artemis so important — it’s a good place to start working through these complicated issues and questions, an arena where collaborative international relationships among close American allies already exist. Future “Big Science” projects and industrial policy collaborations will confront many of the same problems Artemis faces today, whether it’s the need to look at the whole rather than the parts, have a concrete plan of action, or make sure we’re not getting in our own way. If Artemis can solve these problems, or at least ameliorate them sufficiently well, it can serve as a model for other international industrial and scientific partnerships the United States embarks upon in the years and decades to come.
It’s no longer enough for America to talk about international industrial policy or a foreign policy for the middle class – it’s time to act and do so in a friendly and constructive manner. On this front as on others, Artemis can help guide us on our way.