WASHINGTON — Ecuador joined the growing roster of nations backing the Artemis Accords for protected and sustainable space exploration June 21.
In a ceremony at Ecuador’s embassy in Washington, Gustavo Manrique Miranda, Ecuador’s foreign affairs minister, sign the accords within the presence of officials with the U.S. State Department and NASA. Ecuador is the 26th country to sign the Accords and the fourth in Latin America, after Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.
“Signing the Artemis Accords sends a strong message to the international community that the Ecuadorian government is committed to pursue cutting-edge efforts in technology and is open to innovation, investment, workforce development to advertise sustainable growth, and international collaboration to assist solve humanity’s biggest challenges,” said Ivonne Baki, Ecuador’s ambassador to the US, in a press release.
Ecuador doesn’t have a significant presence in space, even though it does have an area agency established in 2007. One Ecuadorian company, Leviathan Space Industries, has been working to determine a spaceport within the country.
The USA and others who’ve previously signed the Accords have made it a priority to draw more countries not traditionally seen as space players. In a recent interview, Jennifer Littlejohn, acting assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, said one working group of member countries, led by Brazil and Poland, was examining how you can attract more emerging space nations and overcome any obstacles to them signing.
“The actual strength of the Accords is the range of the signatory group,” she said. “Although not every country could have the identical long-term exploration goals, I feel we’re working with all signatory countries to search out ways to participate meaningfully within the Accords conversation.”
Karen Feldstein, the NASA associate administrator for international and interagency relations who represented the agency on the signing ceremony, offered an analogous view. “Ecuador today adds its voice to a various and growing set of countries committed to the notion that humanity’s rapid expansion into space, toward the moon and destinations beyond, is peaceful, protected and in full accordance with international law,” she said.
While the Artemis Accords are closely tied to the NASA-led Artemis lunar exploration campaign, signing the accords doesn’t necessarily commit a rustic to participating in the trouble. Advocates of the accords argue that they outline principles and best practices based on the Outer Space Treaty, a cornerstone of international space law.
“The values that the US desires to see develop on the moon and hopefully throughout all of outer space are the values which might be reflected within the Artemis Accords,” said Emily Pierce, an attorney-adviser within the State Department, during a session of the Summit for Space Sustainability June 14 in Latest York.
With several countries planning lunar missions, she said, “there was an urgent practical need to start out to get countries on the identical page regarding operational implementation of several key obligations of the Outer Space Treaty.”
There are still issues that the Artemis Accords haven’t resolved, reminiscent of space resource utilization. That was deliberate, said Mike Gold, chief growth officer at Redwire and a former NASA official who spearheaded development of the Accords in 2020, with a view to create a “big tent” of nations that may later resolve such sticking points. “The Accords are the start of a conversation,” he said on the conference panel, “not an ending.”