Under Artemis, this is all technically temporary. But try to imagine a rival country, especially one like China, which already has a rocky relationship with the United States, telling them to leave. Again, that American safety zone isn’t a claim to sovereign territory; it’s not a claim that some lunar region is literally America. But it sure gets close. Throw in the limited quantity of good places on the Moon, add the lack of any limits on the total number of bases nations can place, add that the nation pushing the new interpretation is the one with the most space capability, and add that the
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