by Colombia joined NASA’s Artemis Accords program, which is growing rapidly, becoming the 19th nation to sign, after recent pacts with Bahrain, Singapore and Romania.
Although Colombia has not yet disclosed its specific contributions to NASA’s Artemis program to the Moon, Marta Lucía Ramírez, the country’s vice president and foreign minister, said Colombia hopes to rapidly develop its space work.
The pact is “a very significant moment in the bilateral relationship as this year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and Colombia,” Ramírez said in a NASA statement on Tuesday (May 10). (The United States recognized Colombia on June 19, 1822, three years after the country effectively achieved independence from Spain, according to the US State Department.)
Signing up with NASA “is an important step for my country as we continue to build our knowledge, national capacity and understanding of the importance of space for future generations of Colombians to come,” said Ramírez.
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The Artemis Accords describe the peaceful and responsible exploration of the moon and beyond. NASA plans to send astronauts back to the moon later in the decade under the Artemis program.
NASA and the US State Department unveiled the Artemis Agreements in 2020, with eight countries signing at the time: Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates United and the United States. Since then, it has also been signed by Bahrain, Brazil, Israel, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Singapore and Ukraine.
“The Artemis Accords establish certain principles to guide civil space actors, including: peaceful purposes, transparency, interoperability, commitment to emergency assistance, registration of space objects, publication of scientific data, resolution of activities, protection of the space heritage and orbital debris mitigation, including spacecraft disposal,” US State Department officials explained in a recent statement.
NASA reiterated that more countries will join the agreements “in the months and years to come, as NASA continues to work with its international partners to establish a safe, peaceful, and prosperous future in space.”
The agency is working to bring astronauts back to the moon’s surface to eventually establish a permanent human presence there. In addition to landings near the lunar south pole, where water ice appears to nestle inside permanently shadowed craters, the agency is creating a Lunar Gateway Station in orbit around the moon.
The first Artemis mission, called Artemis 1, may launch later this year pending treatment of several technical problems during a “wet dress rehearsal” of the new Space Launch System megarocket to send an uncrewed Orion space capsule around the moon. NASA pushed the rocket back to the shelter in late April to assess problems at the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building near the launch pad.
Following Artemis 1, a manned lunar-orbiting mission called Artemis 2 is scheduled to launch no sooner than 2024, with Artemis 3 achieving the first manned landing.
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