Moonshots and Power Plays: A Forecasting Workshop on Lunar Diplomacy in Tokyo

I recently had the pleasure of traveling to Tokyo with the Bertelsmann Foundation and the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) to co-facilitate a forecasting workshop on lunar diplomacy, part of our ongoing work on the RANGE crowd forecasting project. Our workshop piggybacked on a larger conference sponsored by Spacetide, a non-profit based in Japan whose mission is to promote new space businesses worldwide.

Close to 30 people from the global commercial space sector, government space agencies, and think tanks participated in the workshop. The session focused on how national interests, private investment, and international competition will converge to define the next phase of activity on the Moon.

Our goal was for attendees to leave feeling like their time with us was not only informative, but directly relevant to their own work – helping to inform the policies and decisions they would be making in their respective contexts. Pontificating about the future can be helpful, but we wanted to make sure our time was more structured, and led to a shared framework for how to think about, and track the outcome for, the future of lunar diplomacy.

To start, we invited some thought leaders to share brief framing remarks as “scene setters” for this question:

How will the growing confluence of power politics on the one hand, and economy and commercialization on the other, affect the lunar space exploration agenda?

Then to begin our group forecasting work, we presented 3 plausible scenarios as possible outcomes to this question that we had drafted with SME’s from ESPI ahead of time:

Escalating strategic competition between the United States and China drives increased investment in lunar programs and compels other states to align with one of two competing coalitions, each advancing divergent models for lunar governance and activity.

U.S. retrenchment from lunar initiatives allows China to secure a first-mover advantage, expand influence through partnerships with emerging economies, and establish a Beijing-centered framework that effectively sets the rules for access and operations in cislunar space.

The proliferation of public and private lunar initiatives, driven by evolving U.S. and European priorities, generates a fluid and competitive international landscape characterized by diverse partnerships and expanding commercial activity.

We knew our scenarios weren’t exhaustive, but served as strawmen for our next exercise: “decomposition.” In this phase, we broke up into groups and worked to identify all the signposts we should be paying attention to over time to understand which scenario was most likely to take place. In less than an hour, we collectively identified dozens of these signposts. Some examples included:

• Chinese investment in mining and transportation technologies
• Reduction or change of the Artemis budget
• Changes to U.S. ITAR regulations
• Development of open navigation systems
• Competition for rare earth elements driving demand from alternative sources

Now, we had plausible scenarios and a long list of signposts to monitor, but how ultimately do we connect the two? Through RANGE and crowdsourced forecasting! We prioritized a handful of signposts which seemed particularly important to monitor, and turned those into forecasting questions.

After a brief tutorial on “how to make a good forecast” we each (publicly) gave our probabilistic judgments on 3 questions. As a facilitator, this is always one of my favorite moments in these kinds of workshops. No matter how the conversation has gone up to this point, you suddenly get a clear view of where there is consensus in the room, and where there is real disagreement. In sharing those probabilities and rationales behind them, each participant also gets to hear others’ points of view. It’s not uncommon for someone to revise their forecast based on a new perspective they had not considered.

Fueled by coffee, snacks, discussion, and debate, we left the room agreeing to post forecast questions on RANGE to get that community’s broader perspective. We’ll report back to the group with results over time, so we can continue to track how the scenarios are playing out - an added benefit that helps keep the workshop’s insights alive beyond our time together.