100 Years from the Moon Landing to a Cislunar City
September 26 @ 16:30 – 18:00
International Moon Day is an opportunity to recognize the central role the Moon has played and continues to play in the history of space exploration. A symbol of cosmic proximity and technological challenge, the Moon has represented a point of reference for humanity for millennia. Today, between the memory of historic landings and ambitious future plans, this anniversary renews the scientific community’s commitment to a new era of lunar exploration. As in 1969, every extraordinary journey begins with a simple step.
Ten years ago in July, the Center for Near Space of the Italian Institute for the Future was founded with the aim of spreading Space Culture, supporting the development of Civil Astronautics, and fostering the growth of the Private User Community. The launch of conceptual studies of orbital architecture with its OrbiTecture team soon evolved into the pioneering studies of the Cislunar City, in the belief that the scientific enterprise of space exploration is rapidly evolving toward a permanent human presence in space.
On this basis and with these elements, the session “100 YEARS FROM THE MOON LANDING TO A CISLUNAR CITY” aims, on the one hand, to celebrate man’s first step on the moon as humanity’s first step off Earth, and on the other, to project forward a century later, when the stable existence of a community of approximately 1,000 people in a dozen “neighborhoods” located between low Earth orbit and the Moon, both orbit and surface, will be possible and probable.
The prospect of the emergence of the Cislunar City and its long-term configuration as a coordinated community, not subordinated to terrestrial power centers, requires a radical rethinking of the legal paradigm applicable to it. The purely geocentric perspective that informs the spirit of current regulations is proving increasingly inadequate to meet the needs of an autonomous, stable, and structured community in space. It is therefore appropriate, if not necessary, to establish a normative paradigm that goes beyond the limits of traditional international law to develop a space law for space, conceived in light of the environmental, social, and operational specificities of the cislunar context.
