Hardware or Handshake? Africa’s Dual Reality in the ILRS

The preceding analysis examined Africa’s engagement with the Artemis Accords, revealing a critical pattern of symbolic participation without corresponding operational capacity and strategic positioning that risks legitimising frameworks from which African nations remain functionally excluded. It also highlighted contentious provisions on safety zones and resource extraction that mirror terrestrial patterns of inequitable benefit distribution.

 Yet the Artemis framework represents only one pathway into lunar governance. Five African nations- South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Senegal- have aligned with China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), an alternative lunar architecture that operates through bilateral agreements and emphasises “joint construction, shared benefits.”

Does the ILRS framework offer African nations concrete opportunities that Artemis lacks, or does it replicate the same pattern of symbolic participation?

This article assesses African engagement with the ILRS, examining its organisational structure, distinguishing nations with confirmed payload contributions from those with purely aspirational agreements, and evaluating the strategic implications of its informal governance model.

China’s Lunar Vision: Understanding the ILRS Framework

Overview and Mission

The International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a joint initiative announced in 2021 by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and Roscosmos, marks a strategic shift from symbolic lunar exploration to a long-term, permanent presence. Building on a sequence of missions, including Chang’e-6, which returned the first samples from the Moon’s far side in 2024, and the upcoming Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 missions that will scout for water ice and test in-situ resource utilisation, CNSA and its partners plan the ILRS as a multi-partner scientific hub. They envision it operating at the Moon’s South Pole by the mid-2030s.

It is designed to support sustained operations, including planned crewed landings by 2030, and will serve as a platform for multidisciplinary research, lunar observation, resource development, autonomous operations, and the eventual hosting of astronauts.

Organisational Structure

The International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) Project is coordinated by the International Lunar Research Station Cooperation Organisation (ILRSCO), established in 2023 to manage joint scientific, engineering, and mission activities. ILRSCO oversees five key areas: design simulation, operation control, data processing, sample storage and research, and international training.
Cooperation is organised across five tiers: Category A (full mission partnership), B (system integration), C (subsystem development), D (instrument contribution), and E (ground-based data sharing). Founding or early participants gain preferential rights and broader access to research outcomes, while all partners contribute in proportion to their capacity.

Future missions like Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 will offer broader opportunities for multi-level collaboration, while earlier ones such as Chang’e-4 and Chang’e-6 focused mainly on data sharing. Overall, the ILRS framework promotes joint construction and shared benefits, encouraging cooperative development and equitable results.

The ILRS outlines a concrete partnership model with clearly defined, tiered participation options requiring specific technical contributions at each level. Through technical working groups and mission-specific opportunities, this framework is structured around the principle of “joint construction, shared benefits”, emphasising collaborative development and equitable distribution of outcomes among participating nations.
However, the ILRS lacks a publicly available governance framework equivalent to the Artemis Accords, and specific principles governing resource extraction, dispute resolution, liability, and long-term operational procedures remain undisclosed.

African Participation in the ILRS: Distinguishing Rhetoric from Reality

China’s “5-5-5” Outreach and African Signatories

To expand its influence, China has launched an ambitious “5-5-5” campaign, aiming to recruit 50 nations, 500 institutions, and 5,000 researchers to engage in lunar science by the early 2030s. This outreach has been reflected in Africa through bilateral agreements with several nations. 

South Africa and Egypt signed Memoranda of Understanding with the China National Space Administration (CNSA) in 2023, followed in 2024 by Ethiopia and Kenya, which formalised cooperation through their respective space institutions, and Senegal, which also signed an MoU with CNSA that same year. However, a critical question must be posed: what is the nature of engagement demonstrated by these agreements, and what concrete benefits have accrued to these African nations?

Concrete Contributions: South Africa and Egypt

Under the 2023 MoU, China and South Africa committed to extensive cooperation across demonstration, mission implementation, operations, applications, education, and training within the ILRS framework, thereby explicitly strengthening BRICS collaboration. One tangible outcome of this agreement is the Africa2Moon project, which will contribute a low-frequency lunar radio astronomy payload to the Chang’e-8 mission, establishing Africa’s first radio antennas on the Moon and supporting early ILRS scientific objectives. 

Egypt’s participation similarly shows substantive engagement with China’s long-term lunar programme and the planned lunar base. Beyond its initial ILRS cooperation agreement, Egypt deepened its lunar engagement in 2024 when the Egyptian Space Agency, working with Bahrain’s National Space Science Agency, was selected by CNSA to provide a multi-spectral camera payload for the Chang’e-7 mission. This instrument will study lunar surface materials at the South Pole, including potential frozen water deposits, reinforcing Egypt’s active role in ILRS-related scientific research.

Aspirational Agreements: Ethiopia, Kenya, and Senegal

By contrast, engagement from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Senegal has thus far remained at the level of stated intent. Ethiopia’s discussions with the ILRS have centred on joining China’s future unmanned lunar missions and contributing to deep-space and lunar research activities. Yet, no further developments beyond initial consultations have been disclosed. 

Kenya‘s engagement has likewise focused on Kenya Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) ‘s stated intention to participate in China’s long-term lunar initiative, with early discussions highlighting potential avenues for involvement in future lunar research. However, concrete details on prospective contributions to upcoming ILRS missions have not been made public. 

Several factors may account for this differential outcome. BRICS membership appears significant: both South Africa and Egypt, the two nations with confirmed payload contributions, are BRICS members, whilst Senegal, Ethiopia, and Kenya are not. However, this cannot be the sole determinant, as China has cooperated extensively with non-BRICS African states on other space projects. 

Another plausible explanation lies in differing levels of national space capability: Ethiopia, Kenya, and Senegal possess nascent space programmes still developing foundational capacity and expertise, which may preclude immediate contributions to technically demanding lunar missions. Nevertheless, the cases of Egypt and South Africa demonstrate that engagement with the ILRS can yield near-term, concrete results for African nations possessing the requisite technical capability, competitive proposals, and strategic alignment with Chinese lunar objectives.

Flexibility or Uncertainty? The ILRS’s Informal Framework

Unlike the Artemis Accords’ codified principles, the ILRS operates through bilateral Memoranda of Understanding and project-specific technical agreements. This absence of a binding multilateral framework presents both opportunities and uncertainties for African participants. 

On one hand, this flexibility offers distinct advantages: partnerships avoid the ideological and political commitments embedded in Western-led frameworks, allowing African nations to focus on practical scientific cooperation without broader geopolitical entanglements. China’s track record in satellite technology transfer across Africa suggests substantial capacity-building potential, framed within a South-South cooperation narrative that resonates with many African governments seeking alternatives to traditional partnerships.

However, this informality carries significant risks. Without established resource-sharing frameworks or sustainability principles, African nations face uncertainty regarding long-term commitments and equitable benefit distribution. The lack of transparency in agreements, evident in the limited public disclosure of terms beyond Ethiopia, Kenya, and Senegal’s initial MOUs, raises questions about accountability and oversight. 

Moreover, the project-specific nature of engagement, while potentially offering immediate opportunities for payload contributions and data sharing, provides little clarity on future governance arrangements or protection against shifting geopolitical pressures, including the risk of sanctions or external interference. For African partners, the ILRS framework prioritises present collaboration over future governance certainty, demanding careful consideration of whether near-term access justifies longer-term strategic ambiguity.

Africa’s Lunar Horizon

Reality Check: The Current African Space Sector

Yet most African countries are still struggling to develop or acquire these fundamental capabilities, remaining heavily reliant on foreign actors for satellite infrastructure and technical expertise. Amid these challenges, discussions of deep-space exploration or lunar resource utilisation appear premature at best.

The risks of premature engagement with lunar initiatives are considerable. Committing diplomatic capital and scarce financial resources to lunar cooperation diverts attention from urgent terrestrial priorities, whilst lunar resources remain decades away from economic viability. 

For African nations at this developmental stage, calculating a meaningful return on investment in lunar programmes is fraught with uncertainty, especially given that revenue generation from lunar resources remains speculative even at the global level.

Moreover, the geopolitical landscape allows African states to sign both the Artemis and the ILRS agreements. Senegal serves as an illustrative example of a country where neither framework explicitly prohibits dual participation. However, this flexibility introduces its own complications: geopolitical pressure from competing blocs, potential restrictions on technology transfers affecting data and hardware sharing, and regional misalignment as different African countries sign divergent agreements. Such fragmentation risks creating intra-African tensions.

The prospect of future resource extraction adds another layer of complexity. Should two African countries ever develop extraction capabilities in the future but operate under different frameworks, one Artemis, one ILRS, overlapping claims to the same lunar sites could generate inter-African conflict rather than cooperation. Both the Artemis Accords’ concept of “safety zones” and the ILRS’s own site selection processes for resource extraction create potential flashpoints that African nations, focused on continental unity, would be wise to anticipate. 

Furthermore, most African nations are still in the process of formalising domestic space legislation and regulatory frameworks. Discussions of governing or regulating lunar resources, or debating principles for extraterrestrial resource utilisation, remain distant considerations when foundational space governance structures are not yet in place. 

This gap is evident even within UNCOPUOS‘s Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities, where only Morocco and Senegal represent the entire continent, a striking absence that highlights Africa’s limited engagement with the evolving international debate on space resources.

Recommendations: Navigating Africa’s Lunar Future

African countries stand to gain from engaging early with emerging lunar governance frameworks, even if initial participation appears largely symbolic. Early entry provides a crucial advantage: it gives states a seat at the table. At the same time, norms governing lunar resources and activities are still being negotiated, and it helps them avoid exclusion from future decision-making structures once those frameworks are set in stone. Given that signing the Artemis Accords or engaging with the ILRS involves relatively low financial cost at this stage, such participation represents a practical positioning strategy for the anticipated lunar economy of the 2040s-2050s. 

Limited yet strategic involvement in both frameworks, where possible, is preferable to a scenario in which African absence today results in restricted access to lunar resources and governance mechanisms tomorrow, particularly as institutional structures established now are likely to remain in place for decades.

However, African participation must be based on transparency and strategic clarity. A significant information gap currently exists: it remains unclear what concrete commitments African signatories have made, what specific benefits they have negotiated, or what obligations come with their agreements. Policymakers must actively ensure that engagement delivers genuine capacity-building rather than symbolic alignment, and prevent participation from creating dependency on a single geopolitical bloc.

This requires careful navigation between competing priorities: gaining access to technology, data, and scientific collaboration; maintaining autonomy in national space programmes; pushing for interoperable technical standards across Artemis and ILRS ecosystems; and keeping diversified partnerships to avoid strategic lock-in. Drawing lessons from past experiences in global resource regimes, where early exclusion often led to reduced influence over governance frameworks, can help shape more effective African engagement strategies.

The path forward requires active monitoring: checking whether promised benefits from Artemis or ILRS partnerships actually materialise; systematically building African technical capacity to enable meaningful rather than token participation; and ensuring that lunar engagement supports, rather than diverts resources from pressing priorities in satellite services, connectivity, and Earth observation infrastructure. African nations must approach lunar cooperation with clear-eyed pragmatism, using symbolic participation for tangible gains whilst guarding against the risks of premature commitment or unequal partnerships.