On 17 July 2026, Mauritius became the 70th country to sign the Artemis Accords, NASA's framework for how nations should behave in space: transparency about missions, interoperable systems, registering objects launched into orbit, and avoiding harmful interference with other countries' space activities and historic sites.
Signatories now span every inhabited continent: 32 in Europe, 16 in Asia, 8 in South America, 7 in Africa, 5 in North America and 2 in Oceania. That geographic spread is the point. The Accords launched in 2020 with eight founding signatories, mostly close US allies, and critics at the time argued it would remain a small club shaped entirely around NASA's own Artemis programme.
It's worth being precise about what the Accords actually are. They're not a binding treaty in the way the 1967 Outer Space Treaty is, and they carry no enforcement mechanism if a signatory breaks the principles it agreed to. They're better understood as a shared statement of norms, closer to a diplomatic handshake than a law. Notably, China and Russia remain outside the framework, running their own parallel lunar cooperation instead.
Still, 70 countries agreeing on anything in space policy is not nothing. As more nations plan their own lunar and orbital missions, having a common rulebook, even a voluntary one, reduces the odds of the kind of orbital debris disputes or landing-site conflicts that could otherwise turn into diplomatic incidents. Whether the Accords hold up once a real disagreement tests them is still unproven. For now, the number keeps climbing.