Artemis II is go, Nature reports, with humans heading to the Moon for the first time in over half a century. The same week, Bloomberg's Hormuz tracker shows weekly transits through the Strait reaching their highest point since the US-Israeli war on Iran began. Two chokepoints, one cosmic and one geopolitical, both suddenly contested. And in both cases, the underlying argument is identical: who gets to set the terms for shared infrastructure that everyone depends on?

The Commons Problem at Two Scales

Nature contributor Moriba Jah published a pointed op-ed this week arguing that the Moon belongs to all of us, not just countries that can afford to reach it. His argument applies with equal force to the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which roughly 20 percent of global oil transits and which is currently being militarized by actors who did not build it and do not own it. The commons problem is ancient. What's new is the simultaneity: humanity is asserting new territorial ambitions in space at precisely the moment existing shared infrastructure is being held hostage by warfare. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies. No equivalent protection governs straits during wartime, which is why the Hormuz tracker exists as a Bloomberg product at all.

Science Budgets and the Privatization of Access

The Moon story has a financing layer that complicates the 'belongs to all of us' framing. Nature also reports that the Trump administration has proposed massive cuts to US science budgets again, meaning the public infrastructure that made Artemis possible is being defunded even as the mission launches. The gap gets filled by commercial actors: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the emerging private lunar economy. The result is a commons that everyone nominally owns but that only private capital can currently access. Jah's moral argument is correct. The economic structure is moving in exactly the opposite direction.