Abstract#

A lunar settlement will need rules that hold for years and still adapt, leadership that can shift as situations change, and knowledge that passes cleanly from one generation of settlers to the next. Kathak, one of India's major classical dance forms, has its own answers to each:#

Rules that hold and adapt: dancers and musicians keep a shared rhythm cycle while improvising within it.#

Leadership that shifts: in many performances, the lead passes between dancer and drummer in real time.#

Knowledge that passes on: the form has been handed from teacher to student for centuries.#

This two-day workshop in Chennai invites Kathak dancers to draw out the principles their art form holds and imagine how a new society on the Moon might organize and govern itself around them. It is the third lab in a series that MoonDAO helped launch in Bolivia, and it uses the same framework. Each lab invites people with little access to Moon conversations to bring what their own field or tradition already knows.#

The Overview Effect describes what seeing Earth from space does to the people who go. This series asks a companion question: what should people carry with them from Earth when they go?#

Problem#

The Moon has no settled governance yet, and the frameworks that will shape it are being contested now. The Artemis Accords set out non-binding principles for lunar activity, China and Russia object to their approach to safety zones and resource extraction, and a UN working group is drafting principles on space resources due in 2027. These debates focus on states, resources and access. They say far less about how a society on the Moon will make decisions, share authority and pass on its rules.#

The people currently shaping these rules come mostly from space agencies, industry, law and diplomacy. This leaves out communities whose traditions hold centuries of experience in coordinating and passing on knowledge.#

Solution#

MoonDAO funding will support a two-day, student-led design workshop on October 24 and 25, 2026, at Devaniya studio in Chennai, facilitated by Civitatem Resolutions. Twenty or more senior and junior Kathak students from Devaniya will draw on their art form to imagine how a lunar settlement might organize itself.#

For example, a dancer who performs within a rhythm cycle might ask: What does keeping shared time while improvising teach a society about rules that must hold steady and still adapt? A student who learned the form from a teacher, who learned it from their own teacher, might ask: How does knowledge pass from one generation of settlers to the next without anyone owning it?#

Why Kathak? Kathak takes its name from the kathakars, storytellers of ancient India. It belongs to a performance tradition whose foundational treatise, the Natyashastra, is roughly 2,000 years old. No single institution owns Kathak. It has survived through a shared grammar passed from teacher to student, and that grammar lets dancers and musicians trained in different places perform together. A lunar settlement will need each of these things: shared rules, shifting leadership, and knowledge that outlasts any single generation. Jigyasa Giri, an acclaimed Kathak dancer, teacher and choreographer, will guide the students, and Kirthi Jayakumar of Civitatem Resolutions will facilitate the workshop along with LunARC.#

An example: from Kathak to a lunar settlement mechanism

The example below is our own illustration of how the method could work. The mechanisms that come out of the workshop will be the students' own, and may look quite different.

• The Kathak principle. A Kathak student does not perform alone on day one. They learn alongside a teacher for years, and when the teacher judges them ready, they make their first solo stage appearance, the manch pravesh. Authority passes in recognized stages, based on demonstrated mastery, and the teacher remains a guide afterwards without controlling the student's performance.
• The settlement challenge. Under the current Outer Space Treaty, settlers remain under the authority of the states that launched them. No current framework sets out how a long-term lunar community could take over decisions about its own life.
• The mechanism Kathak could inspire:

1. At first, Earth-based sponsors hold authority over the settlement, as they would today.
2. As residents show they can manage a defined area, such as sharing water or resolving disputes, authority over that area passes to the resident community in a public, recognized step: the settlement's own manch pravesh.
3. Earth sponsors remain advisers in areas already handed over, without control over them.

How the workshop flows:#

Before the workshop, participants receive an introduction to what the Bolivia and Cairo labs produced, and each submits a short written note on what concerns them about how humanity is engaging with the Moon.#

On Day 1, participants work in small groups to identify what actually needs governing when humans live on the Moon, such as shared resources, decision-making, conflict and leadership. The output is a shared list of governance challenges.#

On Day 2, they turn to their art form. They examine how Kathak handles shared rules, changes of lead and the passing of knowledge across generations, then apply those principles to the Day 1 challenges. In two rounds, each group designs a concrete mechanism for a specific challenge and presents it. The output is a set of mechanism sheets.#

After the workshop, lawyers engaged through Civitatem Resolutions will examine the strongest mechanisms against existing space law, such as the Outer Space Treaty, the 1979 Moon Agreement and the Artemis Accords. For each one, they will ask whether it aligns with these frameworks, extends them or challenges them, and what new thinking it offers. As in Bolivia, participants' own language and reasoning will stay visible throughout.#

How the labs connect. Every lab asks the same core questions, who decides and who benefits, and starts from what participants' own field or experience already knows. Together, the labs invite young people from very different contexts to shape a shared vision for our future on the Moon.#

With three labs complete, we can begin to ask which governance principles recur across age, culture and tradition, and which belong to one context. In 2027 we aim to keep bringing in communities that have no path into Moon conversations, everyday people working far from the space sector. We are in active conversations with students in Cameroon, people with disabilities in China, and non-verbal autistic adults in the US.#

Deliverables for this project:#

Photo and video documentation of the workshop#

A final report including the governance translation of selected mechanisms#

• A summary of the governance mechanisms, posted for MoonDAO community discussion and presented at a Town Hall

Novelty & Prior Art#

Relevant existing work:#

Outer Space Treaty (1967): non-appropriation.#

Moon Agreement (1979): the Moon as the common heritage of mankind. Few states have ratified it.#

Artemis Accords (2020; 76 signatories as of September 2026): non-binding principles, including safety zones.#

UN COPUOS Working Group on Legal Aspects of Space Resource Activities: draft principles due in 2027.#

What's new: these frameworks are drafted by states and experts. Our review did not identify a lunar-governance method that treats long-lived cultural traditions as sources for governance design, or that applies one framework across very different communities and compares the results.

Why existing work isn't enough: these frameworks record what states have agreed or are negotiating about activity on the Moon. They offer no way to hear from communities outside the space sector, so pointing MoonDAO members to them cannot tell us what those communities would contribute. The Bolivia and Cairo labs showed that this method produces original governance material. Chennai tests it with a long-lived art tradition. The workshop generates the original material, and the legal translation is synthesis that connects it to existing law.

Lunar Bridge#

A sustained human presence on the Moon depends on governance that the people living there, and the wider public, see as legitimate. MoonDAO's roadmap commits to a settlement "governed by the people who made it possible," and Phase 5 calls for "a global open process to select the first crew for the lunar settlement." Settlement Design so far covers habitation, life support, power and communication. This quarter's outputs add to the governance side of that work: openly licensed mechanisms, tested against existing space law and drawn from a tradition that has sustained itself for centuries without a central owner, offered as inputs to MoonDAO's settlement design and settler selection. The lab series also brings communities and traditional knowledge usually left out of these questions into them, in line with MoonDAO's aim to decentralize access to space.

Community Standing#

LunARC led the MoonDAO-supported Q2 2026 Governance Design Workshop at Universidad NUR, Bolivia. We delivered the lab, produced the Bolivia Moon Agreement, which we shared with MoonDAO, and submitted the final report, meeting all the grant requirements. When a drop in the price of ETH reduced the grant's value, LunARC covered the shortfall from its own reserves so the workshop ran as planned without compromising quality.#

Beyond the funded project, LunARC co-founder and Project Lead Dr. Lakshmi Karan attends Town Halls, votes on proposals, and takes part in Discord.#

Benefits#

1. Cultural infrastructure for settlement. It complements MoonDAO's technical projects with the human coordination practices a settlement will rely on.#

2. Visibility for MoonDAO. We will present findings from the series, including first results from Chennai, at Dubai Future Week (November 18 to 21, 2026), crediting MoonDAO as a funder in front of an international audience of futures practitioners.#

3. Network growth. We will introduce MoonDAO to young people in India's arts community who have not encountered it before.#

4. Knowledge commons. All outputs will be open-sourced.#

Risks and Mitigation#

1. Full governance translation takes longer than the quarter. Given the December holiday season, the final report will include the translation of selected mechanisms, and the remaining translation may continue into early January.#

2. Funding arrives after the workshop. The vote may close after the workshop dates. LunARC will pay Civitatem Resolutions' fixed facilitation fee from its own reserves and be reimbursed from the MoonDAO grant, as with the Bolivia lab. Venue and participant meals are already secured. The governance translation and final report both take place after the workshop, so no deliverable depends on funds arriving before October 24.#

Objective and Key Results#

Objective: deliver the Chennai workshop and publish its governance mechanisms, with legal translation of selected mechanisms, by the end of Q4 2026.#

• KR1: at least 20 participants complete both days on October 24 and 25.
• KR2: at least 2 governance mechanisms receive written legal analysis against existing space law, published under CC BY 4.0 within 60 days of the workshop.
• KR3: a final open report documenting the method, participant material, mechanisms, legal analysis and lessons for the next lab, submitted by December 31.
• KR4: Within six weeks of approval, all workshop attendees are invited to join MoonDAO's Discord and the Town Hall presentation of their mechanisms. They will also be introduced to MoonDAO citizenship. We will report how many join Discord and how many become citizens.

LunARC's work is primarily in low resource communities. In Bolivia, students were interested in MoonDAO, but the annual citizenship fee was beyond their means. With the increase in the fee this might be similar with the students in India. Because the workshop takes place before the funding decision, we will promote citizenship in the follow-up period after approval and report the results.

Non-goals this quarter: no habitat engineering or hardware; no new treaty or legal instrument; no claim to a complete governance system for a lunar settlement; no company formation.

Team (Table A)#

Project Lead: Dr. Lakshmi Karan @Lakshmi3347. Senate attendance, weekly updates, budget and final report.#

Initial Team:#

Kirthi Jayakumar, Civitatem Resolutions: facilitator.#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirthi_Jayakumar

https://www.wef.org.in/kirthi-jayakumar/

https://www.civitatemresolutions.com/

Jigyasa Giri, Devaniya: acclaimed Kathak dancer, teacher and choreographer (over 30 years of experience, performance and teaching).#

https://www.facebook.com/devaniya/#

https://youtu.be/udja-r0lxAs?si=8L0wYjbE4URQon7b&t=50

https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/16/19329/Kathaks-Diverse-Cultural-Influences–

Same-type prior work:#

Workshop design and facilitation (KR1): Bolivia three-day lab (funded by MoonDAO)#

Governance translation (KR2): The Bolivia Moon Agreement#

Final open report (KR3): Bolivia final report to MoonDAO#

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tp836vDPRwGOFZnzOpN4DBeYLMmD_Qv0EfTNcyqVqrg/edit?usp=share_link#

Multisig signers: @Lakshmi3347, @tophee5056, ryand2d.eth, pmoncada.eth, @BenLifeShip: lifeship.eth#

Intellectual Property#

Open. CC BY 4.0, with credit to participants, LunARC, Devaniya and Civitatem Resolutions.#

Timeline (Table B)#

The workshop is scheduled for October 24 and 25, 2026.#

Deadline: December 31, 2026.#

Budget (Table C)#

LunARC has secured funds for venue, participant meals and lab materials costs.#

Transactions (Table D)#

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