Turkiye's case for joining rests on a recent run of human spaceflight and lunar activity. In 2024 Turkish astronaut Alper Gezeravci flew to the International Space Station on Axiom Mission 3, the country's first human spaceflight, and researcher Tuva Atasever flew a suborbital mission with Virgin Galactic in the same year. The Turkish Space Agency is now preparing AYAP-1, described as a hybrid-propelled spacecraft intended to reach the Moon in early 2027, which would make Turkiye one of a small group of states with an independent lunar mission. Signing the Accords links these national programmes to a common set of behavioural norms - how a signatory registers its objects, publishes its plans, assists astronauts in distress and avoids interfering with another state's operations. Hosting the International Astronautical Congress at Antalya in October 2026 places Turkiye at the centre of global space diplomacy in the same year.

The Artemis Accords are not a treaty and create no new binding law. They are a set of political commitments that signatories say restate and apply the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 - the foundational instrument that bars national appropriation of celestial bodies, requires that space be used for peaceful purposes and for the benefit of all countries, and makes states internationally responsible for the activities of their nationals. The Accords go further than the treaty in operational detail, particularly on the extraction and use of space resources and on declaring safety zones around activity sites, which is precisely why Russia and China have declined to sign and have argued that norm-setting on resources belongs in the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space rather than in a US-led arrangement. For India, which signed in 2023 while also cooperating with Russia on other space programmes, the Accords are one strand of a deliberately diversified space diplomacy rather than a bloc choice.