GANGALE: There are several reasons to prefer a new treaty over amending an old one.
First of all, although I have not made a study of so-called failed treaties and whether subsequent amendments or protocols led to greater acceptance or "rescue" of them, I rather suspect that such instances are the exceptions rather than the rule, and that the norm is for a new treaty to replace a previous one outright. Examples would be the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation, and the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea. A notable exception is the 1994 Agreement on Part XI of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, which gutted the convention's provisions for an International Seabed Authority and an associated Enterprise. With the exception of the US, all major industrial states, i.e., states with the potential to exploit the seabed, have since ratified the Convention.
Another reason is that I find the text of the Moon Agreement to be organized strangely. In my view, certain paragraphs appearing in different articles would be organized more logically into an article of their own. Other articles need to be rewritten, a couple deserve to be discarded in their entirely, and an article containing a definition of terms ought to be added. Ultimately, one arrives at the point at which the revisions are so extensive that one is left with a substantially new document. In contrast, the 1994 Part XI Agreement was focused on a specific part of the Law of the Sea Convention, which is a very long and detailed document that deals with many other issues.
Thirdly, no matter how the Moon Agreement may be amended, its very name is a 34-year-old object of odium among a very large and very well organized segment of the lay community of space enthusiasts. As a new, small, and obscure community in the late 1970s, it organized to defeat US ratification of the Moon Agreement, and that defeat led other spacefaring states to turn away from it. The defeat of the Moon Agreement has since become central to this community's creation myth. Thus an effort to ratify an amended Moon Agreement could be framed as a frontal assault on this belief system, which even if it were to succeed, would be unnecessarily bloody. This is not a hill for anyone on either side to die on. In this case, gaining acceptance of a new treaty may well be politically more feasible than gaining acceptance of an amended treaty.
Finally, there is the opportunity to choose a new name based on an updated perspective on the exploration and development of outer space. The Moon was the focus of the US and Soviet space programs in the 1960s and the early 1970s, and the wording of the Moon Agreement reflects the preoccupation of that earlier time. However, by the time the Moon Agreement was opened for signature in 1979, its focus on the Moon was already an anachronism. It should be noted that the term "Moon Agreement" is a misleading contraction of the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. Article 1, paragraph 1 states:
"The provisions of this Agreement relating to the Moon shall also apply to other celestial bodies within the solar system, other than the Earth, except insofar as specific legal norms enter into force with respect to any of these celestial bodies."
In reality, the agreement pertains to all "celestial bodies within the solar system," not just the Moon. Perhaps calling the agreement the "Solar System Agreement" would have sounded grandiose in the 1970s, when only the Moon, Venus, and Mars had been visited by spacecraft, but 40 years later all of the planets in the Solar System have been explored, as well as several asteroids and comets. Furthermore, the Moon is far from being the focus of plans for human missions to deep space and for profitable exploitation of celestial bodies. In this context, the Moon represents the past, and it is only part of the future. The name "Solar System Treaty" not only reflects a broader, 21st century perspective, it reflects the reality of the treaty's scope.
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