Marvellous time for a moonshot as space challenge gets easier

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Picture: NASA

When, in 1969, Neil Armstrong planted the first footprint on the surface of the Moon it seemed to some as if anything was now possible. Anything, that was, except what actually happened next.

After a few trips to the Moon America, proud to have shown it could do what no other country could, but with other calls on its resources, quit while it was ahead.

And no one else took up the challenge.

Today, as in 1969, only white American men have ever had the experience of seeing the whole Earth, bright and beautiful, shining down from an alien sky, and only four of them are still alive. But young women and men from various countries may soon be following them.

In part, this is because the empty airless Moon looks more attractive than it did in the days of Apollo. Over the past 20 years ice and other volatile compounds have been discovered at its poles, which should make setting up Moon bases and perhaps fuelling shuttles a lot easier. But more space know-how in more countries, more private-sector interest and new government approaches are just as important to the Moon’s improving prospects as its natural resources are, and quite possibly more so.

By the end of this year three spacecraft should be making their way to the Moon for landings early next year. The most ambitious is China’s Chang’e 4, the country’s second such lander and the first from any country to ­attempt to land on the side of the Moon that is always turned away from Earth. Without formally saying so, China has given strong indications that it intends to send people to the Moon too, perhaps in the 2030s.

India’s lander, Chandra­yaan-2, will be its second Moon mission, and its first attempt at a powered landing. The other Moon-bound spacecraft, though, will mark a more significant first: not just the first Israeli mission, but the first Moon mission run by something other than a government. Although the lander, nicknamed “Sparrow”, has funding from the Israeli space agency, much has come from philanthropy, and the mission is being run by SpaceIL, a non-­profit. SpaceIL was formed to compete in the Google Lunar XPrize, set up in 2007, which offered $US20 million ($28.4m) to the first team to land a rover on the Moon and send back high-definition video. It was never won, and Google withdrew the prizemoney on offer early this year. But some of the teams it inspired are still plugging away. As well as Space­IL there is ispace, in Japan, which has plans to launch in 2020. And in America there are Moon Express and Astrobotics, both of which hope to secure new funding from NASA in 2019.

NASA plans to do for the Moon in the 2020s what it did for low Earth orbit in the 2010s: stimulate the creation of new private-sector capabilities for getting stuff there. Technology-development grants and contracts for taking cargo up to the International Space Station were crucial for the development of SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk that has come to dominate the space-launch business. Companies like Astrobotics and Moon Express are now competing for grants to improve their lunar-lander technology, and soon will do so for contracts to deliver scientific payloads to the Moon’s surface.

They both hope to fly such missions in 2020. NASA is also looking for private-sector bids to provide the first module for a new space station, known as Gateway, that will hang in orbit between the Earth and Moon, allowing astronauts to remotely control rovers and to go down to the surface themselves.

Underlining that the new capabilities appeal not just to governments, Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese retailing billionaire, has contracted with SpaceX to take a flight around the Moon with a crew of eight artists, perhaps as soon as 2023, in one of the spacecraft the company is developing for missions to Mars.

In his speech at the dawn of the Apollo program, president John F. Kennedy said America took on challenges like that of going to the Moon “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. They still are. But with today’s broader-based and more capable space industry, this particular thing is easier than it was. That, yoked to personal passion, may now be enough to get it done again.