Race to the Moon returns with new motivations and new actors – 09/01/2023 – Science

A shout of triumph rippled through mission control in Bangalore as the Chandrayaan-3 lander softly touched down on the lunar surface on the 23rd. “India is on the moon,” said a smiling and visibly relieved S. Somanath, president of the Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO.

The feeling that a historic moment was being lived was clear. Not just because India is only the fourth country to land on the Moon, after the US, China and Russia, but because Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lunar module is the first to land close to the Moon’s south pole, so far unexplored. .

He won’t be the last. Half a century after the end of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, an unusual number of countries are preparing their own lunar adventures.

Soon, Japan’s space agency will attempt its own unmanned lunar landing, and South Korea intends to do so later this year. Others, such as Canada, Mexico and Israel, plan to send rovers to explore the lunar surface. Six international space agencies are partnering with NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon by 2025. And China plans to send its taikonauts to the lunar surface by 2030.

In the 1960s, when the US and USSR were racing to be the first to set foot on Earth’s only natural satellite, lunar exploration was mainly driven by governments and conducted by national space agencies. Although the space programs provided derivative technological and economic benefits, going to the moon was primarily a matter of national pride.

More than half a century later, the actors and motivations have changed. Exploration, including lunar missions, is still dominated by major economic powers, but the use of space more generally has broadened to include many more countries and private companies.

“The technology for space exploration has come down a lot in cost and in some ways has become a commodity,” says Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, an American think tank that focuses on the sustainable use of space.

“It’s also why we have more countries exploring launch vehicles and getting interested in space. And when they get interested in space, the moon is seen as both a lofty and achievable goal.”

In addition to national prestige, still an important factor in the Moon landings, Weeden says that many of the Moon missions are aimed at determining “what’s really out there that might be useful.”

“Some experts think there is immense military, strategic and economic value to having a presence on the Moon. Others think there are natural resources that we need. The reality is we don’t know.”

Take pole position

The fact that India chose the south pole of the moon for its landing is significant. When the last Apollo mission left the Moon in 1972, scientists judged the moon to be dry and barren. Since then, however, probes have indicated the possibility that there are large deposits of frozen water and rare-earth metals hidden in the dark, icy craters at the south pole.

China and the US want to use the region as a base to explore the moon’s furthest reaches, with the longer-term goal of learning how to live and work on another planet. Your precious water resources, if they cannot be used for drinking, could be broken down into hydrogen for fuel or oxygen for breathing. And the hope is that, with a permanent presence, more valuable resources could be found on the Moon to support missions that will explore deep space further afield.

Smelling the political willingness to spend large sums on lunar missions —NASA alone expects to spend around US$93 billion on Artemis by 2025—, companies around the world are also jumping on the bandwagon. US companies Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic are vying to operate the first commercial lunar landings this year, following the failure of Japan’s ispace in April.

“There’s a lot of interest right now,” says Dallas Kasaboski, an analyst at space consultancy NSR and author of its annual Lunar Markets report. Kasaboski estimates that there are more than 400 public and private lunar missions planned between 2022 and 2032, up from just 250 missions a year ago. While many of the current programs, including the one in India, were conceived many years ago, “the last couple of years have seen much greater development and engagement with lunar activities,” he says.

Cheaper but still tough

This acceleration has benefited from the rapid drop in access and operating costs in space and the growing view of space as a strategic field.

The development of reusable commercial rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is estimated by NASA to have cut the cost — per kilogram of payload — of launching into so-called low Earth orbit by 95 percent. Private sector involvement in the development of lunar mobility and communications services promises to do the same.

Interest is also growing because China’s and US lunar programs are finally coming of age after years of delays, says Bleddyn Bowen, professor of international relations at the University of Leicester and author of “Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space” (Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space). “Finally, there’s the technology ready to do this.”

But even though there is now approximately 100,000 times more processing power built into an iPhone than was used by the computer that put the first men on the moon, getting to the moon is still a risky undertaking. “Space is a place of broken dreams and broken promises,” says Bowen. “It’s still extremely difficult to get everything right, on the day and at the moment.”

There’s no GPS to guide a spacecraft, there’s no atmosphere to slow down a vehicle hurtling toward the Moon’s surface. The Moon is covered in craters and debris, and the shadows they cast easily lend themselves to being evil. interpreted by sensors.

India succeeded on the 23rd, but only after a previous mission in 2019 failed. Days before the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed, the Russian Luna-25 lander spun out of control and crashed.

Yuri Borisov, director of the Russian space agency, Rosmocosmos, attributed the failure to a 50-year hiatus in his country’s lunar program. “The invaluable experience that our predecessors accumulated in the 1960s and 1970s was all but lost during the program interruption,” he said.

But the risk of failure has not led China, the US and countries like India to give up seeking the prestige that a successful lunar mission brings. Nor do they seem to be concerned about the uncertainty regarding the practical results that these high-cost projects will make possible. For many, the main attraction is the advantage of being first in a field where the potential is still unknown.

“If you’re a major power on the Moon, you’re going to have a lot of influence in shaping the details of lunar governance,” explains Bowen.

lunar governance

It was the fear of losing out to China that led the US to refocus its space exploration efforts away from Mars and back to the Moon in 2017. Within two years China had demonstrated its lunar capability, with the first successful landing on the far side of the Moon.

Now China and the US are eyeing the South Pole and even some of the same landing spots, and their plans have sparked fears of a possible conflict.

“The dominant power will be able to thwart the ambitions of others by occupying territory and seeking to police it,” writes Tim Marshall in his book on power and politics in space, “The Future of Geography.” “The first to settle down will be the first to access the Moon’s potential wealth.”

NASA Director Bill Nelson warned earlier this year that China might start claiming territory on the Moon under the guise of scientific research, a claim that has been rejected by the Chinese.

But his comments drew attention to the urgent need to draw up new international guidelines on moon exploration if planned lunar missions are to proceed peacefully. The 1979 Lunar Accord was not ratified by Russia, China or the United States, which instead crafted their own rules, known as the Artemis Accords. Neither China nor Russia signed the agreements.

“It’s going to be very important that every country going to the moon has a set of rules and that those rules are well implemented,” says David Avino, chief executive of space engineering company Argotech, which has ambitions to develop a thriving lunar business. .

But the competition has already begun. And it no longer just involves the US and China. India, too, has ambitions to get humans into space, and its low-cost approach has proven highly successful so far. The Chandrayaan-3 mission would have cost $73 million, a fraction of the cost of other lunar landings.

India’s space program, which was born 54 years ago, initially focused on domestic development — helping to build communications infrastructure, improving crop monitoring and cyclone early warning systems. But with the rise of China, their priorities have changed.

Beijing’s first anti-satellite missile test in 2007 “produced a unanimous consensus that India needed to do something to protect its own assets in space,” says Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, an analyst at the Observer Research Foundation think tank, in New Delhi. India tested its own anti-satellite missile in 2019.

India has also sought to counter China’s might by forming partnerships for space exploration, including potential future missions to the Moon with Japan and to Venus with France.

Along the way, it built up substantial space capability. “India is not a new space power,” says Bowen. “It launched its own satellite on its own rocket for the first time in 1980.”

The successful mission in August will reinforce Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to characterize India as a premier global power in economic, technological and military terms under his rule, with the G20 leaders’ summit in New Delhi this month and national elections in 2024.

In contrast, the failure of Luna-25 has cast a shadow over Russia’s credibility as a space power. “Over the last 15 years we have seen many reasons to be concerned about the vitality and health of the Russian space program,” said Weeden of the Secure World Foundation. “I wouldn’t say the Russian space program is over, but it’s on a downward trajectory, while India’s is on the rise.”

Bowen notes that India is self-sufficient in all the key fields needed to project power into space: infrastructure, economic services and military intelligence.

“So if she implements an aggressive lunar exploration program, it will take time and money, yes, but she can do it.”

Translated by Clara Allain