Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Under the Artemis II mission Nasa is planning to send four astronauts to the Moon, according to a BBC report. Their voyage around our nearest neighbour will pave the way for a lunar landing and, eventually, a Moon base. Nasa’s Artemis programme has taken years of work, involved thousands of people and is estimated to have cost $93bn to date.
America’s Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s were driven by a race with the Soviet Union. This time around China is the competition.
More than 50 years ago, America’s Apollo missions made history when the first people set foot on the lunar surface. With six landings in total, it felt like the Moon had been well and truly ticked off the space to-do list.
Why is the US spending so much time, effort and money racing to return? The terrain might look dry, dusty and seems rather barren, but it’s far from that. “The Moon has got the same elements in it that we have here on Earth,” says Prof Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum.
Rare earth elements “An example is rare earth elements, which are very scarce on Earth, and there might be parts of the Moon where these are concentrated enough to be able to mine them.”
There are metals too, like iron and titanium, and also helium, which is used in everything from superconductors to medical equipment. But the resource that’s the biggest draw is the most surprising: water.
“It has water trapped in some of its minerals, and it also has substantial amounts of water at the poles,” says Russell. The Moon is a fantastic archive of the Earth,” says Russell. “A new haul of rocks from a different area of the Moon would be amazing.”
America’s Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s were driven by a race for space dominance with the Soviet Union. This time around China is the competition.
Chinese project China has been making fast progress with its space programme. It’s successfully landed robots and rovers on the Moon, and says it will get humans there by 2030. There is still prestige in being the first to plant your flag in the lunar dust. But now it really matters where you plant it. Both the US and China want access to the areas with the most abundant resources, which means securing the best lunar real estate.
Nasa has its sights set on Mars and wants to send people there by the 2030s. Given the technological hurdles it needs to overcome, it’s a pretty ambitious timeline. But you have to start somewhere, and the US has decided the Moon is that place.
Scientists can’t wait to get their (gloved) hands on material from the Moon. The rocks brought home by the Apollo astronauts transformed our understanding of our celestial neighbour.
Perfect time capsule Because the Moon was once a part of the Earth, it holds a record of 4.5bn years of our own planet’s history. And with no plate tectonics, or wind and rain to wipe this record away, the Moon is a perfect time capsule.
