Back to the moon « Prospect Magazine

Science and Technology

Back to the moon

27th January 2010 — Issue 167

Its south pole may be as valuable as Saudi Arabia’s oilfields. But who will get there first?

Reaching for the Moon: a lunar base as envisaged by Nasa engineers in 1989

From the end of the Apollo and Soviet missions in the 1970s until 2005 there were only two missions to the Moon. But since 2006, nine missions have been launched— from Japan, India, China, Europe and the US. Eight more are being put together and Britain is pondering its own voyage to the dark side. Why the sudden interest?

In the short term, the new players in space are reaching for the Moon while keeping their eyes firmly on planet Earth. As Jon Cartwright reported in “Star Wars” (Prospect, December 2009), satellites for communications, intelligence gathering and navigation have become important military assets. And Moon programmes, like all space programmes, allow the rising powers to develop technologies that have a crucial military function in a civilian guise.

Yet countries like China and India have little experience of building and launching the rockets required, navigating them accurately or deploying and managing the satellites. The technologies they need still exist largely in the US, Russia, and to a lesser extent in Europe. For the moment, the US is doing what it can to prevent China from getting access to them. Astronauts from 15 nations have been invited to visit the International Space Station, the centrepiece of Nasa’s operations, but China is not one of them.

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