2024-01-23 00:04:00
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Japan joined the exclusive group of countries that have achieved a soft landing on the lunar surface, following in the footsteps of the United States, Russia, China and India. A fact that, according to experts, predicts an increase in the frequency of lunar missions, with more than 100 expeditions planned for the year 2030, as indicated by the European Space Agency.
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The renewed race to the Moon responds to the need to “get to the Moon to learn how to live in space, to learn how to use the resources of space and that is really the springboard to all the vast riches of the universe,” Michelle told CNBC. Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. “The Moon is a testing ground,” she said.
Resources sought by both nations and corporations include rare earth metals and the isotope helium-3, abundant on the Moon and potentially useful for powering nuclear fusion reactors. Furthermore, the presence of water is a vital resource not only for human survival but also for the creation of rocket fuel, which could transform the Moon into a refueling station and platform for deeper space exploration.
Japan joined the select group of nations that have successfully completed a soft landing on the Moon, an achievement to date only achieved by the United States, Russia, China and India. (REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon)
“Whoever manages to establish a significant lunar presence is making a statement about their political system, about their economic system, about who is ahead in the geopolitical competition,” said Dean Cheng, senior advisor of the program, to the same medium. of China at the United States Institute of Peace. “But a second, more recent part is the belief that there are significant resources on the Moon that are useful for Earth or for future space flights.”
Recently, NASA announced that it has postponed its manned return to the Moon to the end of 2026, a year later than planned, amid recent obstacles that challenge the US space agency’s strategy of relying heavily on private companies for its missions. lunar lander, which has generated setbacks such as delays in the Artemis program and a propulsion failure in the Astrobotic company’s lunar lander. Meanwhile, China is moving forward with its government-backed program and aims to carry out manned landings to the natural satellite by 2030.
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Although Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander will not reach the Moon intact, NASA has three more private missions planned this year, including a second attempt by Astrobotic. “Ten thousand things have to go right” on a lunar mission like Astrobotic’s, Carnegie Mellon professor Red Whittaker, who led the development of a tiny four-wheeled lunar rover aboard Peregrine, told Archyde.com. “It is very, very common for failures to occur during the course of a mission.”
“We have to be a commercial company. We are trying to be competitive in this new era of commercial spaceflight. “If you look at budgets, we have to be more creative and efficient and do things differently,” Bhaskaran said.
China and NASA in a space contest: The Moon as a strategic objective. (REUTERS/Tingshu Wang)
China is not far behind in lunar achievements, with a mission scheduled this year to collect samples on the far side of the satellite, having made the first lunar soft landing since 1976 with Chang’e-3 and the first lunar landing on the far side of the Moon with Chang’e-4 in 2019.
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Other countries like India have learned from their own failures and successes, such as the landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the south pole of the Moon. The nation sees Astrobotic’s misfortune as a valuable learning curve, inspiring its startups to take on missions of this magnitude in the future, according to Pawan Kumar Chandana, co-founder of Skyroot Aerospace.
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