New space race for Moon and Mars on a limited budget: QuickTake

(Bloomberg) – The first space race was a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for national pride and military advantage. Now NASA is assigning missions to private companies and other countries have joined the race, notably China and India. The Moon and Mars remain attractive targets for many nations, as are the technological advances that space exploration can bring.

Since the space shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA, as the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is better known, had relied on Russia to ferry US astronauts to the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth to two decades. That changed in 2020 when billionaire Elon Musk’s company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, carried out its first manned missions, powered by reusable boosters that dramatically cut launch costs. Boeing Co.’s Starliner, a new astronaut capsule designed to fly the existing Atlas rocket, is undergoing orbital testing and may even fly to the ISS in 2021. SpaceX launched its first private supply run in 2012. What has changed is that SpaceX and other companies, including Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, are cutting costs to reach space. SpaceX also has a contract to fly four astronauts in 2021 for Axiom Space Inc., which plans a private orbiting space station, and has a deal to take a Japanese billionaire and his guests around the moon by 2023.

China landed a rover on the moon in 2019 and launched a mission to return there in late 2020 to collect samples. It also intends to establish a lunar research base with its own astronauts. India plans a second unmanned moon landing in 2021, after a failed attempt in 2019. It also has astronauts training for a planned orbital flight aboard an Indian spacecraft, Gaganyaan. The UAE flew its first astronaut in a Russian spacecraft in 2019, sent a probe to Mars in July 2020, and plans to send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon in 2024. The European Space Agency has probes that scan the solar system and is developing a lunar lander.

Only Americans have set foot on the moon and the last visit was almost half a century ago. Now the United States and other nations are interested in returning. This is because the moon race in the 1960s made great strides in aerospace technology along with innovations like camera sensors for cell phones. Advances in science since then mean that a comeback will likely yield new insights into the origins of the moon and the solar system. National pride motivated the programs, along with a desire to advance the commercialization of space. The American Apollo program that brought the first humans to the moon in 1969 cost $ 25.8 billion, or about $ 260 billion in terms of adjusted inflation, according to the Planetary Society. According to NASA’s current plans to return this decade with the Artemis program, an aircraft powered by its new Space Launch System rocket would dock on a lunar orbital platform, accommodating crews of four to until three months. The astronauts would descend from there to the surface, where minerals could be extracted and resources exploited to create oxygen, water and rocket propellant. A refueling module would serve the space station and missions to Mars. Separately, Blue Origin has its own plans for a base on the moon’s south pole.

Deep space exploration could provide clues to life elsewhere and information on how humans could adapt to much more challenging environments. Venture farther in the solar system it would drive technologies in areas such as laser communications and radiation shielding. Mars is a priority for NASA and the central goal for Musk, who envisions a self-sufficient city. At the end of 2020, China, the UAE and the United States all had probes headed for the red planet, nearly half a century after the first spacecraft landed. Meanwhile, ESA and Japan had a spacecraft en route to Mercury.

Rare minerals are a possibility. Asteroid mining is an idea reflected in science fiction from Jules Verne to Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Japan landed a probe on an asteroid in 2019, and NASA achieved a similar feat in October 2020 by collecting samples. Asteroid mining may have greater scientific benefits than economic ones, making space travel more feasible: water on asteroids could help produce propellant or be used to deal with radiation.

Since 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, satellites have supported technologies from telephone networks to geolocation and surveillance systems. Costs are now falling further. The UK government saved satellite operator OneWeb from bankruptcy in 2020, allowing it to compete with Musk and Bezos, who aim to launch thousands of small satellites into low earth orbit while offering faster internet coverage.