Why the world’s in a second race to the moon

                      Fifty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin created history, and, on the eve of India’s second lunar mission – Chandrayaan 2 – let's take a look at man’s oldest muse and how it has inspired all manner of human endeavour. First up, why a renewed surge of interest in moon travel is both an indication of the complexities of lunar missions and a future foretold.

I am quite certain that we will have such bases (on the moon) in our lifetime… somewhat like the Antarctic stations… continually manned,” Neil Armstrong said in 1970, in response to a question in a BBC interview on whether he thought it was possible to set up scientific bases on the moon in the forseeable future.

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Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, went on to live for another 42 years. Far from creating permanent scientific facilities in that time, human beings, it appeared, actually withdrew from the moon. Consider this: in the decade between 1965 and 1975, the United States and the then USSR, the only two countries with space programmes at the time, sent more than two dozen lunar probes. These included NASA’s Apollo missions, six of which landed a total of 12 astronauts on the surface of the moon between 1969 and 1972. Curiously, however, for the next almost two decades, there was not a single lunar mission launched by any space agency. Human beings seemed to have suddenly lost interest in the moon. And, when the lunar exploration did resume in 1994, it did not begin from where the scientists had left off in the mid-1970s, but, seemingly, almost from scratch, by sending orbiters, landers and rovers. Just two missions were launched in the 1990s and another six in the next decade by which time, other players like India, China and Japan had also entered the fray.

Read | India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission: All you need to know

The last decade has seen a renewed interest in the moon, especially after the discovery of water on the lunar surface by Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008. But it is only now, 50 years from the first landing on July 20, 1969, that humans have finally decided to go back to the moon. Last year, NASA had announced that it planned to send a manned mission to moon by the year 2028. In April this year, the US administration asked NASA to do this by 2024 itself. Most likely, by that time, some other countries, India and China among them, would be competing to send their own human missions to the moon.

The stage is now set again for a race to the moon over the next decade, and, this time, it is likely to be markedly different from the earlier one. In all probability, it will involve multiple participants, be more collaborative than competitive, and will be guided by the overall objective of utilising the resources of the moon, setting up permanent facilities for scientific explorations and using it as a launch pad to take humans deeper into space — the kind of things that Armstrong was talking about in the 1970 interview.

It is remarkable that it has taken 50 years for human beings to plan their journey back to the moon, to do the kind of things that many believed was just an arm’s length away in the 1970s itself. Half a century is a pretty long time for any new technology to mature and get adopted for common use. It is hard to think of any other breakthrough 20th century technology that would have remained stagnant for this long. This is, of course, not to suggest that space exploration hasn’t progressed in the last 50 years. Far from it. Spacecrafts have now gone beyond the solar system, exploratory missions have probed Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, more than 500 astronauts have travelled to space and come back, and scientists have built a massive permanent laboratory in space, the International Space Station (ISS), that has been manned continuously for almost two decades now.

An artist’s rendering of the LCROSS (the lunar crater observation and sensing satellite) spacecraft and Centaur separation. (Photo: NASA)

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