In 2025, humankind could return to the moon – after a fashion. If all goes to plan – never a given in space exploration, or indeed in world affairs right now – Nasa will launch the Artemis II mission in September that will carry four astronauts in a loop around the moon. It will be the first crewed mission to travel that distance since Apollo 17 in 1972.
In truth, that launch date is probably optimistic. The Artemis mission has already been put back more than once from the initial goal of 2019-2021, and a mission report last October admitted that the time allocated to sorting out any technical issues has been more or less used up on problems with the launch rocket and pad. There’s plenty more yet to be checked, not least the heat shielding that will prevent the crew from being fried on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
It all heightens the question that was put to me recently: why does it seem harder to get people to the moon with the technology of the 2020s than the 1960s – not least given that the computational power available to the Apollo programme was a pitiful fraction of that in a typical laptop today?
Anyone who has seen the Apollo command module in London’s Science Museum will be under no illusions: we got lucky, with that primitive, jerry-rigged technology, that no one died on an actual spaceflight. After the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, safety tolerances have got so much tighter, making the engineering challenge that much harder.
All the same, the question remains hard to resolve fully. Part of the answer surely lies with motivation. To space exploration enthusiasts, we seem to have lost the collective will for bold ventures like this. The reality is, however, that it hasn’t been easy, post-Apollo, to articulate a compelling reason to return to the moon. For a cash-strapped Nasa, uncrewed missions that can explore largely uncharted new worlds, such as Jupiter’s icy moons or Saturn’s enticing carbon-rich satellite Titan, promise far greater returns scientifically without any risk to human life.
Indeed, much of the impetus for crewed moon missions remains as it was in the Apollo era: nationalistic.
China’s ambitious space goals, pursued through the Chang’e programme (named after a Chinese goddess who dwelt on the moon), are as much a statement of patriotic technological prowess as they are a scientifically or even economically driven endeavour. The same might be said for the Indian lunar programme Chandrayaan, which successfully landed a rover vehicle in 2023.
All the same, the robotic Chang’e-6 lunar lander that touched down on the moon’s far side in the summer of 2024 returned the first ever samples of moon rock from that hidden face, offering an unprecedented glimpse into lunar geology. Even then, some of the interest was stimulated by questions about the chemical resources that might be available to Chinese astronauts in lunar settlements.
Nationalistic, not to say colonialist, tensions were raised by this success. Nasa’s administrator Bill Nelson expressed concern that Chinese astronauts might get to the moon’s south pole first “and then say, ‘this is our area, you stay out,’ because the south pole of the moon is an important part… We think that there is water there and if there’s water, then there’s rocket fuel.” That these concerns are real doesn’t make their context any less tiresome.
There is, however, some scientific justification for establishing a permanent lunar base – a goal for which Artemis II is seen as a first step. A radio telescope on the moon’s far side would be free from the interference experienced by such instruments on Earth, both from radio telecommunications and from the effects of our planet’s ionosphere, the upper region of the atmosphere. Nasa is considering the idea of lining a lunar crater with a wire mesh to convert it into an immense radio telescope about a kilometre across.
One can hope that a lunar base might foster the same sort of international collaboration evidenced by the International Space Station – and, it should be said, with somewhat more potential for important science, of which the return from the ISS has been rather slender. Needless to say, the prospects for a productive dialogue about space between the US and China now look even dimmer, although the European Space Agency has always maintained good relations with both. We’ll see. The first task is to get there – and you’d be well advised not to hold your breath about that during 2025.
