JUNE 2019. DISCOVER 53
A Planetary Effort
Lunar living: Humans
have talked about returning
permanently to the moon
ever since Gene Cernan left
Apollo’s final bootprints in- While plans remain
nebulous, the U.S., China,
Russia and Europe have
all discussed building
moon bases in the coming
decades. Europeans
recently released their
plans for a “Moon Village,”
which robots could start
building in as little as five
years. Humans would follow
once the base is habitable.
U.S.: Spurred
on by the
signing of
President Donald Trump’s
Space Policy Directive-1, the
United States is committed
to sending astronauts back
to the moon by the late
2020s.China: After
a series
of robotic
missions, China aims to land
a crew on the lunar surface
in the early 2030s.Russia: A
handful of
upcoming Luna
missions will probe lunar
resources, restarting a
long-stalled legacy of
Soviet-era moon missions.European
Union: The
European
Space Agency plans to mine
lunar regolith — moondust
— for valuable resources like
oxygen and water by 2025.Japan: The
country’s Smart
Lander for
Investigating Moon (SLIM)
spacecraft will use facial
recognition technology on
craters to prep for extremely
precise lunar landings in the
early 2020s.India: The
country’s
second lunar
mission, Chandrayaan-2, was
set to launch in April 2019.
The craft’s planned landing
site is near the south pole,
where the rover mission will
explore the lunar surface.Israel: The
non-profit
organization
SpaceIL, spawned from the
Google Lunar XPRIZE
competition, launched
Israel’s first lunar lander in
early 2019 (just months after
the contest ended).CH
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Deep Space Gateway: NASA says it will begin
launching modules in 2022 for the Lunar Orbital
Platform-Gateway, a space station that will orbit
the moon. Once built, it will house up to four
astronauts — and their experiments — during
30- to 90-day lunar missions.Lunar XPRIZE: The
decade-long Google
Lunar XPRIZE, which
offered $20 million to the
first commercial company
that lands a functioning
robot on the moon,
ended last year without a
winner. But now, at least
five teams have concrete
plans to land on the lunar
surface within a few
years. And the XPRIZE
Foundation is chasing
new sponsors to revive
the contest.