Russia’s first lunar landing in 47 years might have hit trouble, but the flurry of scheduled landings makes the moon once again the hottest real estate in the solar system.
The moon may be dead and desolate, but it is now the hottest real estate in the solar system, generating interest from countries across the globe eager to demonstrate their technological prowess and aid humanity in understanding its closest celestial neighbour.
Today, the goal is not so much proving superiority of one political system over another but a race to a physical location, the south pole of the moon, where water in the form of ice lies in permanently shadowed craters.
At 2.10 pm Moscow time on Saturday Russia’s space agency Rocosmos sent a command to prompt the lander to enter the pre-landing orbit. But “an emergency occurred on the space probe that did not allow it to perform the manoeuvre in accordance with the required parameters,” it said in an update on Telegram that was also reported by Russian state news agency Tass. Specialists are analysing the situation, Roscosmos said, without providing further details.
Then, of course, there is NASA. Last year, it kicked off its Artemis campaign by flying its Orion spacecraft, without anyone on board, around the moon. Next year, it is planning a similar mission, but with four astronauts in the capsule. Before then, it plans a number of robotic missions, the first of which could come by the end of this year, when two companies are to send spacecraft to the lunar surface in an effort to become the first commercial ventures to do so.
In the decades since the Apollo program ended, the space agency had been directed to the moon, then to Mars and an asteroid and then back to the moon. But the Artemis program, born during the Trump administration, has been wholeheartedly embraced by the Biden administration. It enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, which is keen to fulfil the NASA pledge to send the first woman and person of colour to the moon.
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