Why China Might Beat the U.S. Back to the Moon

Roughly 6,800 miles separate humanity’s past and future on the surface of the moon. It’s the approximate distance between the Sea of Tranquility—where Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first landed on July 20, 1969—and Shackleton Crater at the south lunar pole. The vicinity of Shackleton is where astronauts from the U.S. and, quite likely, taikonauts from China (from the Chinese word “taikong,” meaning space or cosmos) will touch down sometime during or before 2030, taking advantage of local ice deposits that can be harvested for water, breathable oxygen, and even rocket fuel. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] To hear the U.S. tell it, we’ll be the first to stick the landing. “The statement I’ve heard around NASA is, ‘We want to be there to greet them when they arrive,’” says Howard McCurdy, professor emeritus of public administration and policy at American University. If the space agency holds to its notion of flying the Artemis II crew on a looping journey around the far side of the moon late next year, and landing the Artemis III crew in the south polar region in 2026 or 2027, the next boot prints on the moon will indeed be American. But don’t count on it.  NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket has flown just once, in late 2022. While it successfully sent an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a 26-day lunar orbital mission, later analysis found that the r...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news