The Atlantic: The Moon Is Open for Business
A number of companies have set their sights on the moon, and they’re ramping up their plans to deliver spacecraft to its surface. They’re finalizing spacecraft designs and securing launch contracts, and they’ve set some fast-approaching deadlines. Only three nations—the United States, the Soviet Union, and China—have successfully soft-landed on the moon, and their missions were all carried about by national agencies. (Other nations have crash-landed, which is exactly what it sounds like.) No company has ever placed a spacecraft on the moon, but if a few key players have their way in the next decade, the lunar surface may soon be littered with them.
If even a fraction of these companies come even close to hitting the deadlines that have been announced in just the last few months, the Moon is going to get a lot of visitors in very short order.
There are robotic landers coming from Astrobotic (2019) and SpaceIL (2019). SpaceX announced last week that it had signed up a Japanese billionaire for a translunar sightseeing trip (2023). That’s in addition to two contracts from iSpace, which plan a lunar orbiter (2020) and multiple rovers (2021). And all of these may pale compared to an announcement in July from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which puts them on a path for a manned lunar landing in the next six years.
That’s not all. That’s not even close to all. There’s Masten Space Systems looking to build a high power upper stage specifically designed to land tons of material on the lunar surface. There’s Moon Express creating a whole range of landers, rovers, and probes, with their first lander also targeted for 2019. The new energy in the space over the last decade has been all about sub-orbital and orbital space. The next five years look to see existing players and a whole new contingent making a break toward the Moon.
The recent confirmation that there is water ice at numerous locations on the Moon makes the possibility of not just landings, but sustained human colonies considerably greater. In fact, while Elon Musk has SpaceX firmly pointed at Mars, a lunar colony is directly in the crosshairs of Bezos’ Blue Origin. Many of these companies are aiming at the Moon with one thought in mind: money. They expect to plant their company logo either in the anticipation of government contracts, or mining materials from the Moon to use elsewhere in the Solar System. Most of them will fail. All of them may miss their deadlines. Still, it’s going to be seriously interesting.
Gene Cernan, the last human being to step from the lunar surface, climbed the ladder to Apollo 17 and headed back to Earth in December 1972. Cernan died in 2017, and it seems very, very unlikely that any human being will put a boot on lunar soil in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his departure. But we may come close. And this time, the footprints may come in droves.
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