For NASA employee Ryan Zeigler, the prospect of astronauts returning to the moon got real in late April. He took a call in his Houston, Texas, laboratory from the space agency’s headquarters in Washington.
“They said: ‘So, we’re going back to the moon,’” he said, just days after the telephone call. “I’m like: ‘Yeah, about that?’”
Along with many others at NASA, he has got a lot of work to do in about half the time he thought he had to do it. Unlike others, Zeigler’s job does not begin the moment the astronauts set foot on the moon, but the moment they arrive back on Earth.
Illustration: Tania Chou
He is the manager of the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, and is in charge of the 2,200 samples brought back from the moon by the Apollo missions half a century ago.
The telephone call was to warn Zeigler that a curation plan would be needed for the new rocks, which would be arriving back on Earth in 2024 — rather than the “2028 at the earliest” that everyone was expecting.
The trouble is that the plans are at such an early stage that no one at NASA headquarters knows exactly where the astronauts will land yet — and therefore what kind of rocks Zeigler might have to look after.
The samples collected by Apollo have told us that the moon almost certainly formed after a cataclysmic collision between Earth and another planet more than 4 billion years ago, but the details remain highly elusive.
They have also suggested that an intense bombardment of the planets occurred 3.9 billion years ago that could have been instrumental in the development of life on Earth.
However, doubts have been raised about this scenario.
To solve both mysteries, fresh rocks from different lunar locations would be needed.
The unexpected call to arms began on 26 March when US Vice President Mike Pence spoke following a meeting of the US National Space Council at another NASA center, the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
He told reporters that the White House had charged NASA with getting Americans back to the moon within the next five years, almost slashing in half the previous time frame NASA and its international partners had been working toward.
A few days later a statement by NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed that it was beginning an internal rearrangement to accelerate the program and work toward landing astronauts somewhere close to the lunar south pole by 2024.
“I know NASA is ready for the challenge of moving forward to the moon, this time to stay,” Bridenstine said.
For nearly a month, NASA said little else, leaving pundits and commentators to fill the void about whether it was possible and how much it would cost.
Then, on May 13, NASA called a media teleconference in Washington with less than 90 minutes’ notice to talk about the new mission.
“It turns out that Apollo had a twin sister, Artemis. She happens to be the goddess of the moon. Our astronaut office is very diverse and highly qualified. I think it is very beautiful that 50 years after Apollo, the Artemis program will carry the next man — and the first woman — to the moon,” Bridenstine said.
However, the big news was that NASA declined to state how much they would need in total to perform the mission. Instead it asked for a “down payment” of US$1.6 billion in addition to the already agreed US$21.5 billion budget for next year to get things started.
There is absolutely no guarantee that US Congress would grant this request. The biggest question that NASA would be asked to answer is: Why the sudden rush?
First, it is escaping no one’s notice that a landing in 2024 would coincide with the end of Trump’s possible second term in office.
Second, the US could just want to keep up with the rest of the world.
“Everyone is running in the general direction of the moon. I think there is a kind of moon fever, that’s got everybody interested,” said Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee who now edits the Web site nasawatch.com.
On Jan. 3, the Chinese landed the Chang’e 4 spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a place no one has ever been before. Their next mission is scheduled for launch at the end of this year and is designed to robotically return 2kg of moon rocks to Earth for analysis.
India is planning to launch the Chandrayaan-2 mission this summer, which if successful would make them only the fourth nation to land anything on the moon.
While for many years NASA had dismissed such achievements as simply catching up with something they did decades before, now the mindset is changing, Cowing said.
“Here in the US it’s like: ‘Well, wait a minute, why aren’t we going?’” he said.
NASA’s original plans for returning to the moon relied on a strong collaboration with the nations that came together on the International Space Station.
NASA is testing a gargantuan rocket known as the Space Launch System. Bigger than the original lunar rockets, it would propel its Orion space capsule to the moon, where it would dock with a space station in lunar orbit known as the Lunar Gateway. From there, the lunar lander would ferry astronauts to the moon’s surface.
The Lunar Gateway was to be the biggest area of collaboration, but to meet the new time frame, NASA proposes to “descope” the gateway so that a smaller version can be ready in time.
This largely removes the need for the international partners to accelerate their own programs to match NASA. Instead, there is the option for them to complete the original full version of the gateway on the original time frame to facilitate future lunar visits.
However, one place international cooperation is still critical is on the Orion crew spacecraft. While NASA is making the crew compartment, the European Space Agency (ESA) is building almost everything else.
The service module it is to provide is a large cylindrical spacecraft that attaches to the crew capsule and supplies it with power and propulsion. Without this, Orion would be going nowhere.
ESA director of human and robotic exploration David Parker is confident the ESA can supply all the Orion service modules that NASA needs as soon as it needs them. He said that ESA has two service modules in various stages of completion and is setting up the construction of a third — the one that could take astronauts to the lunar surface.
“We’ve just been waiting for NASA to say they’re ready to put boots on the moon,” Parker said.
Even if it can justify the need to race back to the moon, there is still the big question of whether NASA would get the money.
In the traditional scheme of things, NASA contracts the big US aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin to make rockets and flight hardware to its specifications. As with everything bespoke, the price tag is eye-watering.
If that price proves unpalatable to US Congress, NASA could change tack and suggest buying in cheaper, commercial hardware from companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to get the job done.
By pure coincidence — if such a thing ever really exists — a week before the budget announcement, Bezos unveiled a mock-up of a lunar lander that Blue Origin have had in development since 2016. He said that it could be ready by 2024.
“What you have here is Bezos calling NASA’s bluff, saying: ‘Hey, over here, I can do it,’” Cowing said.
Certainly the lunar lander is the biggest mountain to climb — US$1 billion of the first year’s extra funding is going into jump-starting its development.
So if US Congress refuses the request, the accelerated return to the moon would be dead before it has even started — unless NASA can come up with a cheaper way of doing it, such as buying spacecraft from Bezos, whose company rather than the US taxpayer funds the development.
“In the back of my mind that’s what I think could be the game plan,” Cowing said.
Given the animosity between Trump and Bezos, enabling a crowning achievement of Trump’s time in office could be bittersweet for the Amazon founder.
It is not just US private companies that are looking to get in on the lunar action. Berlin-based PTScientists is developing a commercial lunar lander that could deliver up to 100kg of payload to the lunar surface.
On May 8 it signed a memorandum of agreement with the ArianeGroup, which builds and develops the European Ariane rockets, to jointly develop lunar missions.
PTScientists is also developing a separate lunar lander with ESA that would prospect the lunar south pole for water and other resources that could be used by astronauts.
While the company has been happy so far to do the groundwork alone, it is now looking for governmental assurance that there would be a market for the products it is developing.
In short, it wants to know whether Europe wants to go to the moon.
“We would like to see a political commitment that lunar exploration is important,” PTScientists government affairs manager Mari Eldholm said. “If Europe wants to join this effort, we really need to act now or be left behind.”
The opportunity for that commitment is coming up at the end of this year when ESA convenes a meeting of European science ministers that would effectively define its space exploration goals for the next decade.
“When I was a kid, we watched the moon landings on television. It was something America did,” Parker said. “Now the question for our ministers is: ‘Do you want to be part of it too this time?’”
To fully participate in the return to the moon, Parker plans to ask for a modest budget increase. It would be the equivalent of asking for an additional 0.2 euros per year from everyone in Europe. It would take ESA’s space exploration budget from 550 million euros to 660 million euros (US$613 million to US$736 million) a year.
A lot could depend on what happens in the US this summer, when the decision about whether to stump up the extra cash are to be made, and it is by no means a done deal.
“Let me tell you what I think is going to happen,” said Cowing, before describing the political row in the US over whether Puerto Rico has received enough money to assist with its recovery from hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.
Why is this important?
Because the chair of the appropriations committee that must sign off on NASA’s extra grant money is Representative Jose Serrano, who was born in Puerto Rico.
So when Bridenstine asks for an extra US$1.6 billion, “Representative Serrano is going to look at him and say the lights are still out in Puerto Rico,” Cowing said.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past