BBC: “To the Moon and beyond”

Shannon started to focus on ideas that were viable. What made a lot of sense was the ability to build a very small crew-tended space station around the Moon, he says. Gateway gives you a place for crews to get set up before they go down to the surface. It gives you an opportunity to control remote vehicles on the surface. It would also act as a safe haven were anything to go wrong during a mission.

The Apollo missions took all the hardware necessary for completing the mission with them to the Moon. Nasa put them on a path around the Moon called a free return trajectory, which would get them safely back to Earth if, for example, an engine didn’t fire to send them into lunar orbit. But this limited them to landing in a narrow band around the equator.

Gateway will be higher up, in an oval-shaped path around the Moon called a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO), giving Nasa the ability to land wherever it wants.

---

The administration cited Chinese lunar ambitions while justifying the return date of 2024. Some observers think space-faring nations like the US, China and Russia will need to coordinate lunar exploration to navigate murky legal waters over who owns lunar resources.

I think there’s a very large risk of geopolitical conflict, says Phil Metzger. If a single nation decides to go it alone on creating industry in space, then eventually that single nation would have a tremendous political, economic and military advantage.

Ignoring the potential of space resources just creates a power vacuum, he says: The ethical way to fill it would be to do it cooperatively, internationally, trying to make sure that all humanity benefits.

Paul Rincon

Despite criticism, I am very supportive of NASA’s Artemis mission to the Moon, with the potential to cement a more sustained human presence on the Moon and to reach beyond it into the inner solar system. At the same time, this project should really have happened decades ago immediately after the Apollo program. I am somewhat pessimistic that these plans will come to fruition in the current form, not only delayed by budget cuts, but eventually changed beyond recognition by the shifting priorities and moods of each new American administration.

A concept of lunar life in the mid-21 Century by architects Foster + Partners

It seems to me that NASA is not in great shape currently, between their increasing risk aversion around sending people to space, lack of transparency and unwillingness to investigate critical failures, overreliance on SpaceX and private contractors for key parts of their operations, and an administrator that looks like a relic from the past – that past half a century when NASA hasn’t managed to send people beyond Earth orbit. I was taken aback when he started quoting Bible verses last year at the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope – I’m a Christian myself, but I also think there should be firm separation between government institutions and religious life.

No, what moved me was not national pride but a sense of comfort inherent in any narrative depicting competency and coöperation, of steps meticulously planned and then completed. There was once a room of cigarette smokers who were really good at trigonometry and aeronautics. They cheerfully sent men to the moon and got them back home without a single slide-show presentation by an ego-driven billionaire wearing a headset.

Emily Witt

Ultimately, the issue lies with a lack of vision and long-term strategy for space exploration. Apollo was born out of Cold War tensions and competition, and that drive abandoned as soon as Americans ‘won’ over the Soviets. I fear that history is repeating, with a new Cold War brewing between the United States and China, and Russia doing everything it still can to stir things up. Unfortunately, the only way to motivate the US to develop a cohesive plan to explore (and exploit) space seems to be to point out that China is racing ahead of them…