While the mission Artemis II of NASA completes the final preparations in view of the possible launch in the first half of February, billions of people around the world are preparing to see for the first time in their lives humans fly around the Moonsomething that hasn’t happened since 1972, when the last mission of the Apollo program ended. Today, with the new lunar program ArtemisNASA intends to bring man back to our natural satellite in what is effectively a “new race to the Moon”. The next mission of the program will in fact see the first human moon landing since 1972.
It is legitimate to ask ourselves why we want to go back, given that we have already been there, and why we haven’t been back for over half a century. The reasons for the new race to the Moon are scientific but also geopolitical and strategicand they are all based on one basic assumption: the Moon today has a completely different interest from what it had during the space race in the 1960s. And only now is technology ready to transform this interest into concrete programs, like Artemis.
The goal is to remain: the mineral resources of the Moon, from “white gold” to rare earths
Basically, today we don’t want to visit the Moon, plant a flag and go home: the goal is remain. What Artemis wants to do, in the long term, is to build human settlements on lunar soil: the challenge will be to create and maintain them using available resources as much as possible on sitethat is, on the Moon itself. A challenge totally out of the technological reach of the Apollo era, but which we can try to face today. And that can bring gods very specific advantages to those who will be able to win it. Advantages that will be scientific and technologicalbut above all cheap And geopolitical. The presence of lunar bases in fact opens the doors to a economic market which, according to a 2021 PwC report, can cumulatively reach even i 170 billion dollars in 2040.
Why? Because planting bases and maintaining them is to all intents and purposes an unexplored market that can learn in the coming decades to self-sustain by directly exploiting the resources already present on the Moon. Learning to extract, process and trade these resources is an investment that has a impressive economic potential.
On the lunar regolith they are found for example metals And rare earths. Not only exploitable materials for the construction of settlements and infrastructures, but also strategic materials in the contemporary economy. Let’s think about rare earthsfundamental for technology, and which we find on the lunar surface. Rare earths are crucial to electronic devices such as computers and smartphones and are at the heart of ecological transition because they are used to make components of electric vehicles, photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. Its supply chain is currently monopolized by Chinawhich effectively controls the global market. So think what could happen, even on a geopolitical level, if we learned to extract and trade lunar rare earths.
Even among metals we have interesting resources, one of which is lithium. This alkali metal is the fundamental component of many types of batteries (they are called “lithium batteries” for a reason) and consequently it is a key resource not only for electronics but also for electric mobility and the storage of renewable energy, with all that entails: it is no coincidence that lithium is also known as “white gold”.
Probes in lunar orbit have shown us, for example, that significant quantities of water ice. It is above all for this reason that the Artemis moon landings will take place around the lunar south pole rather than around the equator, as was the case with the Apollo program. Water is not only needed for the survival of human beings: once broken down into oxygen and hydrogen, these two elements are in fact used (in liquid form) as rocket fuel. Oxygen is also what, trivially, makes thebreathable air.
We have also known for several years that it is also found in the lunar regolith helium-3a very rare isotope of helium on the earth’s crust which however could have applications in future power plants nuclear fusion (its fusion releases large amounts of energy producing much less radioactivity than hydrogen fusion) and also how cryogenic fluid for future quantum computers. Its concrete usability is very uncertain, but according to some estimates its market value will be around $20,000 per gram.
Moon second act: the scientific reasons and the Martian objective
We don’t want to return to the Moon solely for economic and market reasons. Learning to build moon bases involves overcoming engineering and technological challenges from which we can derive a enormous know-how expendable not only to advance terrestrial technology through technological return, but also bring closer the real objective of the major space agencies: bringing humans on Mars.
At the moment, human exploration of the red planet falls within the realm of science fiction. There are too many things we don’t know how to do yet, from the long journey to Mars to prolonged survival in such a forbidding environment. All these things can be learned to do on the Moon, which is the test bench perfect given its proximity to Earth. Learning to build bases and survive in the relative safety and “comfort” of the lunar context is the best training ground for one day planting one’s foot on Mars and thus transforming ours into a interplanetary species. We don’t know if and how all this will happen, but this is natural next step of human space exploration.
Why we haven’t been back to the Moon in over 50 years
If today the interest in the Moon is driven by the possibility of establishing settlements and exploiting resources in situwhen we went there in the Apollo era between the 60s and 70s the Moon instead had a eminently political objective. The space race was a chapter in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union: the first superpower to set foot on the Moon would clearly prevail over the other.
In the early 1960s the USA was in great difficulty from this point of view: the USSR had held the record for the first artificial satellite (the Sputnik 1 in 1957), of the first man in space (Jurii Gagarin in 1961) and the first woman in space (Valentina Teereshkova in 1963). The USA therefore had to gamble for everything: they allocated an impressive budget to NASA (over 4% of the entire federal budget) to bring the first humans to another world and thus ensure victory in the space race. The priority and urgency were high, so much so that the Apollo program was willing to run risks that are not acceptable today to the safety of the astronauts.
The program was incredibly successful and landed 12 humans on the Moon between 1969 and the 1972. At that point the victory against the Soviet rival had become overwhelming, and the game was no longer worth the candle. The program was incredibly expensive (in total it cost the equivalent of 275 billion dollars today) and a failure could have compromised the image of the USA. Simply, the Moon was “no longer needed” and the American economy would have benefited from a relaxation of the budget allocated to its space agency. For comparison, funding for NASA today absorbs less than 0.5% of the federal budget.
Interest naturally shifted to other space exploration projects: yes, because in space there is not only the Moon. The following decades saw incredible progress in the exploration of the Solar System (think of the program Voyagerto missions like New Horizons or Rosette and to Martian rovers like Perseverance), in the low-Earth orbit population (an effort that ultimately resulted in the collaborative project of International Space Station) and in the construction of both terrestrial scientific telescopes (such as the Very Large Telescope in Chile) and spatial (like Hubble And James Webb), not to mention all those probes that have revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos, such as the satellite Planck for the study of cosmic background radiation.
In short, there was so much to do and discover in space without the exorbitant costs of a lunar program and without putting human lives at risk. Only in the last few years the Moon has once again become “useful” enough to justify large economic investments of lunar programs: this explains the human absence on Selenic soil in the last half century. However, our satellite has remained of interest to science, and in fact there has been no shortage of probes that have mapped and studied it from top to bottom, such as the American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiterbut also rovers that have landed on its surface, one of which is that of the Chinese mission Chang’e-6 which also brought the first samples from the far side of the Moon to Earth.
