40 Years Later, It's Moon Race 2.0

You probably wouldn't have had much fun on the surface of the moon. It's not the exploring or the bouncing or the buggy-roving that would have bothered you. It's the worrying.

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• The Space Moon Race

Landing on the moon is fine, but you need to get home too. That means heaving your multiton spacecraft back off the ground and up into space--and if that's going to happen, all its thousands of components have to work just so. There's no guarantee that they will--which is why the first time men landed on the moon, President Richard Nixon had a short address prepared just in case things went wrong. "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," he would have said. When they're writing your obit while you're still alive, it's hard to have a good time.

But the astronauts themselves had a grand time on the moon--and the U.S. had just as much fun sending them there. For a big, loud, hootenanny nation like ours--one that has spent the better part of its history whooping its way west--having an empty landmass to explore a quarter-million miles (more than 400,000 km) offshore was a powerful tonic. The fact that the exploring took place in what was otherwise a very hard decade made the experience only more bracing.

By any measure, the current decade is a hard one too. And again--perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not--we're eyeing the moon. By 2015, to hear NASA tell it, a new manned spacecraft--the evocatively named Orion--will be carrying crews to Earth's orbit. By 2020, Orion will be paired with the lunar lander Altair. That same year, fresh American bootprints will be made on the lunar soil--the first since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Contractors have been chosen, metal is being cut, and most important, money has been allocated. "This is a real program," says Jeff Hanley, manager of NASA's Constellation program, which oversees manned exploration. "We're spending a couple hundred million dollars a month, and thousands of people are marching to a strategy."

Globalization is driving the new push. As the economies of Asia and Europe spread new wealth, more and more countries are realizing that the moon is within reach. Never mind the two-party U.S.-Soviet moon race of old. This time China is in the hunt. So are India, Japan and the entire 17-nation European Space Agency (ESA). On Oct. 22, India launched its Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, an unmanned lunar orbiter that marks the country's first table stakes in the moon game. China's Chang'e 1 spacecraft is already in lunar orbit, as is Japan's Selene. Europe's SMART-1 entered lunar orbit in 2003, and the ESA wants to go back. China broadly aims to have astronauts on the moon by 2020. The ESA is hoping to build a "global robotic village" by 2016 and a permanent manned base by 2024.

And none of this includes the private sector. Last fall, Google offered a $30 million prize to any group that lands a robot on the lunar surface before Dec. 31, 2012, travels at least 500 m (1,640 ft.) and sends back video. In the first six months after the prize was announced, 560 groups from 53 nations expressed interest. All at once, the moon, which has spent nearly 40 years as a cultural colony of the U.S. alone, has a lot of new claimants.

Robots First

The most powerful player in the moon race, apart from the U.S., is China. If the past hundred years were the American century, the next hundred could be China's, and nothing says rising power like a space program. "Chinese people have a lot of feeling for President Kennedy," says Li Jing, an astronomer formerly with the Chinese Academy of Science. "The Apollo project catapulted the U.S. into scientific leadership. The U.S.'s national power shot up. Chinese people are very clear about that."

In 2003, China acted on that clarity, launching its first manned mission, a 14-orbit flight by a lone astronaut. In 2005 a two-man crew went up for a five-day stay, and in September 2008, a three-man team flew a mission complete with a spacewalk.

But China's true fascination has long been the moon--at least since 1978, when the U.S. presented Beijing with a 1-g (.035 oz.) sample of lunar rock brought back by the Apollo 17 mission. Chinese officials razored off half of that moon crumb and gave it to scientists to study. "From that half a gram, we produced 40 papers," space scientist Ouyang Ziyuan told the People's Daily.

China won't be begging the U.S. for lunar scraps anymore. Chang'e 1, launched in October 2007 and named for China's goddess of the moon, is currently orbiting 125 miles (200 km) above the lunar surface. The ship is stuffed with equipment to study the ground and look for possible landing sites. Chang'e 2 is set to follow next year with another orbital mission, followed by a rover in 2012 and a robotic sample-return mission in 2017. A manned trip could come after that. "The Chinese have read the Apollo playbook," says Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chinese space program at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

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