40 Years Later, It's Moon Race 2.0

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India's moon program is less ambitious--so far--but the country has a deep space tradition. The Indian government has been in the satellite-launching game since 1975, but it always focused on such bread-and-butter science as land-mapping, weather-forecasting and communications. In a country struggling with chronic poverty, even the most ambitious ruling party dared go no further. All that changed in 1998, when India and Pakistan rattled the world with dueling nuclear tests. In the heady, protech rush that followed, then Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee approved an Indian lunar push and chose to make the announcement as part of the Independence Day celebrations of 2003. A Chandrayaan-2 rover is planned for 2011.

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• The Space Moon Race

Like the Chinese program, the Indian one would not exist at all but for a roaring national economy--notwithstanding the current global slowdown. "What is the purpose of 8% growth if we can't make the spending necessary to sustain it?" asks Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), India's NASA.

The biggest difference between the old moon race and the new one may be the role of the private sector. In 2004 pilot and aerospace designer Bert Rutan copped the $10 million Ansari X Prize by designing the first manned vehicle to fly to and from suborbital space twice within a week. In September 2007, aerospace engineer Peter Diamandis, ceo of the X Prize group, announced he was partnering with Google to offer a new, $30 million Lunar X Prize, with the goal of having a private rover toddling about the moon by the end of 2012.

The vast majority of the teams responding to the contest do not have the skill or seed money to compete seriously. But so far 14 groups do, and Google has okayed them as contestants. Made up mostly of aerospace and software pros, the teams are allowed to use commercial rockets to launch their probes but must build the ships and steer them to a moon landing on their own. The designers exhibit a surprising sangfroid about their work. "There's no magic. We did it in the '60s, and the physics are the same," says aerospace engineer Bob Richards, head of a design team.

The Humans Return

Robots, of course, are limited--Scouts and surrogates largely unsuited to the complex lunar work researchers want to undertake. Geologists hope to continue the studies of solar-system origins that the Apollo crews began (before Nixon scrapped the manned-moon program in favor of the ostensibly more practical and affordable space shuttle). Astronomers talk of placing a radio telescope on the moon's far side; energy experts want to mine the moon's helium 3, an isotope that could power clean-fusion reactors back on Earth. And anyone dreaming of a human presence on Mars knows that before you attempt long-duration stays on a body tens of millions of miles from home, it's best to practice on one nearby. "You wring these techniques out on the moon first," says Mark Geyser, manager of the Orion project.

In 2004, President George W. Bush announced a moon-Mars initiative that would commit NASA to those kinds of goals. Skeptics suspected this was just a bit of election-year candy--and that may have been part of the plan. But the initial idea was accompanied by some hardheaded trade-offs. The grossly overpriced International Space Station would be completed by 2010, allowing the outdated space shuttles to be retired. This would free up between $3 billion and $4 billion a year without increasing NASA's budget. Since Americans still need access to space, the shuttle would be replaced with an updated Apollo-style orbiter. Pair that with a souped-up lunar lander similar to the original, and you're back on the moon. "We're anchoring our models in Apollo data points," says Cleon Lacefield, a vice president and project manager for Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the Orion orbiter.

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