40 Years Later, It's Moon Race 2.0

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• The Space Moon Race

Actually, NASA is doing Apollo one better. In the old lunar program, one massive Saturn V booster did all the lifting, but this time there will be two rockets. The Ares V, the larger of the pair, will be used to carry the new lunar lander as far as Earth's orbit and make unmanned cargo runs to the moon. The smaller Ares I will lift the command module, carrying four astronauts, to meet the lander. Dividing the job between two rockets frees up more payload space on the Ares V. And unlike the Saturn V, which had to be invented from the engine bells up, the Ares boosters will go the frugal route by adapting existing hardware, such as the solid-fuel boosters from the shuttle and an upper-stage engine from the Saturn rockets themselves.

One of the quirkiest features of the old Apollo missions was that while three men would fly to the moon, only two would descend to the surface; the third minded the mother ship. This time there will be a four-person crew, and all the crew members will get a chance to get dirty while the orbiter that is their ticket home waits unattended above. "We have greater control over the orbiter than we used to," says Clinton Dorris, deputy manager of the Altair lander program. What's more, with lunar campouts of up to six months planned--compared with the record three-day stay of Apollo 17 in 1972--leaving one crewmember alone is simply not tenable.

So far, Orion and the boosters are the furthest along in their production cycles, since every day that they delay extends the five-year period when Americans have no independent access to space. To fill that gap, the plan has been to thumb a ride to the space station with the Russians aboard their venerable Soyuz ships. But with tensions rising between Washington and Moscow since the Russian invasion of Georgia, worries are rising too. This could lead NASA either to postpone mothballing the shuttles--a bad idea when you're talking about a creaky fleet that's already claimed 14 lives--or to accelerate building the replacement vehicles.

It's no secret which option NASA prefers, but the question will be whether there's enough will and wallet to get the job done. The Wall Street crash does not portend big budgets for what some people see as a luxury agency like NASA. And President-elect Barack Obama may not feel much loyalty to a lunar program that so indelibly bears the Bush stamp. But having successfully reeled in Florida on Election Day, he's not likely to do anything to tick off its space-happy voters either. Plus, there are jobs to be created in a newly revived moon program. "When we won the Orion contract, we posted openings for 2,000 jobs," says Lockheed's Lacefield. "We received 30,000 applications."

Finally, of course, there's the question that's dogged every manned flight since the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin first went into orbit in 1961: Why bother? Space planners have always justified today's flights as necessary rehearsals for tomorrow's--we can't live on Mars if we don't learn to live on the moon first. True enough, but couldn't we just do neither? As for deep-space observatories on the far side of the moon, the Hubble telescope has done perfectly well alone in orbit, with only a few maintenance missions in 18 years. How much harder would it be to build a moon-based telescope that didn't need any?

None of that, of course, reckons with the other piece of the equation--the wholly unscientific joy we feel when we do something as preposterous as putting people in space. None of it reckons either with the primal jolt Americans have always gotten from competition--the gunning-the-engine moment when we decide that if China and Japan and India and Europe are peeling out for the moon, the U.S. can surely beat them there. That ain't sensible, and that ain't science, but as it was 40 years ago, it sure is fun.

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