All three countries have long-term programs, the ultimate goal of which is the creation of a permanent base on the Earth’s satellite. The potential of the Moon as a raw material base for the Earth is enormous – scientists believe so.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) super-heavy rocket, designed for the Artemis program, is expected to launch in March-April 2022. This will be an unmanned test mission that will send the Orion spacecraft to the Moon. On November 10, 2021, NASA head Billy Nelson said that the United States should make every effort to return to the Moon before China lands there. An internal NASA audit has found that the US space agency will not be able to send people to the Moon as part of the Artemis program in 2024.
Most likely, the deadlines will have to be shifted “several years in advance.” Auditors point to the fact that the spacesuit needed for flights to the Moon will not be ready until May 2025.
Given the time it takes to fully test the human landing system (HLS, or Human Landing Systems) and new spacesuits, we predict that NASA will push back the timetable for landing humans on the Moon by several years, according to a report from NASA Inspector General Paul Martin (Paul Martin).
The Russian automatic interplanetary station Luna-25 will launch in the summer of 2022. The station will spend three to seven days in orbit around the Earth’s satellite, then the lander will land at the Boguslavsky crater at the south pole.
China plans to land taikonauts on the lunar surface before 2030. Ye Peijian, technical adviser to the Chinese Academy of Space Technology, spoke about this on the China Global Television Network. Nelson said the United States aims to return humans to the Moon no earlier than 2025. At the same time, the first manned flight into its orbit is planned no earlier than May 2024; it was originally planned for April 2023.
Chinese scientists have discovered water in the lunar soil. The samples were delivered to Earth by the Chang’e-5 interplanetary station, Izvestia TV channel reports. The samples contained 120 ppm of liquid. Most likely, water appeared due to the solar wind. The research results are a big technological leap.
The discovery of water ice on the Moon on an industrial scale would open up great prospects for its development. Almost all existing projects for the construction of lunar bases involve the use of local water resources.
They are needed in the life support systems of manned stations, and are also required to obtain rocket fuel components, the Roscosmos press service reports. Over the past decade, LEND has orbited the Moon more than 12,400 times and transmitted more than 110 gigabytes of scientific information to Earth. On its basis, maps of the mass fraction of water in lunar matter were constructed. Perhaps the main conclusion is that in the vicinity of the north and south lunar poles there are most likely areas of permafrost with a relatively high content of water ice, increasing at some points to several percent of the soil mass.
In the description of the developments expected to be included in the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) program, another truly unique material is mentioned. We are talking about californium (Cf), a radioactive chemical element. This metal is the most expensive in the world: the price of one gram reaches $30 million. Californian is used for scientific research and in medicine. Despite the high cost, the economic effect of using this rare metal exceeds the cost of its production.
Mining elements such as californium on the Moon would likely pay for any lunar program. But while the US Congress has not allocated funding for the entire Artemis program, and China’s planned costs for the lunar manned program are not advertised, it is almost impossible to reliably estimate the cost of mining californium on the Moon and delivering it to Earth.
The development of the Earth is in full swing, and the hour is not far when humanity will face a shortage of natural resources, primarily metals. By this time, it is necessary to develop and master technologies for delivering scarce and rare materials from our natural satellite.