Israelis soaring ahead in race to the moon
GOOGLE called off its race to the moon weeks ago, when it became clear no private explorer would complete the trip by the March 31 deadline.
But that will not stop at least three teams from Israel, Japan and the US, who said their missions were still a go, with or without the contest’s $20 million (R236m) prize. “We’re full steam ahead,” said Yigal Harel, programme director at SpaceIL, the Israeli team who plan a soft-landing on the moon later this year.
When the Lunar XPrize was introduced in 2007, interest in moon exploration was at a low.
No government had landed there since the 1970s and no businesses had seriously contemplated it. But the contest has had its intended effect, jump-starting a cottage industry of would-be space explorers, even if no one emerged to take Google’s money. Last year, overall investment in space start-ups by venture capitalists climbed to a record $2.8 billion, according research firm CB Insights.
One reason the moon is within easier reach is that escaping Earth’s gravity is now so much cheaper. Private launch services such as Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies can put a satellite into orbit for about a tenth of what it would have cost a decade ago. SpaceX last month sent up a rocket powerful enough to lift the weight of a fully-loaded jumbo-jet.
The team most likely to get to the moon first, the non-profit SpaceIL, is attempting the feat mostly to prove it can be done. With some funding from the Israel Space Agency and billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, they plan to hitch a ride on one of Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets before the end of 2018.
Other teams see business opportunities in building lunar infrastructure, ferrying supplies to the moon or extracting minerals from its soil. If there are vast lakes of ice frozen in the shadows of the moon’s craters, as satellite imagery indicates, that could prove to be a valuable resource. Of course, any commercial enterprise would face the uncertainty of outdated international agreements that don’t address how private property works in space.
Meanwhile, governments are looking at the moon for the first time in years. In the US, President Donald Trump requested almost $900m in new funding for Nasa moon missions, which include building a space station in lunar orbit by the mid2020s. China this year plans to land a probe on the unexplored dark side of the moon, where radio signals from Earth can’t be received.
It’s the discovery of water, however, that could really start a gold rush on the moon, according to Rob Chambers, the director of human spaceflight strategy at Lockheed Martin Corporation.
Breaking free of Earth’s gravity requires so much thrust that fuel accounts for almost 90 percent of the weight in today’s rockets, putting tight limits on how far humans can travel into space.
The unforgiving maths that engineers use to describe this is known as the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. But water on the moon – and the hydrogen energy locked inside – could offer a way out, by turning Earth’s only natural satellite into a filling station on the way to Mars or beyond. – Bloomberg