NASA's Artemis II took humans to the Moon after 53 years.
Why now?
Why not earlier?
How is Artemis actually different from Apollo?
Are there any real benefits?
What is China doing?
And where exactly does India fit in this great Moon race?
I break it all down in my op-ed for Deccan Herald.
From the article:
It has been 53 years since humans went to the Moon under the Apollo programme. … the two are fundamentally different. The Apollo era was driven by Cold War politics and was a strictly American endeavour. Its goal was short-term missions for symbolic and scientific progress. In contrast, Artemis stands on a web of international collaborations and commercial partnerships. It aims to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon.
The Apollo programme was plagued by massive costs. Artemis is trying to overcome this issue by moving away from government-owned rockets in favour of commercially procured reusable rockets and hardware. This is built on the understanding that long-term lunar exploration can only succeed if it’s economically viable.
… The rush to the Moon mirrors the geopolitical competition on Earth between the United States and China. The Chinese Communist Party views space as a ‘critical domain in international strategic competition’. It aims to supplant the US as the world’s leading space power by 2049.
… By 2030, it has plans to land its astronauts, and by 2035, to construct a station on the Moon in partnership with Russia.
… If China establishes a dominant lunar presence first, there is a profound fear in the West that it could use ‘lawfare’ (legal warfare) to enforce “keep out” zones over the most valuable lunar territory. The Artemis programme is a vehicle to carry not just the US and its partners’ infrastructure but also the values and governing preferences outlined in the Artemis Accords, a set of voluntary guidelines for conduct on celestial bodies.
… The Moon is seen as a massive reservoir of untapped wealth. Some craters near its south pole are permanently shadowed from the Sun and contain water ice. This water is being positioned as the ‘oil’ of the lunar economy. Besides human sustenance, it can also be split into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to serve as rocket fuel. If mining this lunar water and turning it into fuel proves viable, the Moon can become a stepping stone to Mars and Deep Space. Besides water ice, the Moon also holds critical minerals indispensable for modern electronics. Also, the lunar soil has an abundance of Helium-3, a potential clean fuel source for future nuclear fusion reactors.
Many of these resources are geographically concentrated in small regions of the Moon... All of this creates a ‘gold rush’ dynamic to be the first to reach and control these strategic locations and orbits.
It is currently impossible to judge if mining lunar ice or critical minerals will ever be economically viable. There is also no clear or strategic military advantage to be gained from activities in cislunar space yet. However, in case the bets do pan out, the countries that manage it first will greatly increase their wealth and technological competitiveness.