On 23 February, 2024, the Odysseus Moon lander began its descent towards the surface of the Moon from an altitude of 92 kilometres. The lander pitched over and approached the surface at a slant, using an automated landing sequence to avoid any craters or boulders. There was a communications blackout during the terminal descent. It later emerged that one of the four feet of the lander caught something during the landing, causing it to topple. However, a Moon rock prevented the lander from toppling entirely, allowing it to continue communications.

Despite the off-nominal landing, it was a resounding success, and a historic mission. Odysseus was the first private spacecraft to reach the Moon, ushering in a new era of commercial operations. All previous missions to the Moon were research oriented, and state sponsored. A time capsule and an art project were among the commercial payloads that Odysseus successfully delivered to the lunar surface.

The Moon is not so far any more 

So far, the Moon was just the Earth’s only natural satellite, a celestial body to study, to understand more about the history and evolution of the Solar System. Now, the Moon is being perceived as the eighth continent, an extension of the Earth, a new frontier with untapped commercial opportunities. Most, if not all of the proposed and planned missions to the lunar surface by countries all around the world are aimed at eventually setting up at least a semipermmanent human outpost on the Moon.  Beyond just establishing a research outpost, there is interest in commercialising the lunar surface. The incipient plans are wide ranging, and include space tourism, filmmaking, astronomy, manufacturing and mining. All of these activities will require to be supported by power distribution, transport and communications infrastructure. There are private companies vying to provide these services on the lunar surface.

A major reason for this is the discovery of water in the highlands around the south pole of the Moon. There are permanently shadowed craters here, where the light from the Sun always falls at an incline. It is possible that there are deposits of water ice at the surface, or close to the surface in the depths of these craters. Water itself can be used to grow food on the Moon. Oxygen can be extracted from water, which can be used in life support systems as well as rocket fuel.

The force of gravity is six times weaker on the lunar surface than the Earth. If humans can set up propulsion extraction facilities and fuel up launch vehicles, the Moon may become an ideal launch pad for deep space missions to the outer Solar System and beyond, significantly bringing down the cost of space travel. There are opportunities for manufacturing as well, taking advantage of the tenuous lunar atmosphere combined with the low lunar gravity.  

Space Resource Technologies makes simulated Martian and Lunar regolith for testing developing technologies for future missions. When asked about the benefits of lunar exploration for humans on Earth, Anna Metke, CEO of Space Resource Technologies told us, “To enable a sustainable future for space exploration, resource utilisation and fuel humanity’s expansion into space.”  

All the major spacefaring nations have planned and proposed missions to the Moon, which are all geared towards preparing the groundwork necessary to establish a semipermanent presence on the lunar surface, along the lines of research outposts in Antarctica or orbital platforms such as the International Space Station (ISS) or the Chinese Tiangong space station.  

The race to the Moon is going on in earnest between China and the USA. China is leading an initiative called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in close collaboration with Russia and a number of other partnering nations, including European ones. Europe is concentrating its efforts around the concept of a Moon Village, which is an initiative aimed at assembling a lunar community, as against a particular project or programme. The European Space Agency (ESA) is working closely with NASA for realising the Artemis Basecamp. Here, we will have a closer look at each of these initiatives.

Whether or not there is water on the Moon is a subject that has been debated for centuries. The astronomers in the mid-seventeenth century who used telescopes to observe the Moon found dark patches, which were interpreted as seas. The Latin word for ‘seas’ is ‘maria’ in plural and ‘mare’ in singular, which is a terminology that has stuck, despite humans now knowing that there are no bodies of liquid water on the lunar surface.  

Over the course of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, the Moon was believed to be an inhospitable and dry space, as observations indicated that it lacked an atmosphere, which would cause any water on the surface to evaporate instantly. In 1961 theoretical physicist Kenneth Watson proposed the idea that water ice could exist in the permanently shadowed regions close to the lunar poles.

The samples returned during the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972 did not reveal the presence of water. However, the Clementine spacecraft in 1994 discovered strong hydrogen concentrations in the permanently shadowed craters, indicating the presence of water ice on the Moon. Hydrogen was also discovered within tiny beads of volcanic glass after Apollo samples were reexamined using modern, sophisticated techniques. In 2008 and 2009, ISRO’s Chandrayaan 1 mission, as well as NASA’s Cassini and Deep Impact probes discovered signs of water ice on the Moon.

A NASA instrument called the Moon Minerology Mapper on the Chandrayaan 1 orbiter comprehensively proved for the first time that water ice existed within the permanently shadowed craters on the Moon. The water ice in the permanently shadowed regions has also been confirmed by observations conducted by NASA’s SOFIA airborne observatory, before it was retired in October 2022. The data gathered by SOFIA was used to create the first high-resolution map of water distribution on the lunar surface.

It is the availability of water that makes the south pole of the Moon such an attractive location to set up humanity’s first extraterrestrial outpost. The initial pathfinding missions, especially the ones with rovers will set out to identify the areas where water is available close to the surface, and map its abundance as well as distribution. The initial set of landers will also characterise the lunar regolith and the wispy lunar atmosphere, to better plan future missions, and the construction of Moon Bases.  

On 11 December 2017, the then President of the United States of America, Donald Trump called for Americans to “Lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the Solar System and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities. Beginning with missions beyond low-Earth orbit, the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilisation, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.” 

NASA intends to return American boots on the surface of the Moon, with the first landing currently scheduled for 2025. This will be the Artemis III mission that will use the SpaceX Starship to allow astronauts to access the lunar surface. However, there have been developmental delays with the hardware, and it is likely that NASA will have to revise its timelines. Still, work is going on in earnest towards the mission, with NASA already identifying 13 candidate landing sites for the mission.  

Artemis III will be just the first of several crewed missions that will transport the hardware, resources and gear necessary to make staying on the Moon increasingly comfortable over time. Initially, the base is expected to consist of a lunar cabin, a rover, and a mobile home with its own life support system, making it something of an extraterrestrial caravan, that will allow crew to take trips as much as 45 days in duration. There will also be a sustained robotic presence that allows robots to continue construction and assembly work without human supervision. From short surface stays, the eventual goal is to set up a basecamp that allows humans to visit for durations longer than two months at a time.  

While initially, the landers such as Starship will themselves provide the astronauts with a temporary lunar headquarters. Eventually, NASA intends to set up a fixed habitat that can accommodate up to four astronauts at a time. NASA is evaluating rigid shells, expandable habitats and hybrid approaches. NASA is also on the verge of announcing the private company or companies that it has partnered with to develop a new Moon Buggy for Artemis missions, which can operate in both crewed and uncrewed configurations.

One of the biggest hurdles of operating on the Moon is the cost of transporting resources from the Earth to the Moon, which is an expensive endeavor. It currently costs $1.2 million to transport a kilogram of mass to the lunar surface. The idea is to use the resources available locally to the greatest extent possible. Apart from the weight of the payloads being a constraint, another is the size or bulk of the payloads as well. There is only so much that even the largest and most powerful rockets can accommodate, and future lunar missions may have to necessarily rely on multiple launches.   

One of the proposed construction approaches is to use additive manufacturing techniques or 3D printing to create bricks from the easily available lunar regolith. Tests conducted on the Earth have indicated that such bricks can withstand the extreme conditions on the Moon. 3D printing using ‘ink’ derived from lunar regolith can also potentially be used to manufacture tools and spare parts, reducing the reliance on resupply missions from the Earth, and bringing down the cost of lunar operations.  

Researchers have also demonstrated the technological capability for extracting oxygen from the lunar regolith, using a carbothermal reactor. The process of heating and extracting the oxygen from the lunar regolith takes place within the carbothermal reactor. Similar reactors are used on the Earth for the manufacturing of steel and solar panels, to produce carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. The development of this technology addresses a critical gap in NASA’s capabilities, and demonstrates that it is possible to extract oxygen from the lunar regolith.

Challenges of communicating with the Moon 

Most of the planned and proposed missions are headed to the south pole of the Moon. Radio is the conventional approach to communicate with spacecraft, and from the lunar nearside as well as the south pole, it is possible for a spacecraft to directly communicate with the ground stations on Earth. However, far side missions will require a relay satellite that can act as a link between the hardware on the surface. On 20 March, 2021, China launched the Quiqiao 2 or Magpie Bridge 2 relay satellite to support its future lunar missions.  

One of the problems with radio communications is bandwidth, that is the amount of data that can be transmitted in a particular interval of time. An attractive option that can relay about 200 megabits of data per second, and allow for the transmission of 4K video in realtime, is through the use of optical communications, or space lasers. NASA has already tested such a laser out on Earth, and will be evaluating the system during the Artemis II flight.  

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme intends to establish a regular cadence of private missions to the Moon with academic and commercial payloads, to support the Artemis programme. The landers are from a variety of private American aerospace companies that manage and operate the flights as well.  

Odysseus by Intuitive Machines was the first of these landers to deliver the payloads to the lunar surface. On 8 January, 2024, another private American spaceflight company, Astrobotic had launched its Pregarine lander on board a Vulcan rocket by United Launch Alliance. The spacecraft started leaking fuel, making a landing impossible. It reached lunar distance, and then returned to the Earth. Astrobotic made the responsible decision of deliberately destroying the spacecraft with an atmospheric reentry.  

Intuitive Machines got the valuable hands-on experience of operating a spacecraft. The missions have to be carefully managed through a 24×7 operation, to anticipate and react to dynamic situations, such as a loss of fuel, and provide the services necessary to all of the individual private payloads on board. These may include operations, scheduling and data transfer.

Both Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic will be making another Moon landing attempt before the end of 2024. Astrobotic’s Griffin lander will deploy a resource prospecting rover, while the second Nova-C lander from Intuitive Machines hopes to drill into the surface and hopefully discover lunar ice. Firefly Aerospace, yet another private American aerospace company had finished assembly of its Blue Ghost lander in 2023. This is likely to be the next Moon lander, in the third quarter of 2024. Firefly Aerospace has already started work on assembling its subsequent lander.  

It is not just the private companies in America that are aiming to commercialise the surface of the Moon. Skyroot Aerospace, that launched India’s first privately built rocket in November 2022, the Japanese Robotic Spacecraft company Hakuto, and the Australian turnkey satellite missions provider HEX20 have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop the market for lunar orbiters from the Indo-Pacific region.  

iSpace aimed to be the first private company to execute a controlled Moon landing, but the Hakuto spacecraft crashed into the Moon on 26 April, 2023. The company is determined to try again this year, with a lander that will include a rover on board as well.  

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has been conducting a highly successful lunar exploration programme since 1997. The programme is named after the Chinese Moon goddess Chang’e, and includes orbiters, landers and rovers dispatched to the lunar surface. After launching an impactor and an orbiter, China became the third country to execute a soft, controlled landing on the lunar surface after USA and Russia, with the Chang’e 3 mission, that reached the Moon on 14 December, 2013. The lander carried a rover on board. On 2 January, 2019, The Chang’e 4 lander became the first spacecraft to land on the dark side of the Moon, and continues to operate on the lunar surface.

The Chang’e 5 mission landed on 1 December, 2020 equipped with a drill that collected a rock core sample from a depth of a metre. An ascender then ferried the sample back to the Earth, which was subsequently distributed to scientists from a number of countries including Russia, France, Sweden, Australia and USA. These were the first lunar samples to be returned to the Earth since the Apollo programme.

The samples from the Chang’e mission expanded our understanding of the formation, evolution and geology of the Moon. The lander made the first in-situ detection of water on the lunar surface, discovered signs of recent volcanic activity, found asteroid impact events that could be matched with strikes on Earth, discovered signs of impact-induced magnetite formation on the lunar surface, and generally expanded the scientific understanding of lunar geology.  

The Quiqiao 2 relay satellite that has just entered lunar orbit will provide comms to Chang’e 6, that CNSA assembled at the Wenchang Space Launch Centre, and which landed on the lunar surface on 2 June. The sample return mission has a profile similar to the Chang’e 5 mission, and consists of an orbiter, a lander, an ascender and a reentry module. China is collaborating closely with the international scientific comunity for the Chang’e programme, with the Chang’e 6 lander carrying payloads from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the French Space Agency (CNSA). There is also an Italian laser on board for calibrating the instruments and the ICUBE-Q picosatellite from the Institute of Space Technology in Islamabad, that advances Pakistan’s lunar ambitions.   

Work on both the Chang’e-7 mission, and the Chang’e-8 mission is already in progress. Chang’e 7 is headed to a portion of illuminated ground on the edge of the Shackleton Crater, which marks the lunar south pole. China has invited international payloads for the Chang’e-8 mission, which will demonstrate 3D printing on the lunar surface using locally sourced Moon dust as ‘ink’. Together the trio of Chang’e landers will form a research station, paving the way for the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), an ambitious initiative led by China. 

International Lunar Research Station   

The ILRS is a long-term plan to set up a semipermanent outpost on the Moon, which can support visits by crewed missions, and also operate autonomously. Russia is a close collaborator with China on the ILRS, and China is collaborating with a number of countries and research institutions around the world for the programme. Over the course of 2023, China onboarded Egypt, Belarus, Thailand and South Africa to the ILRS initiative. CNSA has signed over 170 agreements with more than 50 countries for future cooperation in the space domain.

The ILRS rivals the Artemis Basecamp. The Artemis III mission is still officially slotted for 2025. China intends to land a crewed mission on the lunar surface before 2030. A pair of carrier rockets will be required to launch the mission, one for the lander and one for the crew module.  

According to the planned mission profile, the lander and the crew module will hop to lunar orbit after launch, and dock with each other. The taikonauts or Chinese spacefarers transfer to the lander, and touch down on the lunar surface to conduct experiments and collect samples, and return to the lander. The lander then ascends to lunar orbit, docks with the crew module again, with the taikonauts transferring back, and returning to the Earth.  

After a competition, the names of the crew module and the lander were picked in February 2024. The crew module has been dubbed Mengzhou or Dream Boat, while the lander has been named Lanyue or Embracing the Moon. The spacecraft has been configured to be assembled in orbit after being launched separately, and can be used in Earth orbit as well as future deep space missions.

China is developing the Long March 10 carrier rocket just for the brand new lunar hardware. The rocket has three and a half stages, measures five metres in diameter and can transport 27 tonnes to lunar orbit. China is also developing a spacesuit that can be used for Moon walks by the taikonauts. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) is also developing a lunar rover called the Wengshu Chariot, that can be stowed away, and can operate in crewed or uncrewed configurations.  

On 11 August, 2023, a Russian Soyuz 2 rocket launched the Luna 25 mission, which was the first Post-Soviet mission to attempt a lunar landing. The mission was headed to the highlands around the south pole of the Moon, to investigate the amount of water available. Luna 25 did not shed enough velocity when approaching the Moon because of a glitch, and crashed into the lunar surface on 18 August, 2023.

Luna 25 was just the first of a series of lunar missions planned by Roscosmos. Luna 26 is a relay satellite, much like Queqiao 2, and also has the capabilities of mapping the surface at a 2.3 metre resolution. The stereo imaging capabilities will be valuable around the lunar polar regions because the harsh shadows make it difficult to differentiate between a mount and a depression. 

Roscosmos is aiming to launch the Luna 26 mission in 2027, and the Luna 27 mission by 2030, followed by the Luna 28 mission. Both the landers are equipped with drills to penetrate deep into the lunar surface. Roscosmos expects to find water and volatile compounds with the missions. These Luna landers will work closely with the Chinese Chang’e landers, paving the way for the ILRS.  

China and Russia intend to start assembling the ILRS by 2030, with a focus on using local resources for constructing the habitats required. NASA has the same approach as well. It costs over a million USD to send a single kilogram to the lunar surface, which is why space agencies intend to use locally available resources on the Moon to the greatest extent possible.

Russia is exploring concepts for crewed missions, including building a lunar igloo within a mound, using the surrounding regolith or lunar soil. 3D printing technologies can be used to assemble bricks, the habitats themselves, tools and spaceparts. There will also be a requirement for communications facilities, to communicate with ground stations on Earth as well as the autonomous hardware on the Moon.

Russia is also considering autonomous vehicles that can extract the regolith, which can then be processed into ink for 3D printing, rocket fuel, with water and oxygen extracted for life support systems of the astronauts, as well as the inflatable greenhouses. Both NASA and Russia are evaluating innovative robots with wheels that scoop up the lunar dust. By moving the front and back wheels in different directions, these robots can stay in the same place, while digging into the regolith and collecting the material.  

On 23 August, 2023, India became the fourth country to execute a soft, controlled landing at a time and place of its choosing on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan 3 mission demonstrated India’s capabilities of delivering hardware to the lunar surface, operating the spacecraft, and conducting scientific experiments. The mission met all of its objectives, and ISRO went a step ahead, with the lander hopping on the lunar surface, and the orbiter, which was carrying a radiation based heater, returning to Earth orbit despite having minimal fuel.

With these stretch goals, ISRO was demonstrating the capabilities required for follow-on Chandrayaan missions. The short hop on the surface demonstrated that ISRO hardware could take off after landing on an extraterrestrial surface, a capability required for a future sample return mission. The orbiter returning to Earth demonstrated a sample return spacecraft can make the same journey.  

The propulsion units had a pair of small, experimental radioisotope heater units (RHUs). More powerful, scaled up versions of these devices can be used in the future for longer missions on the lunar surface. Chandrayaan 3 could operate for only a single lunar day because it could not survive the extreme cold of the lunar nights, where temperatures can drop to as much as -270°C.  

India is planning a series of follow-up Chandrayaan missions. The Chandrayaan 4 and thee Lunar Polar Exploration (LUPEX) mission, a collaboration with JAXA are both in the study phase. ISRO is planning the Chandrayaan 4 mission as a sample return mission, building on the capabilities demonstrated by Chandrayaan 3. The mission may also demonstrate 3D printing in the low gravity lunar environment.

The LUPEX mission is also headed to the south pole of the Moon. ISRO and JAXA plan to operate the Indian lander and the Japanese rover on the surface for between three and six months. The goal of the mission is to prospect for water in the permanently shadowed craters around the lunar south pole. It is possible that the same lander platform is used for both the Chandrayaan 3 and LUPEX missions. Both the missions are expected to be launched by 2028.  

ISRO plans to launch a series of Chandrayaan missions after Chandrayaan 4, building up the capabilities for landing an Indian astronaut on the Moon, in tandem with the Gaganyaan programme, an ambitious initiative to lift humans into Earth orbit primarily using domestic hardware. While reviewing the progress on the Gaganyaan programme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed ISRO to land the first Indian on the Moon by 2040.

ISRO went a step ahead, and came up with a roadmap that ended up with the construction of a Moon Base by 2047, in time for the 100th anniversary of Indian independence.  

At the 2023 National Symposium of the Indian Society of Geomatics (ISG) and the Indian Society of Remote Sensing (ISRS) at the Symbiosis institute of Geoinformatics in Pune, Maharashtra, ISRO Chairman S Somanath said, “For future Chandrayaan missions we need to have docking capability, we must be able to bring in samples from there, we must also do long duration Moon missions. The last mission was just two weeks, we couldn’t do more because of various limitations. This must be overcome, and we must do long duration missions. We must also create habitable capability there, and also building stations on the Moon over a long period of time. Next track is called the exploration track, where we create capacity to orbit the Earth, human access to space through Gaganyaan, building space stations, cislunar possibilities, and human landing on the Moon. The very important track is the launcher capability. Unless we have this capacity, none of these visions are possible. The limited capacity of launching today, we see that it cannot grow beyond a point. We must develop newer rockets with high capacity so that we can achieve all these dreams, over a period of time.”  

During the 11th convocation programme of the Pandit Deendayal Energy University (PDEU) in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, Somanath said, “We would also like to have a launch of a human spaceflight to Moon. Many people ask me this question, ‘Why do you send a person to Moon, when Americans did it so many years back. Why you want to do it again?’ I think many of you may be knowing that, today, the space economy is being talked about, which is Moon-based economy. I think these narratives you would have read very much, and in US they are working on how to create a Moon based economy, and exploration of space, based on facilities that are created on Moon. The Artemis Programme, which is piloted by US, is based on a Moon economy.”

ISRO is headed to the Moon for geopolitical as well as economic reasons, and intends to collaborate closely with other national space agencies as well as private domestic spaceflight companies to commercialise lunar operations in a sustainable manner. Somanath said, “We cannot be left behind. Like we did for the Antarctica mission. Today, we know we have a station there, and we are part of this exploration to understand Antarctica. And that same decision is what is being taken today, to be part of the Moon economy. And, we cannot be left behind. It has a scientific objective, it also has geopolitical and economic objective. I think this must be well understood by all of you. The energy that is created out of the Chandrayaan 3 landing really enables us to dream big today.” 

We then followed up with a question on the specific benefits of a Moon Base. Giri told us, “A base on the Moon, whenever it transpires, is not and will not be a global collective asset. As per the current commercialisation trends, it is bound to be built and operated by those who have invested in it. Having said that, the advantages depend on who invests in it, their strengths and weaknesses, whether the base will be running any commercially sustainable operations, whether there is a return on investment, and whether the base is made with strategic goals in sight. The bases on the Moon will provide an advantage only to those who invest in them; the rest of the non-investors will be bystanders. The advantage will depend on whether the moon base results in the extraction or harnessing of a new extraterrestrial resource or energy source, whether it leads to avant-garde spin-off technologies, whether the lunar base is a stop-over to Mars and other inner and outer solar system destinations, and whether it adds to the national economy. The advantages will be imminent once technical, monetary and human capital are invested sagaciously.”

There are already commercial campaigns being planned for making movies on the lunar surface, and mining for resources. The lack of an atmosphere and the low gravity environment can be suitable for manufacturing processes not possible on the Earth, for example producing a sunshield that can mitigate global warming. Observatories on the lunar far side can observe celestial targets without the disturbance of the Earth atmosphere. There will be a demand for ground transportation on the Moon, as well as power distribution networks, plans for all of which are being drawn up.  

Om Patnaik, 14 years of age, who studies in Grade 10 at Shiv Nadar School in Noida secretly wishes that the moon landing happens in the next 2 years so that there are no board exams. We asked Patnaik what a future Indian Moon Base could look like. Patnaik told us that the spacefarers would use “Inflatable tents or sleep pods that they will carry along with them in their spaceship. Decathlon can market these as Moon Pods and sell them in one size fits all. Inflatables because they will be light and easy to carry in bulk. Build a super sonic shield around them that will act as a protective layer against space radiation.”  

When asked what the spacefarers would wear, Patnaik replied, “For those who can afford it, a Darth Vader type suit with self pumping oxygen. A little less expensive option is the Mandalorian suit with a breathable helmet that residents will wear all the time, except when they eat and drink, with in-built gravity shoes to make walking easier on the surface. An even cheaper option can be Stormtrooper suits with no gravity boots, because I do not like them at all.”

ISRO is in fact developing inflatable habitat modules for use on the Antariksha Bharatiya Space Station. These modules can be chained together, and can be transported on rockets. While such inflatable structures may be suitable for certain facilities, such as greenhouses on the lunar surface, they will not offer sufficient radiation shielding. Both ESA and Russia have proposed using lunar mounds for radiation shielding, with some scientists even suggesting building outposts with ancient subsurface lava tubes.   

Attempt at a consolidated timeline There are no clear answers to the most pressing question when it comes to lunar exploration: ‘When?’. Based on the current optimistic plans announced by the various space agencies, here is an attempt at a consolidated timeline for the future of lunar exploration.