To The Moon And Mars – Mapping The New Space Race

Space Race 2.0

Mankind’s first exploration of space occurred during the Cold War and the great power struggle between the USA and the Soviet Union. As unfortunate as it is, it seems that one of our species’ greatest achievements needed to have conflicts and the threat of war to get moving forward.

After Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the impulse to go to space faded a little. Decade after decade, more years accumulated without a single human having walked on the Moon.

But a new space race is heating up, and like the first one, it is fueled by the growing rivalry between the USA and the new rising superpower, China. With Russia, heir of the Soviet Union, ready to join forces with China.

When discussing the recent progress in space exploration, we tend to focus either on the short term, like the impressive landing by SpaceX a few days ago.

Or the very long term, like how we could build a global space-based economy or the infrastructures required to get there, including supplying unlimited green energy to Earth.

Less often discussed in the immediate next 1-2 decades, as well as the plans of non-Western public agencies and private companies.

Space Stations

ISS

After the end of the Russian space station Mir in 2001, only the ISS (International Space Station) was still in orbit with astronauts.

Source: NASA

This aging piece of equipment, started in 1998, is increasingly hard to maintain and prone to failure. As a result, it is expected to be decommissioned by 2030 at the latest.

In the summer of 2024, NASA announced that SpaceX had been selected to develop and deliver the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle.

China’s Tiandong

The ISS was recently joined by the China Tiandong (meaning Celestial Palace) space station, the construction of which started in 2021.

Source: Wikipedia

China decided to build its own station following the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 US law that banned China from collaborating with the US, Europe, or Japan in space exploration, especially the ISS.

It is now widely seen as a bad idea, and it has triggered China to develop its own capability in space launch and space station construction. Tiandong is now opening for non-Chinese astronauts, most likely first its Russian partners, who have been instrumental in speeding up China’s progress in space.

China plans to double the station from 3 to 6 modules in the coming years. This would bring its mass to 180 metric tons, or just 40% of the ISS’s 450 tons.

Source: Wikipedia

Discussions online have also focused on how more streamlined the interior design of Tiandong is compared to the ISS, but this is likely a little unfair, as Tiandong benefited from much more recent IT technology and the experience of Mir and the ISS construction.

Source: Reddit

Tiandong will give experience to China’s taikonaut, the Chinese word for astronaut, the way Russians used cosmonaut, and be used to perform scientific missions.

It will also service a Hubble-like space telescope called Xuntian (“survey of the heavens.”), which will share the space station’s orbit and be provided by Tiandong repairs, maintenance, and future upgrades.

“The Xuntian telescope has been the most important scientific project since the launch of our country’s space station program. It is a scientific facility that the Chinese astronomical community has eagerly anticipated, and a scientific facility representing the state-level high tech in astronomy.

Hubble may see a sheep but the CSST sees thousands, all at the same resolution,”

Zhou Jianping – Chief designer of the China manned space program

Russian Station

Since the end of Mir, Russia has been a key partner in the ISS program, reflective of a new era of a more limited budget post-Soviet Union, and better international relations.

The Ukraine war has been weighing heavily on this since, and in 2024 announced plans to exit the ISS program and build its own 4-modules space station. The first module will be launched by 2025, with the 4 main modules attached by 2030 and 2 others by 2033.

Source: Payload

This ambitious plan illustrates Moscow’s intent to stay an independent partner to China and not rely entirely on it regarding space exploration. However, it might suffer from budget constraints if the war in Ukraine persists or if the Russian economy slows down. It will also highly depend on the success of the recently tested heavy launcher Angara A5.

Fly Us To The Moon

Besides space stations, the Moon is the primary concern of the new space race, with NASA and its international partners, as well as Russia and China, planning to build permanently occupied manned bases.

This is due to a few key points that make the Moon very attractive for a first step in interplanetary colonization.

Proximity

The first argument for developing our first space base on the Moon is that it is relatively close to Earth. Contrary to what could be expected, this does not significantly reduce the total number of rocket launches or energy required to reach it. Once in orbit, everything in the solar system is “close” regarding the energy required.

However, it is a much shorter trip. This has multiple advantages:

• Less travel time means less radiation exposure and less need for heavy shielding of the transit spaceship.
• Bringing extra supplies in an emergency or evacuating a sick or injured astronaut is quicker.
• There is almost no communication lag (1.25 seconds), which allows for almost instant communication, real-time conversation, and assistance with teleoperated systems.

Gravity

The Moon’s gravity is 1/6th of Earth’s. This is not much, but it might help reduce the negative health effects of microgravity, such as those on space stations. It actually could be a gold mine of information to understand what low, but non-zero gravity does to the human body in the long-term, something still not understood. And obviously, this is a very important data to understand if we could one day settle Mars.

It also makes everything from manufacturing to maintenance and daily life easier. Items fall down, liquids and food do not float around, etc.

Metallic Regolith

Many imagine the surface of the Moon being made of a dusty white rock. Instead, the surface of the Moon, especially the top 15 meters (16 yards) is made of a fine abrasive dust from meteorite bombardment, called regolith.

This regolith is made mostly of oxygen (43%) and silicon (20.1%), but also a lot of metals: 12.5% iron, 7.4% aluminum, 6.1 magnesium, and 1.8% titanium. This means that it could provide, straight for the picking at the surface, all the metals we would need to build large habitats and solar panels for a Moon Base.

It could even provide more metals than we need to build solar panels to power Earth or large spaceships for mass transits to Mars.

It is also possible to smelt it and refine it using local resources relatively easily. For more information, you can check the excellent (and long) video by the channel Astrum on the topic:

Airlessness

Because the Moon is airless, it will likely never have billions of inhabitants. However, this has a few major advantages.

The first one is that smelting of regolith metal in a hard vacuum can be done by turning them into gases. This can be done at temperatures below 1,000°C, easy to reach with solar concentrators.

Another advantage of having no air combined with low gravity is that leaving the Moon’s surface is much easier than leaving Earth’s. While on Earth, mass drivers, a sort of high-speed catapulting spaceships in orbit, are still science fiction, we could probably build one of the Moon tomorrow with the right budget.

Combined with the local material abundance, this suggests that it might make more sense to mine and manufacture the bulk of the material needed for space exploration on the Moon.

NASA Moon Plans

NASA’s plan for the Moon is covered by the Artemis missions, starting with Artemis I up to Artemis IV, with the building of a permanent Moon base, as well as a space station in the Moon’s orbit, the Lunar Gateway.

Source: NASA

The plan is for one mission per year, with 4 astronauts each time, 2 in orbit and 2 on the Moon itself.

Source: The Planetary Society

Delays Pilling Up

A recurring issue with the Artemis program is delays in the planned schedule. In 2020, Artemis II & III were already expected for 2024.

A key issue is the SLS (Space Launch System), a new rocket built by the large defense & aerospace contractors Boeing, Aerojet Rocketdyne (part of L3Harris), Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. SLS’ total development costs have exploded to $100B, or $12m per day, and experienced several failures during testing. As a non-reusable rocket, it also increases the budget of the Moon missions significantly.

The lunar lander, or Human Landing System (HLS), is also getting delayed, which was assessed to have a 70% chance of being ready by 2028. Meanwhile, the Artemis rover team from Lockheed Martin is being replaced by Leidos Employees.

The closest deadline for humans to return to the Moon is now by 2026, with lunar habitats (Foundation Habitat and Mobile Habitat) launched by 2032.

Overall the repeated delays and massive cost overruns have impacted NASA’s reputation and made many space enthusiasts despair of when would Artemis actually be happening.

Russia’s & China’s Moon Plans

In 2021, China announced a plan to build a Moon base jointly with Russia, as well as collaborate with a series of other countries mostly in Asia and Africa.

Source: Wikipedia

It follows the recent major success of the Chinese space agency’s Chang’e 6 probe, which brought the first-ever sample of lunar rock from the far side of the Moon.

The Chang’e-7 mission, scheduled for 2026, will survey the south pole, which has been selected as the site for the future Moon base.

Chang’e-8 will be launched in 2028 to experiment with using lunar resources for in-situ manufacturing.

The public plan is much less detailed than the Artemis program. We, however, know a few things:

• It will be divided into 3 phases and require 5 missions from super-heavy launchers still in development.
  • The first phase will be dedicated to scientific measurements and local resources.
  • The second phase will build the basic supporting elements and the first manned landing remotely.
  • The third phase, likely around 2045, will build the actual base ready to receive more astronauts and scale up the facility.
• The idea is to use each Chang’e mission to develop one by one the modules of the required technology, like landing on the South Pole and exploring it, how to use local resources, etc.
• It is clear that China is counting on progress on its launcher technology, including reusability, to help build the station in the meantime.

Source: Techeblog

You can also see the first renders of the planned Moon base in this video from the Chinese state media (in Chinese):

Nuclear Energy

A major contribution of Russia to the program would be its expertise in nuclear energy, especially miniaturized reactors. It is expected to reach as much as 1MW (1,000 kW).

This might also be done in collaboration with India, a new ambitious lunar nation that has been achieving this since its 2023 robotic mission on the Moon with Chandrayaan-3, making it the fifth nation to do so.

Nights on the Moon last 14 days, which could be crucial for any large-scale occupation that will struggle to rely solely on solar power.

It can be remarked that NASA is also planning to use nuclear energy, but at a much smaller scale, with Rolls Royce’s 50-100 kW micro-reactors.

Lunar Economic Zone

China has a very ambitious plan for space exploration and Moon colonization, with a view that is very Chinese and focused on economic development instead of “scientifically pure” space exploration.

It notably proposed establishing an Earth-Moon space economic zone and has drawn up a roadmap for it with an annual “total output value of more than US$10 trillion” by around 2050.

Lunar Mass Driver

If this plan sounds extremely far-reaching, it’s because it is.

The multi-trillion-dollar Earth-Moon economy imagined by Chinese planners and researchers would potentially include helium-3. This ultra-rare element might make nuclear fusion easier to achieve (with no neutron emissions).

“Just 20 tons of helium-3 could meet China’s yearly electricity demand. While Earth has only around 0.5 tons of helium-3, the lunar soil is estimated to contain 1 million tons—enough to power the world’s energy needs for over a thousand years.

Lunar soil has enough helium-3 to power the world for over a thousand years”