The New Moon Race: Why Go Back At All?

Opening

Hello, dear subscriber. Did you happen to read any space books as a kid? I remember my mother buying me Isaac Asimov’s space series, and I read them cover to cover. Looking back, it was already the 1990s by then, so space already felt a little… out of fashion, if I’m honest. But right now, humanity is talking about space more than ever.

Let me be more precise. It’s been 53 years since Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17 lifted off from the lunar surface in December 1972. In that time, a single smartphone has become more powerful than all of NASA’s computers combined, and more than 10,000 satellites now orbit Earth. Yet humans have never gone back to the Moon.

That 53-year silence is about to break. Yesterday, on April 1st, NASA’s Artemis II launched with four astronauts aboard, headed for the Moon. This time, though, there’s no landing — it’s a flight that loops around the Moon along a free-return trajectory¹ and comes back. But what caught my attention isn’t the launch itself. It’s the fact that a month before launch, on February 27th, NASA overhauled the entire Artemis program. And behind that overhaul stands China.

Why It Took 53 Years — Not That We Skipped the Moon, We Simply Had No Reason to Go Back

The Apollo program was never really about scientific exploration. It was Cold War regime propaganda. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, the United States was gripped by fear of falling behind technologically, and to quiet that fear, it poured 4.4% of the federal budget into NASA. In today’s dollars, that’s roughly $280 billion — about ₩380 trillion.

The goal was achieved. Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, and American pride was restored. But once the goal was met, the reason for going evaporated. With the Vietnam War straining the federal budget, the U.S. could no longer justify spending big on space exploration that offered no further practical gain. Apollo missions 18 through 20 were cancelled, and NASA scientists’ dreams of a lunar base and Mars expeditions were shelved indefinitely.

But two things changed in the 21st century.

First, resources were discovered on the Moon. In 2008, India’s Chandrayaan-1 confirmed more than 600 million tons of ice at the Moon’s north pole. Water is drinkable, and when split into hydrogen and oxygen, it becomes rocket fuel — meaning the Moon could supply its own resources in situ. On top of that, helium-3², seen as a future fuel for nuclear fusion, is estimated to exist on the Moon in quantities exceeding one million tons.

Second, a new competitor emerged: China. A country with almost no presence in the 1960s now operates its own space station, Tiangong, and has successfully returned soil samples from the far side of the Moon via Chang’e 6. China has declared it will put astronauts on the Moon by 2030.

The old motive of a prestige contest is gone, but a new motive — resources and geopolitical competition — has taken its place.