The delay to Nasa’s 10-year lunar programme gives us time to beef up the treaties governing the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources
It has been a grim time for lunar exploration. Scientists and space engineers had earmarked 2024 as the year that humanity would begin its return to the moon in earnest. An ambitious programme – largely funded through Nasa’s $2.6bn commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) initiative – was drawn up. Its forerunner projects included the launch of the robot lander, Peregrine, last week – to be followed by a crewed mission, Artemis II, that would put four people into orbit round the moon in September. These missions would form the vanguard for a schedule of further projects, both robot and crewed, that would lead to the construction of a lunar colony some time in the next decade.
These pioneering aspirations have not had an auspicious start, however. Shortly after its launch on Monday, mission controllers revealed that Peregrine – despite a flawless launch – had suffered a critical loss of propellant and would fail to make a landing on the moon. Then came the news that Nasa had decided to postpone its Artemis II mission for a year “for safety reasons”.
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