Preparations for foothold in final frontier

Aiming to kick off the Artemis era later this year, NASA is preparing for the first launch of its Space Launch System (SLS) mega-rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft, which will fly without any crew around the Moon and back on a trip lasting between 26 and 42 days. NASA hopes this Artemis 1 mission will be a steppingstone to its next giant goal, landing astronauts at the lunar south pole by the end of 2025.

On the morning of March 17, the world's largest set of doors rolled open to reveal an aerospace marvel at the Kennedy Space Center at Merritt Island, Florida. There, in NASA's biggest building, stood its newest rocket – the most powerful ever built and nearly 100 meters (328 feet) tall.

Like many space enthusiasts around the world, Renee Weber, a planetary scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, stared in awe at the webcast feed, "that thing is going to the Moon," she thought.

And unlike any of the rockets in the past half-century, this massive SLS rocket is expected to eventually carry people to the Moon. Thereafter, NASA plans to use it to send crews back to the lunar surface, more than 50 years after U.S. astronauts last walked there during the Apollo program, the upcoming program has been aptly called Artemis, after Apollo's twin sister in Greek mythology.

To help achieve this out-of-this-world goal and to support the Artemis program, NASA has contracted companies to send a series of robotic landers to the Moon, which will carry NASA-funded instruments to explore its surface and enhance the science that could benefit further space and astronaut missions.

Seven landers for the Moon

NASA's $93-billion Artemis program might be stealing most of the limelight with its maiden launch later this year, however, the U.S. is just one of many nations and private companies that soon plan to launch missions, heralding what scientists say could be a new golden age of lunar exploration.

Science is not the only driving force, however, with a flurry of missions also signaling the growing ambition of several nations and commercial players to show off their technological prowess and make their mark, particularly now that getting to the Moon is easier and cheaper than ever before.

To begin with, South Korea's Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), "is the first step to secure and verify Korea's space exploration capability and obtain new scientific measurements of the Moon," said Chae Kyung Sim, a planetary scientist at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute in Daejeon, South Korea, who is a member of the science team designing one of the mission's instruments.

"We are enjoying joining this new wave of lunar missions," Sim added.

Four other nations are also aiming to reach the Moon in 2022, Japan's SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon), which is likely to launch sometime later this year, will attempt a pinpoint landing, with a level of accuracy no other country has ever achieved. That mission is vying with Tokyo-based ispace, also set to launch this year, to be the country's first foray to the Moon.

India's Chandrayaan-3, currently officially slated for an August launch that might get delayed, will be the nation's second attempt to get a lander and rover onto the lunar surface.

Russia will once again be shooting for the stars with its Luna-25 lander, scheduled for a July launch to the south polar region. It will be the nation's first trip to the surface of the Moon since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And finally, the United Arab Emirates is embarking on its first lunar mission with a rover called Rashid, scheduled to launch later this year. Its flight will potentially mark another first – as the pioneering trip to the Moon by a commercial company.

Rashid will be carried to the surface on a lander developed by ispace that will be riding into lunar orbit on a rocket designed by SpaceX.

Other companies are also heading to the Moon as part of a NASA program, marking the beginning of commercial trips to other worlds.

So far, many national space agencies running these expeditions are providing only scant details about the missions and when they will launch, with schedules changing frequently. Representatives also say that the war in Ukraine is very likely to delay Russia's mission – and could have unexpected effects on others as well.

Whenever they launch, the missions aim to provide streams of data about the Moon – of which only a tiny fraction has been explored so far. Scientists also say this flurry of activity is likely to spur more frequent and cheaper access to the Moon and increase international interest in lunar research. Furthermore, it could also lay a foundation for crewed lunar outposts, which could provide a launching post for travel to Mars.

NASA partnerships

Unlike the days of Apollo, Artemis is happening in an age when private aerospace companies are developing their own, smaller rockets to get to the Moon. This era of commercial space flight is opening up a wide range of opportunities for US scientists to send robotic missions to the lunar surface.

"In the time since Apollo, we have not had regular surface access to the Moon," said Barbara Cohen, a lunar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

With NASA's first return to the lunar surface happening possibly by the end of this year, if all goes to plan, two companies partly funded by NASA – Intuitive Machines in Houston, Texas, and Astrobotic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – will make two landings on different parts of the Moon.

Intuitive Machines is targeting a dark region of the Moon in Oceanus Procellarum, carrying NASA instruments such as a video camera to capture the dust plume created by the lander as it touches down.

Astrobotic will travel to Lacus Mortis, a volcanic plain in the Moon's northern hemisphere, with NASA instruments including a mass spectrometer that will measure how exhaust gases from the landing effect the chemistry of the lunar dirt.

"By looking at how the gases interact with the surface, we can tell a lot about how they migrate and eventually get lost to space or trapped in cold polar reservoirs," said Mehdi Benna, a planetary scientist at Goddard and principal investigator of the experiment.

These landers are the first in a series of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, in which the agency hires companies to fly scientific instruments to the Moon rather than taking them there itself. It's a risky proposition, because none of these companies have previously built lunar landers.

So far, at least five more landers are planned in the coming years, each going to a different location and carrying different scientific instruments.

Part of this is to combat the high cost of transporting payloads into space, which is averaged at around $1,500 per kilogram (2.2 pounds).

The other part comes from current accessibility to "rocket science" that traditionally has been joked as the apex of human knowledge and thus the most difficult to understand.

Another Intuitive Machines probe is scheduled to land in 2024 at Reiner Gamme, which is a striking example of a geographical phenomenon known as a "lunar swirl." These are highly magnetized patches of the Moon's surface that appear as sinuous bright patterns. The planned spacecraft, called Lunar Vertex, will place a small rover in Reiner Gamma to gather magnetic measurements to try to unravel this lunar mystery and how lunar swirls are formed.

Beyond this, more commercial landers are planned for the coming years, with one including a NASA-built rover named VIPER which will serve as a lunar prospector and gather information on where volatiles are distributed, just as a gold miner would hunt for ore-rich veins.

With the current technological climate geared toward advancement in climate change and now adding unprecedented space progression, its clear that the next iteration of human evolution will be one toward efficiency and extraterrestrial exploration.