Interest in exploring the Moon has been fueled by the discovery, in the depths of some of its craters and in the polar areas, of water ice, a strategic and essential resource for future lunar bases. This interest has led to chained missions to the Moon by space agencies and private companies in recent months.
But the Moon is proving to be a tricky goal. Last August, the Russian Luna-25 crashed into the lunar surface in its attempt to overtake the Indian Chandrayaan-3 mission, which successfully placed a spacecraft on the Moon and made the Asian country the fourth to do so, after USA, the former Soviet Union and China. This January, the Peregrine spacecraft, owned by North American private capital, failed in its goal of reaching the Moon. And although on January 19, Japan landed on the moon for the first time, its SLIM ship was left poorly oriented and in a precarious situation.
It may be surprising that today, 53 years after the Soviet Luna-9 achieved the first lunar landing in history, and with technology superior to that of then, the Moon continues to represent such an imposing challenge.
It must be taken into account that the rockets must propel the ships with high power, which implies a large consumption of fuel. But more fuel means more weight, and weight ends up becoming a critical factor.
Weight limitation is one of the biggest challenges facing aerospace designs. A mission with the objective of landing on the moon must carry fuel to control its trajectory and allow itself to be captured by the gravity of our satellite. It also requires a braking system, based on retropropulsion engines, to land smoothly on the moon. It needs batteries and solar panels for power, and communications equipment to maintain contact with Earth. Weight imposes its law, and the ship project ends up being an exercise in compromise between the desirable and the possible.
The mission must also overcome challenges that are impossible to replicate on Earth. The Moon has six times less gravity, which affects the operations that ships must carry out. The absence of atmosphere makes the descent difficult: the ship must reduce its speed, going from thousands of kilometers per hour to a few meters per second, without the help of braking offered by air resistance or parachutes.
The long and complex sequence of operations required must work in conditions different from those existing on our planet, with no room for error.
Progress is therefore made from lessons learned from previous mistakes. The first spacecraft to reach the Moon, crashing as planned, was the Soviet Luna-2 in 1959, after five failed missions. The US needed thirteen attempts for its Ranger-4 to emulate the USSR’s milestone in 1962.
For current unmanned missions, the objectives are much higher in terms of ambition and scope, and involve a higher level of complexity: more and better scientific instruments are transported, greater precision is required at the lunar landing sites, and more and more are carried out. demonstrations of new technologies. It is no longer simply a matter of landing on the Moon, but rather carrying out complex studies in sites of special scientific or strategic interest, testing new communications systems or testing explorer robots.
The current scenario is different from that of yesteryear, in which only the great powers had the technology to leave Earth. Although there are still two main dominators (the United States and China, a country that has replaced the former Soviet Union in this leadership), various space agencies have been operating in space for years, such as the European one (ESA), the Japanese one ( JAXA) or india (ISRO).
With the arrival of new players in space, it is inevitable that some of them will have to navigate their learning curve when it comes to the challenge of landing on the Moon. Thus, although India has achieved notable successes in lunar orbit with its Chandrayaan missions since 2008, its first lunar landing attempt in 2019 failed when the spacecraft released by Chandrayaan-2 lost control, in the last leg of the descent, and crashed. crashed. A lesson that served so that, in August 2023, the Chandrayaan-3 lunar module made India the fourth country to reach the Moon and the first to land near the south pole.
A goal, landing on the moon, that Japan also achieved on January 19. However, their SLIM ship, despite being able to perform a maneuver of unprecedented precision to reach the planned location, could not avoid landing with an incorrect orientation that prevented light from reaching its solar panels. Given the risk of completely depleting the batteries, those responsible for the mission decided to turn off all systems when only 12% of the energy remained, trusting that the movement of the sun in the sky could illuminate the ship’s panels in the coming days.
Space is also opening up for businesses, and the Moon is no exception. No private initiative has yet managed to land on the moon, an achievement that will most likely be achieved shortly thanks to the increasing pace of missions: in 2019, the Beresheet capsule, an initiative of the Israeli organization SpaceIL, lost control in its descent attempt; The Hakuto-R, from the Japanese ispace, suffered a similar fate in 2023; and a few weeks ago, the North American company Astrobotic tried it with the Peregrine mission, which could not reach the Moon due to a fuel leak. The next attempt could be made at the end of February with the Nova-C mission, sponsored by the American company Intuitive Machines.
The growing interest of the private sector in sending missions to the Moon translates into an increase in projects designed and operated by first-time participants. And the majority pay the toll of learning from error.
It may seem surprising that it was possible to place crews on the Moon fifty years ago and that it has not been attempted again since 1972. But there are two reasons that explain this: budgets and risks.
The context of the Cold War and competition for space dominance between the United States and the Soviet Union marked and promoted the beginning of space exploration in the late 1950s. The Moon became the target of the so-called space race. The project led by a young NASA (created in 1958) had the largest budget in its history: in 1966, the agency’s budget was equivalent to 4.4% of the national total (in 2023 it represented 0.41%). The lunar project created more than 400,000 jobs in the burgeoning aerospace industry, including 100,000 jobs on NASA’s payroll (the space agency’s workforce in 2023 has been around 18,000 workers).
This immense effort made it possible to carry out the innovations necessary to reach the Moon, including the design of the Saturn V rocket, a colossus that flew for the last time in 1973 and which, to date, remains the only one that has sent astronauts beyond orbit. land. But the conquest of the Moon did not come without tragedies: the three crew members of Apollo 1 died of asphyxiation during a simulation in January 1967, when a spark started a devastating fire inside the capsule in which they were training. A few months later, the Soviet side suffered the loss of the only cosmonaut aboard Soyuz 1, who perished when his ship crashed into Earth.
There were also delicate moments, which were saved thanks to a combination of skill and fortune. In one of the most tense moments in space history, Neil Armstrong decided to take manual control of the descent of the Apollo 11 lunar module, in which he was traveling with Buzz Aldrin, when they both observed that the ship was moving too fast. And in April 1970, what seemed to be a routine third mission to the Moon became one of the most epic episodes of space exploration: an explosion aboard Apollo 13, 300,000 kilometers from Earth, left the ship and crew dead. in a critical situation, with almost no oxygen and energy supplies. Only a chain of risky and desperate decisions prevented a tragedy that seemed inevitable.
In short, the Cold War provided almost unlimited resources and required great risks to send astronauts in fragile ships and spend a few hours on the Moon. Once the objective was achieved, the project did not continue. Today, the human return to our satellite aims to be carried out without the precariousness of then and with missions that turn the Moon into a frequent destination (even with future plans to establish bases). And all this must be achieved with fractions of the budgets of the past.
