A new lunar race: China, India and Korea join US and Europe in ambitious Moon exploration

South Korea's Danuri probe is on its way to the Moon, taking a long gravitational slingshot around the Sun before arriving at its destination in December. It is the first lunar mission the country has ever launched, and it marks the beginning of something larger: a coordinated rush by more than six nations to return to Earth's nearest neighbor in what promises to be a fundamentally different kind of space race than the one that ended fifty years ago.

The new lunar era is driven by ambitions that go far beyond planting flags. The United States, Europe, China, India, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates are all sending probes and landers to the Moon with the same core objectives: to understand and exploit its mineral wealth, to establish permanent bases that could sustain human life, and to use the Moon as a staging ground for eventual missions to Mars. The technological competition is real—the United States and Europe cite China as their principal rival—but so is the scientific opportunity. The Moon holds water ice in the perpetually shadowed craters of its south pole, a resource that future astronauts could use for drinking water and for manufacturing rocket fuel. It contains strategic elements like uranium and helium. Its geology, especially at the poles, remains largely unexplored.

Danuri carries four scientific instruments, one of them a camera called Polcam that will be the first to study lunar soil texture using polarized light. The instrument will help map the size of regolith particles, revealing how long they have been exposed to the harsh conditions of space. Another tool will measure the Moon's magnetic field. A fourth instrument, called ShadowCam and built by NASA, will peer into those dark polar craters where scientists believe vast quantities of water ice lie waiting. Sungsoo Kim, a researcher at South Korea's Aerospace Research Institute and the scientist responsible for Polcam, explained that his country wants to develop the technology to explore and communicate with the Moon and other bodies in the solar system. "A new era of space exploration is approaching," he wrote, "and Korea wants to be part of it."

But the most ambitious mission launching this year is NASA's Artemis I, scheduled for August 29. It will be an uncrewed test flight of the Orion capsule and the Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built. The European Space Agency has constructed the Orion's service module—the component that provides propulsion, power, solar panels, and life support systems. Philippe Deloo, a Belgian engineer leading Europe's contribution, described it as the spacecraft's legs. The Orion will fly to the Moon, pass within 100 kilometers of its surface, and complete one and a half orbits before returning to Earth. Three mannequins will be aboard: one in a full spacesuit and two torsos, named Helga and Zohar, that will test a special radiation-protection vest. The capsule will send back images of the lunar surface and what is expected to be the highest-quality photograph of Earth ever taken from the Moon—a moment that echoes the iconic images sent back by Apollo astronauts in 1968, which shocked the world by showing the planet from beyond itself.

The Artemis I mission will take nineteen days to complete its lunar orbit and another nineteen days to return. The Orion will splash down in the Pacific Ocean on October 10, slowed from 40,000 kilometers per hour to just 30 by a sequence of eleven parachutes. The spacecraft's heat shield will reach approximately 3,000 degrees during reentry. If all goes as planned, Artemis II will carry astronauts on a similar lunar orbit in 2024, and in 2025, a woman will walk on the Moon for the first time. The astronaut has not yet been named, but she will be selected from NASA's current corps of 42 astronauts, nearly half of them women, ranging in age from their late twenties to their sixties. Reid Wiseman, NASA's chief of astronauts, noted that candidates undergo medical examinations, but those who are healthy can expect to be sent to space.

The contrast with Apollo is stark. Deloo emphasized that Artemis is infinitely more ambitious than its predecessor. "In Apollo, science was a side objective," he said. "Now we are going to deploy all our capabilities to explore the south pole of the Moon, which has enormous geological interest and great potential for commercial mineral extraction. All of this will teach us whether we can live there autonomously and use the Moon as a springboard to reach Mars." The radiation exposure limits for astronauts have been equalized regardless of sex, a change that reflects decades of progress toward equality in the space program.

Other nations are pursuing more modest but still significant lunar goals. India, which made one of the most important recent discoveries on the Moon—the detection of water by its Chandrayaan-1 probe in 2009—failed to land its Vikram module in 2019 but plans another attempt in the first third of 2023. China successfully landed on the far side of the Moon in 2019 and is planning multiple exploration missions, sample collection from asteroids, and construction of its own space station. Japan is preparing the Slim mission, which will attempt the most geographically precise landing ever made on the Moon. The United Arab Emirates, which successfully sent the Al Amal probe to orbit Mars last year, plans to land a small rover called Rashid on the Moon with assistance from the Japanese company ispace.

Russia, despite its isolation following the invasion of Ukraine, still intends to compete. The Soviet Union was once a first-rank rival to the United States and for decades was the only other nation capable of successfully landing robotic probes on the Moon. Sanctions and the rupture of space cooperation between Moscow and the West have made things far more difficult. Russia's Luna-25 lander, originally scheduled to launch in July, will probably not lift off until 2023. The geopolitical fracture has also created uncertainty about the International Space Station, which Russia announced it would leave in 2024—a move that would disrupt American and European plans to operate it until 2030. Yet Deloo suggested that Western partners should be able to continue operating the station without Russia's module, which has only one essential function: to deorbit the station at the end of its life. For now, Western partners can continue to boost the station's orbit to maintain its altitude, buying time to adapt and operate independently.