The New Race to the Moon

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Speaker 1
This summer, two countries have had their eyes on the skies, literally. 8765 in mid July, India launched an uncrewed spacecraft to the moon.

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Speaker 2
We have a majestic liftoff of lbm three m four rocket carrying India's prestigious Chandrayan three spacecraft.

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Speaker 1
In early August, in a different corner of the world, Russia did the same thing. Both missions were set touch down on a part of the moon that no one had ever been able to reach before. And the world waited to see who would get there first. Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, August 25. Coming up on the show, the new race to the moon. Have you ever wanted to go to space?

01:23
Speaker 3
I have not. Ever? No.

01:27
Speaker 1
You cover NASA and you've never wanted to.

01:30
Speaker 3
I mean, let me try that again.

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Speaker 1
Our colleague Micah Maidenberg reports on the business of space.

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Speaker 3
As somebody who's like, covering this day in and day out, I tend to sort of let the protagonist behind these devices and these programs chase after those dreams. But it's certainly more possible today to imagine visiting space potentially going beyond than it did in decades past.

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Speaker 1
During the Cold War, the moon captured the imaginations of both the former Soviet Union and the United States.

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Speaker 4
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

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Speaker 1
At first, the Soviet Union seemed to be pulling ahead. In 1959, the luna two became the first human made object touch moon dust.

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Speaker 4
Soviet Russia scores a dramatic victory in the exploration of space with the launching of the first rocket to hit the moon.

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Speaker 1
Ten years later, the US took the lead when it successfully landed astronauts on the moon in its Apollo eleven mission.

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Speaker 3
Twelve, 1110, nine.

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Speaker 4
Ignition sequence start.

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Speaker 1
In the decades that followed those first moon landings, the focus shifted. Scientists set their sights on other planets, sending probes to Venus and Mars and even beyond the solar system. But in the last ten years, the moon has started to return to center stage. And now the race to the moon is back on. But this is not your grandma's space race. First off, there are way more players in the game today.

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Speaker 3
This time around, you have the traditional sort of space know. Russia, the United States, China is now very much in the mix and has landed devices on the moon. And Japan is working on a probe.

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Speaker 1
Mexico and the United Arab Emirates are also working on their own lunar missions. And private companies like SpaceX and intuitive machines are working with NASA on their space initiatives. And these modern moon missions aren't just about national prestige at the kind of.

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Speaker 3
Like, grandest level there's a lot of hope or a lot of thinking about how to create kind of like a sustainable, long term presence on the moon and sort of launch practice for deeper space missions, perhaps to Mars.

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Speaker 1
Building a lunar base that can serve as a jumping off point starts with one region, the moon's south pole, which happens to have an important resource.

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Speaker 4
And now it appears there is much more water on the surface of the moon than anyone ever knew, including NASA scientists. They expected to find just teaspoons of water.

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Speaker 3
Instead, we found maybe about a dozen of these two gallon buckets worth of water. And potentially having those resources is really valuable because if you're doing longer term exploration and have like a multi year presence on the moon, you can use the water for fuel, for potentially other uses. That's all stuff that you don't have to transport out to the moon from Earth. And that makes a big difference in terms of designing and operating spacecraft.

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Speaker 1
There's something romantic about it, isn't there? I read a lot of Sci-Fi and I watched the expanse, and there's just something feels like the first step to something bigger.

05:11
Speaker 3
Yeah, it could be. I mean, the romance always has to be kind of balanced out with a few different other factors. Like, chief among them is just like how hard it is to pull this stuff off. It's very difficult to escape the gravity well of Earth at a rocket launch. It takes really precise planning and sophisticated technology to send a device to catch up with the moon and start orbiting it. And then it's a tough operation to get a lander to sort of softly touch down. It's not like landing a commercial airplane.

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Speaker 1
So taking off from Earth and landing on the moon are not easy. What about getting to the moon, south Pole? What are the challenges there?

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Speaker 3
It's tricky. It has big craters, there are boulders. It's not as easy to sort of land on compared to the areas where the Apollo missions were conducted in the late sixty s and early 1970s. The south Pole, it's darker and it's colder than other parts of the moon. The sun can kind of cast shadows that make it harder to sort of understand the surface and what you're actually trying to land on. So that adds another complicating factor for pulling off landings.

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Speaker 1
If actually landing on the moon is so hard, why are all these countries making it such a priority?

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Speaker 3
I think the answer to that is it is for governments, sort of in a sense, like a bet on the unknown. The value of basic scientific research, creating aerospace and space jobs like in your country, maybe there's technology that spins out of some of those projects that create other jobs. You're hoping that you're going to motivate your economy and society in these big and ambitious ways.

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Speaker 1
And this week, one country's big ambitions paid off.

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Speaker 3
Jiha screen pedestakte.

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Speaker 1
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07:36
Speaker 2
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07:39
Speaker 5
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Speaker 1
Well, Russia's lunar 25 lander is scheduled to land at the moon's south Pole sometime on Monday night. Russia's mission to the moon was meant touch down first, but the day before the landing, the mission failed. Russia's space agency reported that Luna 25 had been preparing to land when it spun out of control and crashed onto the moon's surface.

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Speaker 3
For Russia, this mission was about demonstrating its technological prowess, that it could still pull off really big, tough technical feats in spite of the international isolation that it faces following its invasion of Ukraine last year. Russia has sent landers to the moon before. This was going to be their first time they'd done it in decades, and they missed the mark.

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The Lunar 25 was launched only ten days ago, a mission critical to Russia and to its president, Vladimir Putin.

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Luna 20 five's launch into space had raised hope in Moscow that Russia was returning to the big power moon race.

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It doesn't look great. It's not the outcome that Russia, that Roscosmos, the space agency, wanted to see happen. There's concern that some of the past experience and capabilities that Russia developed during the Soviet Union days have been lost.

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But then on Wednesday, just days after Russia's failed mission, scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, watched as their spacecraft prepared touch down on the moon.

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Speaker 3
Sir, we have achieved soft landing on the moon. India is on the moon.

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Speaker 1
Around 06:00 p.m. Local time, India stuck the landing. It was the first time that any country had landed on the south pole of the moon. What was your first thought when you saw that India had successfully landed on the moon?

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Speaker 3
Well, my first thought was, I'll paraphrase, it was something like, holy cow, they did it.

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Speaker 1
They did it. Where does this put India as a player in the world space business?

10:14
Speaker 3
It definitely sort of places India in the kind of pantheon know major spacefaring nations, no question about look like only three other countries have ever landed on the moon, the US, China, and Russia. Now India is the fourth.

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Speaker 1
Micah says that India's success is especially exciting considering how new it is to the space race compared to those other countries.

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Speaker 3
India has been like more of an up and coming space fairy nation in recent years. I mean, they still have a relatively very small budget compared to NASA, but they've really shown that they can pull off kind of big things in space.

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Speaker 1
This year, India budgeted $1.5 billion for its space program. NASA's budget is 25 billion. But India has been determined to land on the moon's south pole. It actually tried to send a rover once before.

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Speaker 3
That mission did not work out. It was not able to land on the moon as India hoped. That happened in the fall of 2019. So about four years ago. The main thing that India did here, just sort of broadly speaking, is they adjusted. They learned.

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Speaker 1
This success means that India is in a position to get more funding and international partnerships for its space program. And all that could lead to good things for its economy.

11:37
Speaker 3
I mean, India is building a domestic space industry, no question about it. The lander that made it to the moon, that's an. I know. You know, ISRO is planning more missions and has specifically talked about this operation as a demonstration of capabilities that they'll use for even more ambitious kind of projects in the future.

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Speaker 1
Does this success give India any type of geopolitical advantages?

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Speaker 3
The timing might just be a little coincidental, but it's really interesting that India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, watched the landing from South Africa, where he was attending a conference of developing world country. It was called the BRICS summit. And part of what this mission shows is that developing countries can use their own technology and create their own ambitions with that technology and pull it off. That's something that India will be able to talk about with countries that are still developing that want to sort of move up. I suspect that's something that's very much on the agenda for India kind of going forward.

12:51
Speaker 1
For those watching the expeditions to the moon, this has been a big week, but the new space race is just getting started.

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Speaker 3
There's still more to come. Landing was like the first big hurdle. A big part of this mission is also sort of deploying a rover that would be able to move around the area where the lander touched down and take different kinds of readings for research purposes. And then beyond that, the japanese space agency is expected to launch a probe as soon as this month. There are two us moon landing missions that could launch later on this year.

13:35
Speaker 1
And next year, NASA plans to launch four astronauts on a journey around the moon, which Mike assess is key to getting humans back on the lunar surface and maybe eventually to explore beyond it. That's all for today. Friday, August 25 additional reporting in this episode by Vibuti Agarwal and Island Woodward. The journal is a coproduction of Gimlet and the Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Annie Baxter, Catherine Brewer, Maria Byrne, Victoria Dominguez, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphries, Ryan Knutson, Matt Kwong, Kate Leinbach, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinoza, Heather Rogers, Jonathan Sanders, Pierce Singhy, Jiva Caverna, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen and me, Jessica Mendoza. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapock and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by so Wiley.

14:44
Speaker 1
Additional music this week from Bobby Lord, Griffin Tanner, Marcus Bagala, Nathan Singapock, Peter Leonard and Blue Dot sessions. Fact checking by Kate Gallagher and Najwa Jamal. Thanks for listening. See you on Monday.