New lunar missions aren't from U.S.
By Robert S. Boyd
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON — A new race to the moon is under way, and the United States is lagging behind a swarm of foreign competitors.
A European spaceship, Smart-1, is due to enter lunar orbit tomorrow night. Four other moon missions — two Japanese, one Chinese and one Indian — are planned for launch in the next three years.
But the next U.S. spaceship to visit the moon won't go up until 2008 at the earliest. That trip would be the first step toward President Bush's ambitious call to send humans to Mars a generation from now, but even the moonshot depends on approval from a skeptical Congress.
The six lunar ventures planned for this decade are all unmanned orbiters. None would attempt to land robots or humans on the moon, but they would study it from afar with scientific instruments.
Bush's plan wouldn't return flesh-and-blood earthlings to the moon until at least 2015. That would be 43 years after the last Apollo astronaut came home from the moon.
Moon enthusiasts deplore the delay. "It's an embarrassment," said Alan Binder, a planetary scientist and founder of the Lunar Research Institute in Tucson, Ariz. "We've wasted almost four decades. ... It's heartbreaking."
Reaching the moon was the highest-prestige space goal during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed to demonstrate their scientific and technological prowess.
Mars now is the glamour target, but scientists think there's still much to be learned from exploring the moon with robots or humans.
Six Apollo missions, from 1969 to 1972, explored a tiny fraction of the lunar surface, all near the equator. The United States since has sent two scientific spacecraft to study the moon's polar regions: Clementine in 1994 and the Lunar Prospector in 1998. Both found tantalizing hints of frozen water, but no positive evidence.
The upcoming missions, if they succeed, would provide much greater detail about the moon's structure, gravity and magnetism. Their sponsors hope to identify potentially valuable resources that could support a permanent moon base and a way station for solar-system voyages.
Lunar experts say they aren't troubled by the prospect that the flock of moon voyages could duplicate one another and waste precious resources.
"The more people are doing things in space, the better for everybody," said Paul Spudis, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "The data these missions collect could be of value to us and other nations. It's win-win for everybody."
"In science, it never hurts to duplicate," Binder said.
Of course, there's a chance that some — perhaps most — of the proposed spacecraft never will be launched or will fail to complete their missions.
"The probability is less than 50-50 they'll even get off the ground," Binder said.
Spudis is more optimistic: "No doubt there will be some spacecraft failures and perhaps some instrument failures. But I anticipate a high success rate."
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