The moon race is now between china and india

The US National Aeronautics and Space Agency has just released the full data on last year’s mission to find out whether there are useable amounts of water on the Moon, and the news is good.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Agency (Nasa) has just released the full data on last year’s mission to find out whether there are useable amounts of water on the Moon, and the news is

good. There is plenty of frozen water on the Moon, plus frozen gases like methane, oxygen and hydrogen that would be useful for making rocket fuel. This will be very helpful to the Chinese

and the Indians when they start to build bases on the Moon. The US is not going back to the Moon. That plan died when president Obama cancelled the first new American launch vehicles in 25

years, the Ares series of rockets, last February. That ended Nasa’s hopes of returning to the Moon by 2020 and building bases for further manned exploration of the solar system. Obama

promised to support the development of commercial manned spacecrafts instead, but those will only be capable of low-orbit operations for the foreseeable future. Gen Charles Bolden, the

current Nasa head, loyally chimed in with talk of a glowing future for the agency. “Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of a year; people fanning out across the inner solar system,

exploring the Moon and Mars simultaneously in a stream of “firsts”, burbled the general. Yes, and if we had some ham we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs. In reality, it looks

like the US has already passed its Tordesillas moment (and so has Russia). As is so often the case, those who start out ahead in the race fail in the stretch, and others finish first. The

Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, two years after Christopher Columbus became the first European to land in the Americas, divided the newly discovered lands beyond Europe between Spain

and Portugal along a meridian just west of the Cape Verde islands. It was immensely arrogant, of course, but there were no other countries in the business of maritime exploration at the

time. Within a hundred years, the English, the French and the Dutch had piled on too, and Spanish and Portuguese power was falling fast. In the end, England’s success in appropriating very

large amounts of valuable territory led to English becoming the dominant world language. This is neither a good nor a bad outcome, but it is certainly a significant one, and it has some

relevance to the current situation. The recent confirmation by Nasa that there is plentiful water as well as hydrogen, methane and ammonia available in frozen form in the lunar soil means

that lunar bases are a viable option — and lunar bases are essential to any realistic space programme that aims to go to the other planets of this system. If you could get this programme on

the Moon, you would only be dealing with one-sixth of the Earth’s gravity. The recent mission showed that there is not just reaction mass on the moon, but also the raw materials with which

to make conventional rocket fuels and enough water, the heaviest element of any life-support system, to make human bases a practical possibility. But they are not likely to be American

bases, nor Russian ones either. Both programmes have run out of fuel, and are now restricted to near-Earth operations so far as manned trips are concerned. So are Chinese and Indian

operations, so far, but the ambition is there and the money will be. Both China and India have already put unmanned space vehicles into lunar orbit, and China has already carried out manned

flights in Earth orbit. These are probably the countries that own the future in space.