It’s an exciting time to be in space. Well, unless you are Odysseus, the privately-launched moon lander that will imminently send its premature final transmission from the Moon’s surface after a botched landing. But the very fact of a U.S.-sponsored craft (the lander was built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines) landing on the Moon for the first time since the Nixon administration reflects the boom that space travel and exploration is currently experiencing. The commercial spaceflight industry is booming; Elon Musk is keeping up a breathtaking pace of rocket launches; a lunar gold rush for natural resources awaits the world’s nations. We write a lot here about what the future will be, but this all invites a simple yet mind-bending question: Where will it be? One of the most reliable chroniclers of the new space age is The Atlantic’s Marina Koren, a longtime space reporter who’s presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival and Summit For Space Sustainability. Koren covered the current lunar craze in a story published this weekend that asserted “our future as an off-world species feels more within reach than ever before” — and she joined me for today’s edition of DFD to discuss what the geopolitics, technology and even the historiography of that future might look like. An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows: When the Obama administration ended the space shuttle program, it seemed to herald a dark age for space. What sparked this renewed wave of space exploration? The American space program has always been at the mercy of budgets, politics, changing presidential administrations. NASA is now pitching the Artemis program to the American public as a triumphant return to the Moon, with hopefully a landing sometime in late 2025. When NASA officials were talking about the Artemis program a couple of years ago, they introduced a slogan to explain why we are going, and the slogan was literally just “we are going.” There is nothing clear-cut in the way that there was during the Cold War. But there are many different reasons that NASA and its fans in Congress could point to. We've been to the moon before, but landing on the moon and having a sustained presence there still matters to countries as a sign of national capability and prestige. Scientific exploration is definitely more at the forefront in the 21st century than it was in the 20th, as well. And the administrator of NASA, Bill Nelson, who is a former [Democratic] senator [from Florida] who has also been to space himself, is now positioning China as a rival in space. This American space age has been characterized by intense collaboration with the private sector, Intuitive Machines putting this first craft on the Moon in five decades being a prime example. Countries like Japan and India have landed there in the past year through government-funded programs. What distinguishes the two approaches? I believe Japan’s lander landed upside down, which is very sad. It’s extremely hard to land on the Moon. It’s a lonely thought. I truly believe it’s not a bad thing to anthropomorphize these lunar landers, because they are extensions of us as humans, carrying our hopes and dreams and desires. Private companies that are working to get to the Moon receive a lot of support from government. For example, Intuitive Machines is one of 14 U.S. companies that NASA has contracted and invested in as a precursor to eventually landing people on the moon. I'm not quite sure if I have a good answer for why there’s more private sector activity in certain countries. China is opaque, and the Russian space program has really struggled in recent decades and is being outpaced by countries like China and India. Did the space community see Russia’s reported plans to put a nuclear-armed satellite in orbit as an attempt to push back on that trend? I think the Russians see nuclear weapons and military activities in space as a way to flex their muscles on the national stage. But Russia attempted to land something on the Moon recently that crashed. Russian capabilities right now are quite limited to low Earth orbit. They have their own plans for putting people on the Moon, but they definitely don't have the infrastructure or the resources to do that right now. What are the geopolitical lines forming around competition for lunar resources? This is another motivation that didn't exist during the Cold War. Having a lunar economy, using water that might exist on the moon as ice to sustain life support and then break apart water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then use that to create rocket fuel, is definitely a driver for both national governments and private companies right now. Which is interesting, because no one owns the Moon, legally. I spend a lot of time talking to space lawyers who are very concerned about how the Moon is about to get a lot more crowded. How do we decide who gets this chunk of the moon and who gets that chunk? These questions are further complicated by the fact that we don't know for sure how much ice actually exists on the Moon. There's a reality in which people get to the moon and realize it’s much drier than we expected, and there goes your lunar economy. Space historians say there are certain camps that believe that whoever controls space controls what happens on Earth. What are historians debating right now about humanity’s presence in space? Space historians would like us to think about space as an actual place, and maybe one that could use a bit more regulation. Right now low Earth orbit and space in general are mostly governed by the Outer Space Treaty, which was enacted in 1967. There have been some updates since, but I'd argue that at some point maybe we could use a new Outer Space Treaty. What are the key technological innovations driving this age of space exploration? Companies are using cheaper, off-the-shelf technology to build these missions. They are going into them obviously hoping that their missions are a success, but they're also very aware that something could go wrong and they'll crash land, and the idea is that they can try again and they don't have to spend a ton of money on every mission. This is still experimental technology which has never been tested in the lunar environment, which is a big reason why we've seen so many failed missions. What’s going on with the Space Force these days? I published a story a few years ago with the headline “The U.S. Space Force Is Not a Joke.” It was sort of a punchline at first, but the reality is that the Space Force is a military branch in every sense. They have staff, they have contracts with companies like SpaceX, they have their own specific uniforms. I believe they have their own song. One hundred years from now, the Space Force will still be here. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if Trump were to win the election again, if he’ll draw more attention to the work they're doing, and talk about what they do. Trump's vision for Space Force was always, you know, people zooming around in low Earth orbit with space guns, but the reality is that it's a bunch of people who work on satellites in a room in front of computer screens. Which is valuable work, but not as glitzy as Trump would have you believe. Anything else you’d like to mention? I would recommend that everyone in the world watch “For All Mankind.” The premise is that the Soviets win the space race, and that puts the U.S. space program into overdrive. By the end of season two there's more of a sustained presence on the Moon, then season three moves on to Mars. In reality we're still in the first season of space exploration in many ways. We've only been a spacefaring species for 50, 60 years. This current moment we're in is going to define how far we go, and whether we become even more of a spacefaring species.
| 
