CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- If we wanted to go back to the moon we could.
Right now.
Every major rocket currently in the United States' stable of boosters, from the Delta to the Atlas to the Titan, is capable of throwing a spacecraft of some kind or another across the vast, empty gulf separating Earth and the moon -- even if it were an extremely small capsule carrying a single human who might or might not have the ability to return home.
As the saying goes: "We have the technology."
The problem for the United States government is that we don't want to go.
As the $24 billion
making plans to get there on their own.
One such group is the Artemis Society International. Named for the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, Artemis proposes a privately financed commercial effort to set up a permanent base on the moon, where a new breed of hardy pioneers can live and work doing everything from mining lunar resources to selling moon rocks as souvenirs back on Earth.
Artemis -- based in Huntsville, Alabama -- has plans to use two commercially procured NASA shuttle missions to begin sending their hardware up to the moon. The project's financial sources depend on every space-marketing gimmick, from selling plastic models of their spaceships to selling Hollywood on the idea of a making a blockbuster movie in which Artemis shares in the profits.
So far the project only exists in the minds of the members of the group, and on the pages of Artemis' website, which not only has a "Frequently Asked Questions" section, but also a "Frequently Raised Objections" page in which just about every possible cynical response to their plan is identified and effectively shot down. Members are confident it can be done.
"It's not a question of whether it'll work, but rather how long it will take. We could accumulate enough money to finance this project with a lemonade stand in Alice Springs -- we would just have to wait a bit longer," Gregory Bennett, one of Artemis' founders, is quoted on their website as saying.
Other commercial space start-up companies, such as Rotary Rocket and Kistler Aerospace, have dreams of eventually returning Americans to the moon by using their new launch vehicles to dramatically lower the cost of getting into low Earth orbit, where journeys to the moon -- and Mars -- can be more easily staged than from the shores of Florida's Space Coast.
Of course, the story changes only slightly if the notion of sending humans back to the moon is dropped.
After the United States and the former Soviet Union wrapped up their historic space race some 30 years ago -- a race in which the Soviet's claimed first prize for landing a probe on the moon, and the Americans, the first humans -- both nations continued to send people and probes to the moon during the 1970s. Then all efforts stopped until 1990, when a new nation entered the exclusive lunar exploration club: Japan.
Japan's HITEN mission -- it was originally known as MUSES A -- reawakened many space cadet's desires to get back to the moon. The probe demonstrated some sophisticated navigation techniques between Earth and the moon before it was intentionally crashed into the lunar surface in 1993, creating a spectacle so dramatic it could be seen by powerful telescopes on the home planet.
Then in 1994, more than two decades after Apollo closed up shop, the United States returned to the moon with a military technology research probe known as Clementine. Testing new ideas for a missile defense program, Clementine circled the moon and discovered the possibility that water ice might be frozen within the rocks of craters that are in permanent shade at the moon's south pole.
Four years later, in January 1998, more than a quarter-century after abandoning the moon for other priorities, NASA returned to the moon with a small, low-cost probe called
, which was launched from Cape Canaveral by a small Lockheed Martin Athena rocket. Although the mission wasn't specifically designed to hunt for water, the probe's instruments did detect the presence of hydrogen in the lunar soil at the south poles, which hopeful scientists interpreted as evidence of water.
Lunar Prospector's 18-month mission came to an end last year when it was deliberately crashed into the lunar south pole. Astronomers watching with telescopes from Earth hoped the impact would release some amount of water vapor from the soil and send it flying up into space, where they could detect it. But so far there is no clear proof that any water vapor could be seen.
And now the United States has hit a dry spell in its exploration of the moon. This is the forecast for at least another two to three years, unless some miraculous directive from the President that is supported by Congress is issued, or a private bunch of rocket scientists somewhere simply go on their own.
For the next few years, Americans interested in exploring the moon will have to do so vicariously through the exploits of the Europeans and the Japanese.
Europe's first trip to the moon is expected in late 2002 when they will launch SMART 1, a technology demonstration spacecraft that will test a new type of electric propulsion while in lunar orbit.
Then by the end of 2003,
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