A Mars Odyssey

With the stated near-term goal of establishing a base on the Moon with the Constellation Project, The Moon is set to become a defacto territory of the United States. But for how long? The European Space Agency (ESA) has some plans of its own, as do the Russians, Japanese and perhaps even China.

ESA just concluded its first exploration of The Moon with the 3 year SMART-1 mission, launched in September 2003. Using a different approach in the form of a novel “ion-drive” (as seen in Star Trek), the combined agency took 14 months instead of 3 days and got there for a fraction of the cost. This drive is now being used to travel to the other planets with innovative experiments. The (gallium-arsinide) solar panels tested on the project are now the state of the art back home. It is possible that ESA could be building their own base as early as 2035 if they don’t get in the habit of suffering losses such as Beagle 2 in 2004.

China, who made headlines on January 23rd of this year by shooting an old weather satellite (their own) out of orbit with a ballistic missile, also has plans to go to the moon. The Chang’e-1 lunar probe is scheduled to launch in 2007 with the stated goal of searching out a suitable landing site. Reluctant to give out mission dates, the service is expected to land a craft on the lunar surface as early as 2010 and a rover by at least 2020. I, for one, am especially fond of their Star Fleet-style logo. Some on Capitol Hill are not nearly as impressed, calling instead for increased spending on “secret space programs” as a result of China’s endeavors in space while cutting NASA’s above the board programs.

See part 2 of this article for more interagency fun.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 2:05 am and is filed under Mission History, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.