(rocket booming)
- On February 21st, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched
into space carrying a kind of payload
it's never transported before.
On board was a robotic lander bound for the Moon.
It's called Beresheet, the Hebrew word for genesis,
and was created by an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL.
In two months, it'll attempt to touch down
on a spot called Mare Serenitatis,
and if it works, it'll be the first privately funded vehicle
to ever land on the lunar surface.
But SpaceIL isn't the only one
aiming for the Moon right now.
Numerous countries and private ventures all over the globe
are hoping to send robotic landers to the lunar surface
within the next few years.
Countries like the US are interested
in science and exploration
in pursuit of putting humans back on the lunar surface.
Companies, on the other hand,
see the Moon as a whole new money-making platform.
That means we could see an explosion
of lunar landings in the years ahead.
(calm music)
The last heyday of lunar exploration occurred
in the 1960s and '70s
when NASA and the Soviet Union raced to see
who could put a human on the surface of the Moon first.
This spawned the historic Apollo missions,
but during that same time, the US and the USSR
sent dozens of landers and orbiters to the Moon
to scout, explore, and return samples to Earth.
After the Space Race ended,
the two rivals focused on other destinations in space,
and the Moon was left relatively unexplored.
But in recent years, Earth's satellite has become
an enticing destination once again.
In 2013, China became the third nation to ever soft land,
or land without crashing, on the Moon,
and it was the first ever to land a spacecraft
on the far side of the Moon earlier this year.
Next up will be India, which will send an orbiter,
a lander, and a rover to the Moon this year
as part of its Chandrayaan-2 mission.
And after years of looking to Mars,
NASA is now focused on returning humans
to the lunar surface.
To start, they'll send a series of robotic landers
to explore and scout.
Those are missions in service of both science
and to benefit long-term human stays.
- What Space Policy Directive 1 says is we're going to go
to the Moon, and we're going to go sustainably.
- So far, this has been a story of governments,
and that's understandable.
Only governments have had the money and capability
to pull these landings off.
- The barrier has been both technological and economic.
- That's Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist
at the University of Central Florida.
- Previously, it required a superpower to get to the Moon,
because you had to have rocket technology,
you had to have the navigations,
all the avionics, including communication systems,
and the guidance and control systems,
and the propulsion, of course.
- But that's changing.
You might remember the Google Lunar X Prize competition.
Started in 2007, the competition called on hopefuls
all over the world to build their own lunar landers,
but there was a catch:
only 10 percent of their budgets could come
from government sources.
The rest of that money had to be private funding.
The goal was to ultimately help
lower the cost of space travel.
- Google wants to help start the off-world economy.
They want to be involved in that.
The key question is can we find
the short-term, economically viable business models?
A lot of companies are jumping in
with various ideas of how to get that started.
- The Google Lunar X Prize deadline came and went
without a successful launch, so the contest had no winner.
However, many of the finalists continue
to shoot for the Moon, one of which is SpaceIL.
The nonprofit says that the Israeli government provided
a little over $2 million of the total $90 million budget.
The majority of the rest was funded
by Israeli entrepreneur Morris Kahn
and the Adelson Family Foundation.
Okay, so, let's take a minute
to look at this mission's profile,
because it's actually taking a pretty unique route.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket dropped the Beresheet lander
off in a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit,
a path about 60,000 kilometers up.
As the lander passes close to Earth,
it'll fire its engine, elongating its orbit more and more
until it reaches the Moon's orbit about two months from now.
It'll circle the Moon a few times
and then perform an autonomous landing.
Once on the surface,
the lander will use its onboard magnetometer
to measure the magnetic field of the Moon,
and if possible, it'll fire up its engines again
and hop across the surface,
taking measurements in another location.
SpaceIL doesn't really have long-term plans for Beresheet.
Their ultimate goal is educating
the public about space travel,
as well as performing a big first for Israel.
But there are other companies,
many of which were birthed out of the Google Lunar X Prize,
that see a real long-term future at the Moon —
one that is lucrative.
Right on the heels of SpaceIL is Astrobotic,
a US company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
They're hoping to become something of a delivery service,
dropping research equipment on the Moon
for the cool price of $1.2 million per kilogram.
The company is working on its first lander called Peregrine
that will take at least 11 research payloads
to the lunar surface.
But perhaps the biggest draw of the Moon financially
is the water suspected to be lurking on its surface.
Numerous missions have found evidence
of water ice on the Moon,
and many companies, like Moon Express in the US
or ispace in Japan, are interested in scouting out
where this ice is and then potentially mining it.
- There are polar deposits on the Moon
that contain water and carbon dioxide
and other things, like nitrogen,
that can be used for making rocket fuel or making plastics,
and really, everything we need to start industry
off planet Earth is available on the Moon.
- And then, of course,
there's always government money to make,
and NASA's already picked nine companies to compete
to send small robotic landers to the Moon.
The space agency has also put out a call for lander designs
to take humans to the surface.
The private space industry sees opportunity
to get investment dollars from NASA.
That could help them make
their lunar business plans a success.
So, will all these lunar endeavors work out?
The years ahead will tell us more,
but 2019 is poised to have possibly four lunar landings,
with many more slated for 2020.
The Moon is definitely an attractive place these days,
but there's still a long road ahead for these companies
before they can turn Moon dust into money.
(keyboard clicking)
- [Man] Bring it down some here.