Severe teacher Moon. Back like we had never been there?

The latest exploits, the failures, the half-hearted successes. Some still wonder, improperly, if we were ever here at all. Others wonder why it’s so difficult to repeat things done almost 60 years ago. The answer is that it’s all somewhat new. Technology and intentions: like the sustainability of a business.

EMILIO COZZI

A probe upside down is greeted with a standing ovation. And another, bent over with a broken leg, like a mutilated automaton in the attempt of a historic feat, ignites collective jubilation.

“Yes, we’ve returned to the Moon as if we had never been here,” someone ventures (or insinuates). Not much to be surprised about. Doubts always linger, without the legitimacy to access public debate, because debate cannot exist; let’s call them doubts, in case one wants to give a neutral definition. Although, closer to the truth, it would be to call them conspiracies.

They are narratives, stories, which latent within sparse niches have gradually found a wider consensus, as if they were political movements (and in a way politics are involved, but this is not the context to discuss them).

They are beliefs, convictions, opinions. All opposed to facts. Which, sometimes, happen to catch media waves to surf on. For example, when a series of lunar missions ends in a near disaster, or when it’s not celebrated as a new, great success, to question a historical truth: we landed on the Moon, in 1969 for the first time and then five more times, until 1972.

Some reasonableness exists instead among those who, somewhat naively, wonder: “We landed on the Moon over half a century ago; how is it possible that it’s so difficult to return?”.

The truth is that the Moon is not a walk in the park, especially if, like this time, we return with different objectives – “to stay” – means and methods. And even though it has already been written on these pages, it is worth revisiting to add some details.

Let’s start with Apollo.

They were times, the Sixties, when the risks taken to conquer space were high. The fact that we can speak of a “conquest,” due to the political-military nature of the space effort back then, justified an impressive tolerance for error.

When on May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard, the first American to do so, flew beyond the sky on the Mercury-Redstone 3 mission (or MR-3), the rocket that took him into space had a launch explosion rate of over 57%. The success of Apollo 11, that is, the probability that the mission would reach the Moon, land on it, and bring back its crew safely, was estimated at 50%. A coin toss.

Today it would be unacceptable: when, in May 2020, after about a decade of “Russian rides,” SpaceX returned the United States to space with an American vehicle, statistical modeling attributed to the Crew Dragon less than one chance in 270 of failing. And there were those who pointed out how the percentage wasn’t so reassuring, considering the increasing number of launches planned in the immediate future.

In short, everything has changed.

During the first space race to the Moon, the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union dictated completely different priorities, objectives to be met at any cost. Including that of life.

In those days, NASA engineers inspected structures with a broom in hand, a low-tech but effective “sensor” to detect hydrogen leaks (whose flame, combined with oxygen, is invisible). If the broom caught fire, it was better to step back.

The glorious American lunar program was on the verge of premature closure after the tragedy of Apollo 1, a fire inside the oxygen-saturated cabin during a ground test, in which three astronauts lost their lives: Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee.

It’s all in the history books: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin quarreled with the onboard computer and had to struggle to find a suitable landing site among the rocks of the Sea of Tranquility. The “Eagle,” manually controlled by Armstrong, touched down when it was almost out of available fuel. A few seconds more and it would have been forced to ascend back to the orbiting Lem, where Collins awaited.

Two lightning strikes during ascent disrupted the systems of Apollo 12; the intuition of a ground engineer – the cryptic words “Try SCE to AUX,” correctly interpreted by Richard Gordon – prevented the abort system from being triggered just two minutes after liftoff, which would have propelled the capsule away, although the rocket ascended smoothly.

The odyssey of Apollo 13 is well known, and problems also arose in the three subsequent missions.

It should also be remembered that Apollo was a program supported by gargantuan funding – in those years NASA absorbed 5% of the US budget – compared to what Artemis enjoys today (which is one of NASA’s programs capable of attracting, yes and no, 1% of the federal budget). And moreover, today, the commitment (also economic) tends to reduce any risk to zero.

Sixty years ago, those who flew into space were pioneers, heroes destined for glory, always and in any case; so much so that considering the possibility of perishing in the exploration of the unknown was something admitted and, just in case, admirable. It’s indicative that Richard Nixon had a speech written to be delivered in case Aldrin and Armstrong had remained on the Moon.

An hypothesis that today no one would consider plausible, let alone acceptable. Paradoxically, the success of Apollo has raised the bar so high as to make any failure unacceptable.

Today, yes, failure is not an option.

Also for this reason, before bringing Humanity back to the Moon, robots are sent. And not that everything goes smoothly anyway: among the attempted landings in the last decade or so, successes can be counted on the fingers of one hand: there are the three Chinese landers and rovers of the Chang’e 3, 4, and 5 missions, which made China the third country to softly (and successfully) land an apparatus on lunar soil, the first to land on the far side, and the first, after the Soviet Luna 24 in 1976, to bring samples of lunar dust and soil back to Earth. India succeeded, with Chandraayan 3, in August 2023, just as the first Russian attempt in 47 years failed. Two Japanese missions and an Israeli one ended in catastrophic failure, as did the first new leap under the stars and stripes: the Peregrine lander from the private company Astrobotic, launched in January 2024, saw its fate sealed immediately after separation from its rocket, a Vulcan Centaur, due to a malfunction in the propulsion system. Peregrine was born under the auspices of NASA, with funding from the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (Clps) with which the American space agency intends to bring private companies to the new lunar caravan.

In the same days, Japan ranked fifth in the special lunar landings ranking. But even in this case, success was marred by a mishap: the Slim lander ended up upside down, in a position that prevented its solar panels from producing all the expected energy. It was a successful mission (especially for the Japanese space agency, Jaxa, on its first attempt after the failure of the private Hakuto-R), which nevertheless demonstrated how difficult it was to arrive “straight”. Then came Odysseus, the second Clps mission, and the first American success since 1972, achieved by Intuitive Machines. And despite the broken leg during descent, which caused the lander to lie down and hindered some activities.

Again, a clumsy, awkward conclusion, certainly not the glorious return to the Moon that the United States was waiting for.

The fact is that after sixty years everything has changed. We are on the Moon: no atmosphere, parachutes are useless. Braking with rockets is necessary, that is, applying active power that must be directed. One must aim well, impossible to proceed blindly as through the clouds of Venus. The first goal, repeatedly stated, is to develop a reliable automatic landing system that does not fail. There’s still a long way to go. The first autonomous landings, without human control, were achieved by NASA’s Surveyor rover, whose retrorockets were activated using radar as an altimeter. Now we need to do more.

The new landers use much more sophisticated technologies than an altimeter. They have cameras, lasers, and ground recognition systems to choose the most suitable place to land. Chandraayan 3 had a real-time image analysis system and algorithms to decide where to move in search of its place in the Sun. For the others, something didn’t work. And there’s no wonder. Let’s borrow the reflection of the former Director General of the European Space Agency, Jan Wörner, in the Guardian, precisely to answer these questions: “You’re always close to failure because you have to be light or the spacecraft won’t fly. You can’t have a large margin of safety.”

Moreover, almost every spacecraft is a prototype, there are no tests, as is the case with rockets or systems produced in series: “If you have a problem with your car, you can have it repaired, but in space there are no opportunities,” says Wörner. “Space is a different dimension.”

In addition to saving weight, the companies participating in Clps are driven to do a lot with limited resources, to cut costs, precisely because the sense of space, in these 2020s, must be verified in the light of sustainability. In other words, of business. And we return to money and comparisons that cannot be made. Because we’ve returned to the Moon as we’ve never been before.