If not mistaken, 2022 will be looked back to as the year in which the colonization of the moon began. No fewer than a dozen missions to the Earth’s satellite are scheduled to start within the next twelve months, six nations and Esa are involved, tests for manned flights are being carried out, probes and a vehicle are being set down in the gray sand of the moon, satellites are being launched and new, larger rockets are being used. What has already started in recent years – culminating in China’s spectacular landing on the dark side of the moon – will pick up speed in the coming months.
Mankind is returning to the moon and this time we want to stay there. A permanent, permanently manned station is to be built – preferably at the South Pole, because water ice deposits are suspected there, which would make the construction and operation of such a station considerably easier. In the future, the lunar orbital platform called “Gateway” will orbit the Earth companion – an orbital station that will serve both research and tourism as a starting point for trips to the moon, and the moon will also become an intermediate station for flights to Mars, because a start from there would be much easier and possibly more cost-effective than from the earth’s surface because of the hardly existing gravitational pull on the earth’s companion.
Return to the moon: Donald Trump provided the impetus
The fact that mankind is returning to the moon is not least due to former US President Donald Trump. In 2017 he announced that NASA would bring astronauts back to the moon and explore the celestial body permanently. In 2024, according to Trump’s over-ambitious idea, Americans should land on the moon again. That was and remained unrealistic, but the Artemis program that was launched with it was started and at least the first unmanned test flight of the “Orion” spacecraft to the moon will start in March, manned moon orbits by NASA and SpaceX are planned for 2023 and 2024 and should be in 2025 with the Artemis 3 mission humans actually set foot on the moon again.
Sources: Nasa, Esa, Roskosmos