In moon race with China, U.S. setbacks test role of private firms

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12/01/2024 11:00

By Joey Roulette, Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Ryan Woo
       WASHINGTON, Jan 12 (Reuters) - Two U.S. setbacks this
week in the race to the moon with China  illustrate the risks of
NASA's plans to bet on a new strategy of relying heavily on
private companies.
    Fresh delays in the U.S. space agency's Artemis moon program
and a propulsion issue that doomed American company Astrobotic's
recent robot moon lander illustrate the difficulties faced by
the only country to have set foot on the moon, as it tightens
budgets while carrying on its cosmic legacy.
    The United States is planning to put astronauts back on the
moon in late 2026 - delayed this week from 2025 - while China is
targeting 2030 for its crewed landings. Before humans arrive,
each space power plans to first send several smaller robotic
missions to examine the moon's surface. China's
government-backed program has scored a string of firsts.
    Astrobotic's lander carried seven NASA instruments that were
meant to inspect the lunar surface. Although the lander won't
make it to the surface intact, three other private moon missions
sponsored by NASA, including a second Astrobotic attempt, are
planned for this year.
    NASA is leaning heavily on other companies such as Elon
Musk's SpaceX - which it will pay for the use of its Starship
HLS lunar landing spacecraft - to slash the cost of its moon
missions. The last crewed moon trips were the U.S. Apollo
missions more than half a century ago, when NASA owned all the
spacecraft involved.
    "I think that China has a very aggressive plan," NASA chief
Bill Nelson said on Tuesday after announcing the Artemis delay.
"I think they would like to land before us, because that might
give them some PR coup. But the fact is, I don't think they
will." 
    U.S. startups must develop space expertise and culture that
took well-funded governments decades to develop. India is also
taking that approach - leaning heavily on private companies in
its space exploration efforts.
    "Ten thousand things have to go right" in a debut moonshot
such as Astrobotic's, said Carnegie Mellon professor Red
Whittaker, who led development of a tiny four-wheeled moon rover
that was aboard Peregrine. "It's very, very common in the course
of a mission that glitches are encountered."
    Astrobotic said its executives were unavailable for
interviews this week, but its Peregrine mission director, Sharad
Bhaskaran, told Reuters last year the company's challenges were
steep.
    "We have to be a commercial company. We're trying to be
competitive in this new era of commercial spaceflight. When you
look at the budgets, we have to be more creative and more
efficient and do things differently," Bhaskaran said.

    OTHER PLAYERS
    China's next step in its lunar exploration program involves
an automated mission this year to retrieve samples on the moon's
far side - which would be the next in a series of firsts.
    In December 2013, China's uncrewed Chang'e-3 made the
world's first lunar soft landing since 1976. In January 2019,
the also uncrewed Chang'e-4 landed on the far side of the moon,
also a first.
    India and firms from Israel and Japan have failed in their
moon attempts in recent years.
    India, which succeeded last year on its second try with its
Chandrayaan-3 lander and became the first nation to touch down
on the moon's south pole, sees Astrobotic's failure as a lesson.
        "This is a much-needed learning curve for private
entities similar to what the government agencies of the U.S.,
Russia and India had through their first landing attempts," said
Pawan Kumar Chandana, co-founder of Skyroot Aerospace, which
launched India's first private rocket in 2022.
    "It inspires our startups to take up missions of this scale
in the future," he said.
    U.S. moon lander startup Intuitive Machines is next up in
the private sector's bid to reach the moon, and has spent about
$100 million on the mission, the company's CEO Steve Altemus
told Reuters last year.
    "We had to build an entire lunar program, not just a lander.
So it was a little more expensive," he said. 

 (Reporting by Joey Roulette; editing by Peter Henderson, Ben
Klayman and Gerry Doyle)
 ((Joey.Roulette@thomsonreuters.com; 7034696632;))