These are the countries leading the ambitious race to conquer the moon

Following in the footsteps of the US, Russia, China and India, Japan has joined the exclusive group of countries that have achieved a soft landing on the lunar surface. According to experts, the European Space Agency has predicted that the frequency of lunar missions will increase, with more than 100 missions planned by 2030.

A renewed race to the moon responds to demand “Go to the moon to learn to live in space and to learn to use the resources of space, which will indeed inspire all the vast riches of the universe.” I said CNBC Michelle Hanlon is executive director of the Air and Space Law Center at the University of Mississippi. “The moon is a testing ground,” he said.

Resources sought by both countries and companies include rare earth metals and the isotope helium-3, which are abundant on the moon and useful for powering nuclear fusion reactors.. Also, the presence of water is an important resource not only for human survival but also for making rocket fuel, which will make the Moon a refueling station and base for deep space exploration.

“Whoever manages to establish a significant lunar presence makes a statement about their political system, about their economic system, about who is ahead in the geopolitical race.”Dean Cheng, senior adviser at the China Program of the United States Institute of Peace, told the same media. “But the second, more recent area is the belief that there are significant resources on the Moon that could be useful to Earth or to future space flights.”

Recently, NASA announced that it has postponed its return to the moon until late 2026, a year later than planned, amid recent setbacks that challenge the US space agency's strategy of relying heavily on private companies for its missions. It has created setbacks such as delays in the Artemis project and propulsion failure in the Astrobotic company's lunar lander. Meanwhile, China is moving forward with its government-backed program and aims to land humans on a natural satellite by 2030.

Although Astrobotic's Peregrine lander won't reach the moon intact, NASA plans three more private missions this year, including Astrobotic's second attempt. “Ten thousand things have to go right” on a lunar mission like Astrobotics, he said Reuters Carnegie Mellon professor Rhett Whittaker led the development of a small four-wheeled lunar rover aboard Peregrine. “Failures during a mission are very common.”

“We have to be a commercial company. We're trying to be competitive in this new era of commercial spaceflight. “If you look at the budget, we have to be more creative and efficient and do things differently,” Bhaskaran said.

China is not far behind in lunar achievements, having made a soft landing on the moon since 1976 and this year plans to collect samples from the far side of the satellite. Chang'e-3 and the first landing on the far side of the Moon Chang'e-4 In 2019.

Other countries like India have learned from the failures and successes like the Chandrayaan-3 landing on the Moon's South Pole. According to Pawan Kumar Santana, co-founder of Skyroot Aerospace, the nation sees astrobotics' mishap as a valuable learning curve, encouraging its startups to take on missions of this scale in the future.