Back to the Moon
SOPHIA CASANOVA HAS long been fascinated by the night sky, spending lazy summers in suburban Sydney during the late 1990s looking up at the stars. But it was at the age of 10, when her parents bought her a telescope, that she truly fell head over heels for all things space.
“That was the tipping point, really,” says the young geologist, recalling how she’d watch the Moon, equally haunted and entranced by its shifting phases. “It’s absolutely incredible to see through a telescope; you see so much detail.” Now a PhD student at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, she’s designing missions to prospect for, and eventually mine, water ice on the Moon and on Mars.
When she began her doctorate topic in 2017, it was considered science fiction. Now, she will likely have the pick of jobs in the booming space resources field around the world. That’s partly because the US space agency NASA has committed to return humans to the Moon during the 2020s under the Artemis program (see opposite), building a base there as a precursor to crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s.
NASA is also partnering with Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada to build the Lunar Gateway, a space station in lunar orbit, and has commissioned nine private companies to develop landers that can deliver payloads to the Moon and return to Earth. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency (ESA), which is headquartered in Paris, has announced plans to mine the Moon for water and oxygen from 2025.
Not surprisingly, China, too, is extremely active in this area. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has already sent three rovers to the Moon, including the first to its far side, last year. And the nation is preparing four more robotic missions that will return samples from the
