To the Moon!

Given all the attention that has been focused on NASA’s new plans to return to the Moon, it’s easy to forget that the United States is not the only nation with lunar exploration plans. While the US is the only country with definitive plans to send humans to the Moon (rumormongering about Chinese plans notwithstanding), the US is not the only country planning to mount robotic lunar expeditions—nor is it even in the lead in this area. By the time the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, the first in NASA’s series of lunar missions, launches in 2008, no fewer than four countries—Europe, Japan, China, and India—will have carried out missions of their own to the Moon, some as the beginning of more ambitious programs.

The last time the Moon was the object of such intense scrutiny was at the end of the Cold War-fueled space race between the US and the Soviet Union. With a far different geopolitical climate today, is there room for cooperation, rather that competition, among the various countries exploring the Moon? Can the missions in the planning stages be reconciled among each other to prevent duplication of science? Or, are factors potentially more powerful that science, like national prestige, enough to prevent any meaningful cooperation? Those were the issues representatives of several space agencies grappled with last month at the International Lunar Conference (ILC) in Toronto.

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Personally, I am all for the seperate expeditions to the moon with the sharing of data. Competition with group learning seems to gain more for nations and space programs than does cooperation in the traditional put-everything-in-one-basket-ahem-program. It keeps agencies far more focused and polities as well. Prestige and oneupmanship make for a powerful tools.

India, China, Europe, America, and possibly others must share what they find though. Science, especially planetary science, works best when everything is shared as far as the end results. NASA can plan its next mission better. ESA can as well. HOWEVER, that's only if all share and share alike. I doubt that the US would, even if the others don't, not share its info though. NASA's extremely open with its findings and the contrast of the NASA MERs and ESA's Huygens was remarked on numerous times. ESA wasn't going to keep the data secret: they weren't going to share though as it came in.

Anyways, let's see how this one works out. It should be rather interesting, this set of exoatmospheric expeditions...