As Artemis 2 prepares to blast off to the moon tonight, this is what it means for Nasa’s hopes of beating the cavalier Chinese to the lunar surface… and on to Mars, writes former Astronomer Royal MARTIN REES

As a young astronomer at the University of Cambridge, I remember sitting in front of a flickering black-and-white television in my university room 57 years ago and watching in fascination as Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.

Like many people, I was fascinated. The next day I met my boss – the famous Professor Fred Hoyle – and found him even happier than I was. It was as if the future had arrived.

The 1969 landing came just 12 years after the Soviet satellite Sputnik I became the first vehicle launched into low Earth orbit.

The pace of progress was exciting, and the world believed it would accelerate even further. It seemed inevitable that we would see footprints on Mars in my lifetime. But that was then and this is now. At 83 years old and now a former Astronomer Royal, I can safely say that in the near future I am as likely to see cows jumping over the Moon as an astronaut walking on Mars.

We all depend on ‘space’ every day for satellite navigation, communications and weather forecasts.

And yet, since the return of the Apollo 17 astronauts, no human has ventured more than a few hundred miles above Earth. But now, after a half-century lull, human space exploration appears to be reviving.

Because this week marks a new dawn. As early as this evening, NASA will attempt to launch the Artemis II mission, which will send four astronauts orbiting the Moon as part of the first manned lunar mission in half a century.

If all goes well, NASA hopes to land astronauts back on the lunar surface as early as 2028.

But still the mystery and poetry of the event are tempered by the basic concerns of human competition.

Because a new space race is beginning not only between America and China, but also between private companies with ambitions of asteroid mining, colonizing Mars and commercializing space travel.

There’s a chance that this exciting but prohibitive contest will continue to define the 21st century.

The last man to walk on the Moon, Eugene Cernan, did so in 1972, and space exploration has slowed dramatically since then.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. government could no longer justify spending 4 percent of the federal budget on NASA; the current figure is about 0.3 percent. Perhaps more than anything else, the public’s appetite has diminished.

For the past half century, despite all the hard work and sacrifices of the crew aboard the International Space Station, no one has ever reached beyond Earth orbit, let alone the Moon or beyond.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everything went as planned on Artemis II. NASA was hoping to launch the rocket carrying the ‘module’ where the astronauts would settle in February this year.

However, scientists noticed a leak in hydrogen rocket fuel during preparations and duly postponed the launch until March 6.

A subsequent ‘helium flow anomaly’ on the 322ft Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket the agency has ever built, meant the mission faced even further delays.

But this week, it looks like all systems are finally ‘working’. Yesterday NASA technicians announced that the weather forecast on the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, was “80 per cent” for liftoff this week, possibly as early as Wednesday evening local time (early Thursday morning BST).

The importance of Artemis II whenever we ‘take off’ should not be underestimated.

The ten-day journey will take three Americans and one Canadian, led by Commander Reid Wiseman along with Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, into space 257,061 miles away from Earth, farther than humans have ever been before. It will also be the first time a woman or a black person will travel to the Moon.

The SLS rocket that will launch the mission consists of two solid rocket boosters and four engines. At the top of the rocket is the Orion spacecraft with its ‘crew module’ or ‘capsule’ housing the crew.

The mission follows that of Artemis I, which saw an uncrewed capsule orbit the Moon in 2022.

But no matter how fascinating these technologies are, they are just mechanisms. What matters is that after 50 years of painfully slow progress, humanity finally appears ready to explore the final frontier once again. The question is: why now?

In 2024, China’s space agency CLEP successfully landed a spacecraft on the dark side of the Moon. The mission, called Chang’e-6, returned soil samples from the Apollo Basin crater in the Moon’s southern hemisphere. This was a historic success. The lunar sample was taken from a place called Shackleton Crater, which has been identified as a possible place for human life to survive.

Much of the Moon’s surface is exposed to two weeks of sunlight followed by two weeks of darkness, in a continuous cycle. However, this crater is near the Moon’s south pole, and the land surrounding it is in constant sunlight. Meanwhile, its center is constantly freezing and therefore there is a source of ice and possible water reserves. (The Moon’s surface temperatures can drop as low as -246 C.)

In 2020, NASA confirmed the presence of a water molecule on the lunar surface.

Reveling in its success, China duly announced tentative plans to send astronauts to the Moon by 2030. So it’s no surprise that Nasa hopes to do this by 2028.

Two years may seem like a lot, but in space exploration, engineering delays, failed launches or other malfunctions can set a program back a decade. The race to return to the Moon is neck and neck between China and the USA.

As Donald Trump himself has said, he wants a mission that involves ‘more than picking up rocks this time.’

Unlike the Cold War era, there is more at stake here than soft power. Because control of space has huge economic and security consequences. Take a look at how Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system gave advantages to the Ukrainian military during the war with Russia.

Ten-day journey will take crew into space further than humans have ever gone before

Or more recent suspicions that Iran is using Russian satellite intelligence to aid its attacks on US bases in the Middle East.

Not to mention the potential for rare metal mining in space, an industry that could easily be worth trillions in the coming years.

More importantly, China has a huge advantage. NASA’s first concern is safety. It should be.

Not only because the American people cannot afford the loss of life, but also because a human tragedy would almost certainly cut off taxpayer funding.

The terrible fate of Apollo I, which exploded into flames during a simulated countdown in 1967, killing all three astronauts, lives long in American memory. And although there have been only two fatal NASA crashes in the intervening years, reflecting a safety record of more than 98 percent, one crash is always one too many.

With its much more authoritarian leadership, China is likely to take greater risks with its space program. Chinese public opinion will not change the government’s ambition.

The desire to explore space is the same desire that led Columbus to America and Marco Polo to the Silk Road; It is purely for exploratory as well as commercial purposes.

It’s no surprise, then, that private companies have entered the market, most notably Elon Musk’s Space X and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

And with the emergence of these commercial actors, the view is that the last space race between the US and China involving humans rather than robots will also be the last space race played by nation states.

Elon Musk claims he hopes to die on Mars, though not in a crash landing, as he once made clear. He is currently 54 years old.

Will we see humans on Mars in the next 50 years? I predicted wrong 50 years ago, so who’s to say about the next 50 years?

NASA astronauts (from left) pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen from CSA (Canadian Space Agency), commander Reid Wiseman and mission specialist Christina Koch

It is certain that Mars has a greater appeal than the already “conquered” Moon. But a crewed mission to the red planet is also incredibly complex.

It takes six months to get there, which means more than a year’s worth of shipping. And then there’s the mental challenge of prolonged isolation of the crew in a small compartment the size of a pickup truck before considering any scientific and engineering challenges.

But as Artemis II prepares for liftoff, Mars remains little more than a speck on the horizon of our collective imagination.

And despite the lofty talk of interstellar mining and colonization, humanity is still trying to follow in Neil Armstrong’s tiny footsteps 57 years later, let alone take one giant leap forward.

Lord Rees of Ludlow is a former Astronomer Royal (1995 – 2025), Fellow of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.