moon

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice: a second Space Race is underway.

In December 1968 (4.5 years after my birth), a manned spacecraft from the American space agency NASA (Apollo 8) successfully orbited the Moon for the first time.
On July 20 of the following year, another spacecraft (Apollo 11) actually landed people on the Moon for the first time. They hopped around for a while, spoke a few historic words and planted a flag.
All this was made possible with the help of enormous amounts of money and research and with computers that were still in their infancy. It was driven by the desire to stay ahead of the competition.
And so the first Space Race was narrowly won against the Russians during the Cold War by the American NASA.

NASA’s last manned Moon mission (Apollo 17) dated back to 1972.
But now another one of those billion-dollar Space Races is underway!
And where it used to be the Russians, it is now mainly various Asian countries that stand a chance of winning that race. The Americans had to adjust their program again, in order to remain at the forefront, but whether they will succeed is not yet a foregone conclusion.

Earlier this month (April 2026), four people successfully orbited the Moon again on NASA’s ten-day ‘Artemis II’ mission (I’m 61 now, so we have had to wait a long time for it).
This time it took humans further from Earth than they had ever been, over 400,000 kilometers, as a result of the wider loop made around the Moon.
A new NASA mission, ‘Artemis III’, in which humans will land on the Moon again if all goes well, is scheduled for a few years from now.

In the meantime, many countries are …