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Image: YouTube / ispace
The Japanese company ispace has established long-term plans to develop and raise a destination for 10,000 people on the Moon by 2040.
The private lunar exploration start-up, specializing in micro-robotics, recently secured slots on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets for the launch of a lunar orbiter by mid-2020. This will be followed by a lunar lander with two rovers aboard in 2021, according to the company's website.
Under the code name HAKUTO-R, the program will serve as a kind of investigative mission to explore the lunar surface. The first mission will ask the orbit to scan the surface of the moon to validate navigation. The second mission will then use the data from the orbiter to land properly on both space rovers so that they can begin surface exploration.
Image: ispace
These first two missions will constitute a sort of technological demonstration for society, which should make it possible to identify areas for improvement before continuing with future missions.
Image: ispace
The next seven missions planned by ispace to begin by 2022 will see the construction of a land-moon transport platform focused on polar water exploration. The platform should also allow more lunar landings and carry more payload.
After all the basic work, the mission will focus on the industrial platform where the lunar development itself will take place seriously.
Japan is not the only party to gain a foothold on the lunar surface. According to Ars Technica, NASA and China are also planning to send people to the moon, but these missions will not take place until the end of the 2020s or the early 2030s.
Whatever the outcome of the new space race, it appears that this generation of space explorers has far more ambitious dreams than flying a single person into space. They actually plan to live there. / ra
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