The countries that will launch new missions to the Moon in 2023

In 2023, Russia, India and the European Space Agency will launch missions to the Moon and deep space.

This comes after the launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission, the American space agency, which recently made a lunar orbit, using a spacecraft designed to put people back on the surface of the Moon.

Who is launching missions to the Moon?

India plans to launch the Chandrayaan 3 mission to the Moon in June 2023, taking a lander and a robotic rover to explore the surface of this celestial body. India first landed on the moon in 2008 with Chandrayaan 1.

Russia plans to launch its Luna 25 mission in July 2023, putting a probe on the moon to collect samples from the satellite’s south polar region.

SpaceX, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, plans to take Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and eight other passengers on the dearMoon trip around the Moon in late 2023. This would be the first mission for its Starship vehicle, capable of carrying 100 people.

NASA plans to launch its next lunar mission in 2024. Called Artemis II, it will carry astronauts to orbit the Moon.

The US agency is expected to launch the Artemis III mission in 2025 or 2026, taking the first woman and the first black person to the Moon.

It will be the first time people have walked on the moon since NASA’s last Apollo mission in 1972. NASA has said it will use the Space X Starship for the mission.

China has announced plans with Russia to establish a joint base on the Moon by 2035, but no timeline has been set for the project.

But why are nations so interested in the Moon?

The goal of space powers such as the US, Russia and China is to establish bases on the moon for astronauts to live in, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in the US.

“The Moon is being used as a stepping stone to places like Mars,” he says. “It’s a great place to test deep space technologies.”

It also takes less fuel to launch a spacecraft from the Moon than it does from Earth to travel into deep space, says Lucinda King, space project manager at the University of Portsmouth.

And, she adds, a fuel source has been discovered on the Moon.

“We know that there is water (H2O) at the south pole of the Moon,” says King. “That means we have hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used to refuel spacecraft for trips to Mars and elsewhere.”

“That’s one of the reasons there’s a race to get back to the moon – to claim the water there.”

What other space missions are planned for 2023?

NASA will launch its Psyche spacecraft in the summer of 2023 to explore an asteroid called 16 Psyche, believed to be the remnant of a planet created in the early days of the solar system.

The European Space Agency (ESA), an organization supported by 22 European countries, plans to launch its Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (Juice) in April 2023.

The probe will look for signs of life in water ice believed to be under the surface of three of Jupiter’s moons — Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.

However, in protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ESA will no longer use a Russian rocket to put its Euclid space telescope into orbit next year. Instead, it will use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The European agency also stopped working with Russia on its ExoMars mission to send a rover to Mars, delaying the launch until 2028.

China plans to put a telescope called Xuntian into low Earth orbit in December 2023 to map distant stars and black holes.

The country has operated probes and robotic rovers on the Moon and Mars and has put a scientific research station in space, called Tiangong.

“There has been a vision emerging in recent years of humanity extending to Mars and beyond,” says McDowell.

That’s why countries like China and India have become space powerhouses in recent years alongside the US, Russia and Europe, he says.

“Your governments are thinking: if this is what the future looks like, we don’t want our country to be left behind.”

This text was originally published here.