The New Race to the Moon

By Malakhi Beyah, 2025

Published 9/27/2023

Go outside and look up tonight. More likely than not, among the backdrop of stars, you will see the Moon beautifully shining in the night. Humans have been gazing at that same moon for millennia; it is a familiar fixture on most nights and gives us a spectacular view to admire. Across the world and throughout history, our natural satellite has shaped cultures, inspired innovation, and fostered one question in everyone’s minds: “What is actually on the Moon?”

We were finally able to start answering that question in the mid-1900s. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a fierce competition to reach the lunar surface. Both countries managed to send orbiters and rovers to the surface in the early 1960s, but neither succeeded in having a human set foot on the Moon until July 20, 1969, when the U.S. landed two men on the lunar surface with the Apollo 11 mission. That mission, as well as various others in the Apollo program over the next three years, vastly expanded how much we knew about the Moon. For the first time in human history, we could hold parts of the thing we could only hold in our eyes and hearts before.

Despite the achievements of the Cold War space race, missions to the Moon essentially stopped in the early 1970s. Recently, however, multiple countries have decided to pick up the Space Race where the U.S. and Soviet Union left it. China and India have joined the list of countries to land crafts on the lunar surface, and others have made significant progress. Perhaps most notably, on August 23, 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission became the first landing on the Moon’s south pole, unlocking an entirely new side of the Moon to explore and learn from. Furthermore, the presence of ice on the Moon’s south pole could allow humans to live on the Moon for extended periods of time. In the midst of all this, Russia is racing to re-enter the race with its Luna program, and the United States’ Artemis program aims to send people to the Moon to stay. With all of this, we can assume that the Moon will soon become a lot more than our fixture of the night.