The new space race

40 years after the first Moon landing, the International Space Station, now “as large as a four-storey house,” reports David Randall in the Independent, orbits the Earth 15 times a day with 12 men, one woman, seven Americans, two Russians, two Canadians, one Japanese and a Belgian inside.

A far bigger step could soon be taken, however. Specialists are to advise President Barack Obama on whether the US should embark on a 21st-century space programme that could see Americans return to the Moon, and eventually Mars. “The President's decision could instigate a space race with China that might be fiercer than anything seen in its Sixties rivalry with Russia,” notes the London daily. In the meantime, Beijing has declared it intends landing on the Moon by 2020, while Russia has also committed to “a major upgrade of its space capability, the first of the post-Soviet era.”

Apollo 11 veteran Buzz Aldrin argues that America could aid international partners for lunar exploration in order to free up its own resources to develop systems for "even more ambitious goals" such as a manned mission to Mars. Surprisingly, many environmentalists are greeting this news with enthusiasm. While some wonder whether manned exploration is compatible with tackling climate change, poverty, and diseases on Earth, James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory, argues that “any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever.”

LONDON EYE

Mayor Boris has got Martian blues

“We will never conquer the Red Planet,” laments the Mayor of London and frequent columnist, Boris Johnson, in the Daily Telegraph. “Homo sapiens will flunk the next great test not because we lack the technology, nor even because we lack the money.” 40 years after the Moonshot, he argues, humanity lacks the willingness to take the necessary physical risk.

Johnson marvels at the machines that went to the Moon in 1969, with their “absurd Bacofoil fragility”. Humanity’s crowning achievement - “to plant a person on the face of a heavenly body once worshipped as a god” was made possible by the confluence of three factors - rocket scientists from Nazi Germany; America’s desire to show the Soviet Union what a capitalist democracy could achieve; and finally the bravery of the astronauts themselves. Using sextants, slide-rules and “bits of paper to navigate space,” landing the Eagle within seconds of running out of fuel, such a mission “was so risky that it wouldn't be allowed today,” complains Johnson. “The insurers wouldn't go near it.” Choked by health and safety regulation, the rockets “would remain on the launch pad.” The tragedy of our age, he concludes, “is that the lawyer-ridden western world is 100 times more phobic and more paranoid than the generation that flew to the Moon.”