More Companies Head to Space, But No One Can Agree on the Rules Up There
Lunar missions raise questions about who controls business in the heavens.
The moon as captured by a camera on Ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander on April 20.
Source: Ispace Inc.
As Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others send thousands of satellites into orbit, growing numbers of companies are contemplating the vastly more complex task of landing on the moon. A spacecraft from Israel Aerospace Industries and the nonprofit SpaceIL crashed on the surface in 2019, and a lander from Japan’s Ispace Inc. suffered a similar fate in April. Later this year, two American companies, Astrobotic Technology Inc. of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines Inc. of Houston, each aim to give it a go.
Such private moon missions herald a new era of space activity, with various companies laying plans for what has long been the stuff of science fiction—growing crops in lunar greenhouses, mapping terrain with drones or extracting minerals from moondust. “We need strong commercial players” going to the moon, says Jonathan Geifman, chief executive officer of Helios Project Ltd., an Israeli startup that has signed up for a scheduled Ispace lunar landing in 2025 to test technology designed to produce oxygen and metals on the moon. “This is the beginning of a very long road.”