Another step towards returning people to Earth’s satellite

THE NEXT ten months will see a new race to the Moon played out on Earth, as three groups vie to construct a successor to the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) which took the astronauts of the Apollo project there half a century ago.

The contestants, announced by NASA on April 30th, are SpaceX, run by Elon Musk, a high-profile billionaire, and two consortia. One is led by Blue Origin, run by Jeff Bezos, similarly profiled to Mr Musk and laden with even more billions, and the other by a not-at-all-high-profile outfit called Dynetics, a subsidiary of Leidos, an American technology firm.

The LEM’s landings were hit-and-run affairs. The longest spent three days on the lunar regolith. The LEM itself had a descent stage, with four spindly legs, that also acted as a platform for the ascent stage (pictured), which took its crew of two back to the mother ship.

This time around the plan is for larger crews and longer stays. The candidates are thus bigger than the LEM. The most LEM-like in concept, though, is Blue Origin’s. It has separate descent and ascent stages. But it has two of the latter—one to low lunar orbit, the other thence to a rendezvous with the craft that will take the astronauts home. It would be carried to the Moon either by Blue Origin’s proposed New Glenn launch rocket, or on Vulcan, a launcher planned by a...