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Back to the Moon: The Birth of Self-Sustaining Outposts
A new space race is unfolding, driven by commerce and permanent bases on the Moon. To succeed, they’ll need to be self-sustaining.
WHEN SOPHIA Casanova was 10, her parents bought her a telescope, and she fell head over heels for all things space. She’d spend lazy summers in her hometown of Sydney, Australia, in the late 1990s revelling in the stars and watching the haunting phases of the serene, implacable Moon.
“That was the tipping point, really,” says the young Australian geologist, who’s now busily designing missions to prospect for — and eventually mine — water ice on the Moon and Mars. “It’s absolutely incredible to see through a telescope,” she says of the Moon, which she still views through a bigger, fancier telescope. “You see so much detail.”
When she started her doctorate in off-world resource extraction in 2017, space mining was considered science fiction. Now, she will have the pick of jobs in the booming space resources field around the world.
That’s partly because the U.S. space agency NASA has committed to return humans to the Moon in the 2020s under Project Artemis, building a permanent base there as a precursor to crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s. NASA is also…
