Everybody's going to the moon - after USSA bombs it

Between 1976, when a Soviet Luna 24 robot landed, scooped up some soil and returned to Earth, and 1990, when a Japanese spacecraft began a highly elliptical orbit that took it 10 times past the moon, nobody paid much attention to our nearest neighbour. Between 1994 and 2008 there were two automaton visitors from the US, one from the European Space Agency, and one each from Japan, China and India.

Right now, almost 40 years after the historic landing of two astronauts aboard Apollo 11, America is once more heading for the moon. A lunar reconnaissance orbiter (LRO), launched on Thursday night, is designed to go into orbit round it, and the Atlas rocket that put it there is on course to crash into a shady lunar crater, sending up a plume of dust and - everybody hopes - ice, high enough to be examined by a companion satellite called LCROSS, short for lunar crater observing and sensing satellite.

There are practical reasons for wanting to know more about the moon. The moon may be a chip off the old block, a violently detached fragment of the newly formed Earth, in which case it represents a preserved record of our planetary origins. In the past 4 billion years, the moon's steady tidal drag has slowed Earth's spin to its present, convenient 24-hour day. The moon's close companionship keeps the Earth's axis of rotation from wobbling chaotically. Without such a steadying influence, life might survive, but certainly not civilisation. Galileo's first glimpse of lunar craters through the first telescope 400 years ago launched the scientific revolution. The moon could be the first base for the human exploration of space (which is why it is important to identify a potential reservoir of water there) and it would be the perfect location for a network of ambitious telescopes. More

USSA moon bombing violates space law