You can lead an astronaut to water, but who will help them drink?

Private sector innovation is central to the unfolding race to build a human base on the moon

Last month, Isro – the Indian Space Research Organisation – hit the headlines when its Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully landed a rover on the rough terrain near the moon’s south pole, catapulting India into an elite club of countries that have landed on the lunar surface.

The news came a matter of days after the Russian space agency’s Luna-25 mission to deploy a 800kg lander failed catastrophically, when the spacecraft carrying it crashed to the lunar surface.

Isro’s achievement has planted a proverbial flag in the lunar dust for Indian science in what is fast becoming a new space race.

The prize is water

Water ice to be more precise. Potentially vast deposits have been identified in permanently shadowed regions near the moon’s south pole. The missions targeting the polar region are seeking to confirm its presence.

Water is key to life on Earth, it will also be key to life on the moon. If water ice can be accessed, processed and purified, it makes a permanent human moon base possible.

Not only will the ice be a source of water, it can be split to produce oxygen to make breathable air and hydrogen to make fuel. That fuel could help provide power for a human settlement, it could also be used to power missions deeper into our solar system, notably to Mars.

Russia and India are not alone in this race. China has ambitions for a crewed mission to the moon, as does Nasa – with the support of the European Space Agency – through the Artemis program. Private sector firms have their eyes on the moon too.

The US-led Artemis Program is significantly more ambitious than just sending a lander and is well-advanced. It aims to send a crewed mission to orbit the moon late next year, with a crewed lunar landing scheduled for 2026. It has plans for a permanent base in the late 2020s near the moon’s south pole to take advantage of the water deposits.

Why this sudden and renewed interest in space?

The driver isn’t just the geopolitics of the West, China, Russia and India vying for supremacy. Nor is it just about the moon. In fact, the main driver hasn’t been international competition – but the opportunities created by technological innovation.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other launch firms like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have, in recent years, radically cut the price of launching payloads. There are far more space launches, operating at far lower costs, than was the case even a decade or two ago. This sudden opening up of orbit has created myriad opportunities that just weren’t economically viable before.

We’ve already seen the proliferation of communications and earth observation satellites in recent years, like Musk’s Starlink constellation, which features well over 4,000 satellites.

There’s now serious talk of setting up vast solar power arrays in space to beam electricity down to earth, and of commercial uncrewed space stations.

And, of course, talk of moon landings.

But making the most of the opportunities created by cheaper space launches will require more innovation – in the spacecraft and the services carried out in space.

Opportunity for the UK

The UK space sector is worth £17.5 billion, and grew more than 5% in 2021. We have massive expertise, particularly in satellite technology, so this is a real opportunity for UK business.

In the USA, NASA and even private sponsors have used competitions as a way to stimulate innovation in space. The Ansari XPrize led to the first private crewed space launch in 2004. NASA has run competitions to design new astronaut gloves, and to create technology to excavate lunar ice.

We should do the same to stimulate the UK’s space sector to solve new challenges.

The companies that can solve the challenge of purifying water ice and make it useful and usable on the moon and beyond will be big players in the future space sector.

At Challenge Works, we’re currently working on a forthcoming prize to encourage inventors to create technology to purify the contaminants out of the lunar ice and make it suitable for astronauts to use. We hope to launch this with our partners in the Canadian and UK space agencies later this year.

If the UK’s space industry applies its expertise in engineering for the hostile conditions of space, and creates the technologies for functioning lunar colonies, the opportunity for the UK economy is enormous.