Renewed interest in the Moon, whose exploration is currently enjoying a second youth after the memorable missions of the 1960s and 1970s, has given many of us a renewed enthusiasm for one of the most exciting joint scientific and technological exercises in human history, space exploration. We live in an age where putting a satellite into orbit or moving space station personnel is downright routine, and for decades the distance that separates us from our natural satellite and everything beyond has seemed to increase by the minute.

The launch of the Artemis program during the Trump administration was a turning point, prompting other space agencies to hit the accelerator on their lunar exploration projects. It is true, yes, that human beings still He has not set foot on the moon since December 1972. (in a few days it will be 51 years), with the successful Apollo 17 mission, but everything indicates that it is only a matter of two, at most three years, before we finally experience such a significant event.

Now, while there is also a point of pride in this new race between the various agencies (and of course the countries they represent), the motivations are very different from those that drove the space race in the 1960s. Now it’s not about showing who can arrive first, This time the goals are much more ambitiouswith derivatives such as establishing a lunar colony and using the Moon as a key location in future interplanetary missions, especially for the expected arrival of humans on Mars sometime in the next decade.

These plans are terribly complex because they require an infinite number of very diverse developments, and today we find a very interesting one. And as we can read in Gizmodo, lASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) and Thales Alenia Space are already working on the first lunar base that NASA will use in the Artemis program. It’s called, at least for now, the Multi-Purpose Habitat (MPH) and everything points to it playing a really important role in the colonization of the Moon.

This point yes it is still far in time. The next Artemis mission will be the first manned one for now and will get quite close to the lunar surface but without landing on a satellite, a milestone reserved for a later one. And from that point, it will still be necessary to create a number of systems and guarantee certain supplies (such as water, especially at the South Pole) before we reach the point where this infrastructure can be deployed, already with plans to establish a permanent or at least long-term presence. That said, it seems unlikely to happen within this decade, but it points to a very interesting future for the next.