No hurry around the Moon these days

India pushed to delay its mooncraft; Japan and China to prolong successful missions, US prepares its autumn's launch and Europe's discussing next steps.

These days there is no hectic activity around the Moon. Japanese and Chinese officials announced extending their successful Kaguya and Chang'e-1 orbiter missions, that are currently taking place. In both cases, missions were originally design for about a year-long life; but with fluent progress of all orbiting crafts and no signs of natural retirement, space authorities in both countries try to receive as much data extra as possible. And in the best case, not to finish mission before its regional opponent. Both Japan a China lead autonomous space and moon programs and plan to launch a lander craft about 2013-2015 period.

India's Chandrayaan-1 mission which is to carry both ESA and Nasa's scientific instruments was delayed from original August to the first week of July. Nothing so special in the Earth nation's space agendas.

US is still quite far from launching its ambitious moon mission in autumn and there are no signs of possible delaying so far. In addition, there are quite extensive space base concept being considered in more and more detailed aspects. The US plan of base -as declared- is gonna be started perhaps somewhen in the period of 2020's. However, with the ongoing presidential debate among Obama, Clinton and McCain there are also changing and sometimes clashing perspectives of the moon activities and space policy generally. While McCain appears to be cordial fan of Bush's space "Vision" program for intensive human spaceflight and exploration, Obama is known for his reserved approach to current NASA. Explicitly, Obama says, he "believed in final frontier" but didn't agree with the proposed manner of exploration. He opposes human spaceflight, especially the push for man on Mars, as ineffective and expensive. Instead, he'd like to invest saved money into US intern social and education programs. As the moonbase concept is often considered spring board for future trips to Mars, this approach could have implicit impacts even for US Moon activities.

ESA has full hands with watching - so far extremely successful - ATV Jules Verne craft porting to ISS. On the European political level, the approved draft of the new EU treaty (to be ratified in upcoming two years) list the space policy as an area that should be discussed and voted in the European Council (by the heads of states) which could to lead to more united stance on space policy. There are also signs that ESA could be soon joined by some new EU members (Hungary, Czech rep., Romania or Poland).

Japan, China on orbit; India gonna join and Germany publishes its dreams

Moon is taking place in mainstream earth news nowadays. Why? At this moment and for about a year or so, Japanese and Chinese probes are cruising Moon's orbit. No, it's not about joint project. But the situation where Japan and China (historical, modern and perhaps even future Earth's tribe rivals) are launching suspiciously similar Moon projects and India (China's historical tribe rival number 2) is polishing surface of its own Moon orbital Chandrayaan-1, was refused to be called Asian space race by Chinese officials though.

Chandrayaan, by the way, is also hope of Europeans associated in ESA. It's gonna carry European technological module, that's gonna help with moon survey. As everything on European peninsula, ESA mixes tribal level with the supra-tribal one. Old tribal pride combined with incapability to achieve national glory by itself led to connecting forces with others. And space requires really huge amount of capabilities to be invested. But back to space!

Europeans together achieved to probe Moon by their SMART-1 project last year. Since then, there has been no signs of efforts to continue with Moon. ESA, instead, focus more on Mars, Earth related project and modest efforts to explore further Solar system. As well as exploration efforts also ESA's budget can be called modest. Perhaps, European peninsula miss kind of tribal rivals as China has.

What's worth mentioning in this situation, is that Germany - one of Europe's leading tribes, with really huge amount of historical rivals - called for its own lunar probe to be launched. Even though not so clearly, the very similar idea was mentioned by British who are now discussing whether to lift their moratorium on human spaceflights. It will be funny to watch whether this can lead to any kind of European space race. Perhaps not, but certain implications will surely come. How will ESA react? Their intergovermental meetings is gonna take place soon, so we will then see if there are some changes in idea of "exploring space together" or not.