An American rocket has a fine debut; not so the Moon lander on board

ON THE MORNING of January 8th America tried for the first time in more than 50 years to launch a spacecraft designed to touch down gently on the Moon. The previous attempt, in 1972, was one of the great space-age spectaculars. The Apollo 17 mission was the only time a Saturn V, until last year the most powerful rocket ever to reach orbit, took off at night; , the lander it put on the Moon, was home to two astronauts for more than three days of lunar exploration, the longest ever such sojourn.Compared with this, Monday’s launch of a Vulcan Centaur rocket, carrying , a robot lander less than a tenth the weight of an Apollo lunar module, was a distinctly modest affair, and with the subsequent failure of s propulsion system it was hardly an unmitigated success. But whereas the Apollo 17 launch marked the end of an era, this was about new beginnings: a new rocket, a new type of lander and a new way of doing lunar science. And whereas the 1972 mission was a monument to the extraordinary things which governments can achieve when everything goes right, this week’s events show the ever greater role that a competitive private sector is playing in space, in terms of both lower costs and greater redundancy.