Another step towards returning people to Earth’s satellite

THE NEXTLEMNASA ten months will see a new race to the Moon played out on Earth, as three groups vie to construct a successor to the Lunar Excursion Module () which took the astronauts of the Apollo project there half a century ago.The contestants, announced by on April 30th, are SpaceX, run by Elon Musk, a high-profile billionaire, and two consortia. One is led by Blue Origin, run by Jeff Bezos, similarly profiled to Mr Musk and laden with even more billions, and the other by a not-at-all-high-profile outfit called Dynetics, a subsidiary of Leidos, an American technology firm.