Why — after almost half a century of “benign neglect” (if not outright institutional disdain) — is the US Government, in the form of President Trump’s new “Space Directive #1,” suddenly championing the idea of “NASA astronauts, for the first time in over fifty years, returning to the surface of the Moon?”   Why are NASA (and the Russians …), in the midst of major geopolitical confrontations reminiscent of the old “Cold War”  … suddenly talking publicly about setting up a “Gateway” orbital station to the Moon — together?!   Why have the Chinese, over the previous decade, quietly been sending mission after unmanned mission into lunar orbit … culminating (in 2013) with an historic landing of a robotic Chinese spacecraft (Chang’e-3 — named after the Chinese “Goddess of the Moon”) on the surface of a previously totally unexplored region, called “Mare Imbrium?”    And why are they now planning an even more dauntingly ambitious, never-before-attempted exploration — by a […]