Plenary 3: Going forward to the Moon - New Roads to Lunar Exploration
Day: Wednesday 16 June 2021
Time: 09:30-10:30 MSK
The 2019 marked the commitment to go back to the Moon in this decade as a major milestone in Exploration. It will not be the first time humans are on the Moon, but it will still be the decade where humanity pioneers and innovates in many exploration areas on the road to Lunar Exploration. The way forward to the Moon is now at the forefront of how space exploration will be understood in the space business. New business models, new technologies, new partnerships... even though space agencies still remain the main developers of these lunar missions, they will gradually become more and more the anchor customers for commercial missions. This panel will offer an overview of different lunar exploration programmes that have appeared around the world, mostly commercial. The panel will highlight the different needs, approaches, challenges and needed solutions from the commercial providers. At the same time, it will help us understand the importance of the space agencies as main customers to them and how the customer relationships are built. It will also give a good overview of the new approaches, covering from the governmental to commercial new policies and actions, discussing over the new business models, new technologies and new partnerships.
Some of the questions that will be discussed cover:
- The importance of a political commitment, and the timing of it. Are there special needs that would make the business move faster?
- Lessons learned from the past – how business apply the know-how build up by the space agencies in the past decades
- The difficulties, or not, of building up a business model with late revenue
- Importance of the team – What a successful team is built of? Experienced people, new motivated people, interdisciplinary or mostly engineering?
- Approaching new customers – should agencies remain the main customer, with a needed commitment to build sounding models and be able to approach other investors? What investors are looking for?- Is there a commercial demand to cover? Or is science the main objective of going back to the Moon?
- What is the “secret” to be faster on the development of all the technologies needed to soft land people on the Moon?
- How to achieve cost-efficient missions to the Moon?
- Is international collaboration key for the developments? If yes, in which areas is more needed?
- What remain the main challenges in their respective approaches? Are there any particular actions that will ease those challenges?
How the panelist will answer different to these questions based on their programmatics, strategy and business models? Do they propose different solutions for the same or different challenges?
All these questions will give the audience an understanding of the exciting new approaches to go back to the Moon, and about the opportunities, risks and challenges that it means to go back to the Moon before 2030.
