TWENTIETH DAY

Shocking photo of drowned father and daughter highlights migrants' border peril
The toddler’s arm was still draped around her father’s neck after bodies were found in the
Rio Grande as they sought asylum
Warning: contains graphic images
The grim reality of the migration crisis unfolding on America’s southern border has been captured
in photographs showing the lifeless bodies of a Salvadoran father and his daughter who drowned
as they attempted to cross the Rio Grande into Texas.
The images, taken on Monday , show Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 26, and his daughter
Valeria, lying face down in shallow water. The 23-month-old toddler’s arm is draped around her
father’s neck, suggesting that she was clinging to him in her final moments.
Mexican newspapers compared the photograph to the 2015 image of the 3 year old Syrian boy
Alan Kurdi who drowned off the Greek island of Kos – although it remains to be seen if it will have
the same impact on America’s fierce immigration debate.
Their bodies were discovered on the bank of the river near Matamoros, Mexico, across from
Brownsville, Texas, just half a mile (1 kilometer) from an international bridge.
According to Julia Le Duc, a reporter for the newspaper La Jornada, Martínez Ramírez had
arrived in Matamoros on Sunday, hoping to request asylum from US authorities with his wife,
Vanessa Ávalos, and their daughter.
But when he realized that it could be weeks before they were even able to start the asylum
process, Martínez decided they should swim across, said Le Duc, who witnessed Ávalos give her
account to the police.
“He crossed first with the little girl and he left her on the American side. Then he turned back to
get his wife, but the girl went into the water after him. When he went to save her, the current took
them both,” Le Duc told the Guardian.
The image underlines the dangers which mostly Central American migrants face in their attempts
to escape violence, corruption and poverty at home and find asylum in the United States.
As part of a broader crack down on migration, the Trump administration has made asylum
seekers wait in Mexico while their claims are considered – a process which can take years.
Migrants have increasingly turned to more remote and dangerous routes across the southern
frontier.
On Sunday, two babies, a toddler and a woman were found dead aftersuccumbing to heat
exhaustion in Anzalduas Park, which borders the river in the city of Mission.
Elsewhere three children and an adult from Honduras died in April after their raft capsized on the
Rio Grande, and a six-year-old from India was found dead earlier this month in Arizona, where
temperatures routinely soar well above 100F.
So far this year, dozens of people have died attempting to cross the Rio Grande, where water
levels are at their highest levels in 20 years and record levels of snowmelt run-off have
transformed the river into a raging torrent.
Claudia Hernández, a Mexican police officer in the border town of Piedras Negras, told the
Guardian: “The river is treacherous and the people who aren’t from here don’t know that. I grew
up here along the Río Bravo river [Río Grande]. I wouldn’t even go into that water to bathe or
swim. There are springs and whirlpools and when the current takes you it can pull you under.”
Isabel Turcios, a Franciscan nun, the director of the Casa del Migrante shelter in Piedras Negras
said that local activists warn migrants not to try their luck on the river, but the US has drastically
reduced the number of migrants who are allowed to request asylum each day.
“People get desperate and cannot keep waiting. They just want to cross. So they go to the river
and without any form of protection – no lifejacket, nothing to save them – they go into the river.
They always tell me that if God wants them to make it then somehow they will make it.”
She added: “It’s not how things should be. They should be able to cross at the bridges. Every
human being has the right to migrate. It’s a human right.”
Meanwhile Mexico has launched its own crackdown on migrants as the government scrambles to
ward off Trump’s threat of trade tariffs.
“Very regrettable that this would happen,” said President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on
Tuesday in response to a question about the latest deaths on the border. “As there is more
rejection in the United States, there are people who lose their lives in the desert or crossing” the
river.
According to reports in the local press, Martínez, Ávalos and their daughter left their home in the
municipality of San Martín in April. But after two months waiting in the southern city of Tapachula
– and fearful of the Mexican authorities – the family decided to push on.
“They said they were scared because of the way things were going for migrants, what with the
pressure from Trump. That’s why they decided to cross the river. Their plan was to hand
themselves into US migration,” Martínez’s sister Wendy told El Diario de Hoy.
One of Martínez’s cousins, Enrique Gómez, tweeted an appeal to the Salvadoran president, Nayib
Bukele, pleading for help in repatriating the bodies. Gómez said the family sought assistance from
the Salvadoran government but were being charged between $7,000 and $8,000 to repatriate the
bodies. Bukele’s office responded by asking Gómez to send a private message and promised to
start the repatriations.
The photograph of Martínez and his daughter provoked soul-searching among some Mexicans,
but recent polls revealed that attitudes towards migrants have hardened in recent months.
“The image of a father and the little one in the Rio Bravo… is a painful symptom of our systematic
failure,” tweeted author Alma Delia Murillo. “And on top of that you have idiots who blame the
migrants because ‘they took the risk.’”
Polling firm Parametría showed 58% of Mexicans opposing migrants entering the country from
Central America. Just 32% of respondents expressed the same opinion on November, when
caravans from Central America transited the country and were welcomed with outpourings of
generosity.
This report includes material from the Associated Press
Border South review: slow train to US border purgatory
4/5stars4 out of 5 stars.
Raúl Pastrana’s compassionate film rides with a Nicaraguan migrant trying to cross into America,
and a US researcher seeking traces of others who never made it
Documentaries about migrants have become a thriving subgenre, thanks to an abundance of
subjects crossing the globe. Rarely are they presented with the kind intimacy of Raúl Pastrana’s
film, which presents the trail from south Mexico to the US in vivid detail, filled with the weary but
amused resignation of displaced people. Many migrant documentaries are about the final journey;
this one is about waiting, unsure if there will ever be a final journey to a better life.
Our main character is Gustavo, a Nicaraguan who has been shot by Mexican police while
attempting to get closer to the border. Migrants such as Gustavo play a cat-and-mouse game with
the authorities, whose presence as they ride the top of trains in full military fatigues and
balaclavas is a frightening warning in the film. If the troops are deployed elsewhere, the migrants
are the ones riding in dense formation on the roofs. This back and forth of trains is a backbone of
the film, and Pastrana shows us as much of the dust and hot metal as possible in some
spectacular frames.
This game has rules of engagement, one of which is that the police should not use excessive
gunfire on migrants, or at least not be caught doing so – and Gustavo’s case has had significant
attention in the media, which gives him a welcome leg-up on his fellow migrants. We return again
and again to Gustavo’s waiting game, and also visit an array of other Central Americans, mostly
Hondurans, hanging out in camps, in forests and by the tracks, waiting for an opportunity. With
both the US and Mexican authorities cracking down, their chances are bleak, and the film is
peppered with talk of those who’ve disappeared and died.
There’s a solidarity and pleasure in the migrant camps, even though these friendships may be
temporary. Coffee is made in an ingenious way and shared, and delicious-looking Mexican food is
whipped up on the cheap for a communal meal. There are some imaginative skills on show –
fixing shoes on the fly, making sculptures, making the best of what’s lying around. There are some
frighteningly young-looking migrants, who do at least appear to be looked after. We don’t often
see migrants doing the best they can like this in stasis, at least not in this part of the world. There
are some stunning set-piece scenes, such as the endless train that could liberate them crossing
above their heads every day as they lounge on chairs in a communal yard, and plentiful use of
eerie silhouettes of figures on freight trains in the dark. Less successful is the other half of the film,
featuring Jason, an American anthropologist tracking the remains of migrants in the borderlands.
He’s a likable and determined figure, and there’s poignancy in his treks through the desert finding
ephemera such as sun-faded backpacks as he seeks to document and name the many
unidentified or lost people. However good his intentions, I found it difficult to care about his
academic approach and his neatly folded bags of lost possessions, compared to the real struggles
of people attempting to join him in the United States. Jason can pop over the border any time to
do his research, while the equivalent journey is of monumental difficulty to those in the other half
of the film. While this irony is clearly intentional, it sits oddly.
This quibble aside, Pastrana has made a caring documentary with humanity. We receive the
message strongly that these are ordinary people expected to do extraordinary things to live like
the rest of us. Gustavo’s destiny becomes perilous when he is no longer the centre of media
attention, no longer regarded as exceptional; we don’t end the film with much more hope than
when we started. This is skilful film-making, not to present the migrants as heroes, but just as
people with mundane plans and dreams like the rest of us.
Border South will be shown at Sheffield Doc/Fest on 8 and 10 June.

Why did the media downplay the latest sexual assault allegation against Trump?
A lack of enthusiasm from top TV and print outlets to cover E Jean Carroll’s accusation has left
many observers rattled
The leader of the world’s most powerful nation is accused by a prominent writer with an
impeccable career in journalism of having sexually assaulted her in an act amounting to rape.
Pretty big news story, you might think. Not so in the US, it seems. When the news broke last
Friday that E Jean Carroll, a revered advice columnist, had accused Donald Trump of sexually
attacking her in late 1995 or early 1996, alleging he slammed her against a wall inside a dressing
room in the Bergdorf Goodman store in New York then penetrated her without consent, the
response from many top media titles was strangely restrained.
The president himself has denied the claims, saying: “I’ll say it with great respect: number one,
she’s not my type; number two, it never happened.”
However, for a variety of reasons – some apparently blatantly political, some technical, some as
yet unexplained – news outlets decided to downplay the story or even excise it altogether. The
most startling example was at the New York Post, where the tabloid ran an account of Carroll’s
allegations drawn from an extract from her new book published by New York magazine, only to
take the story down a few hours later.
Oliver Darcy, the eagle-eyed senior media correspondent of CNN, spotted that not only did the
Post’s own story on the alleged assault vanish but so too did Associated Press copy on the same
issue published by the Post. Darcy later reported that Col Allan, the Post’s pugnacious former
editor who is now an “adviser” to the newspaper, had made the call to pull the stories.
As Darcy and his CNN colleague Marianne Garvey pointed out, Allan is a firm Trump supporter
who was photographed during the 2016 presidential race sporting a Make America Great Again
hat in the Post newsroom. Allan was given an oversight role at the tabloid by his boss, Rupert
Murdoch, another keen Trump admirer.
That a major newspaper should apparently suppress for political reasons a story about a sitting
US president facing allegations of a sex crime was shocking enough. But some observers were
even more dismayed by the generally low-energy (to use a Trumpism) approach displayed by a
raft of less partisan outlets in both print and television.
The question of Trump’s sexual conduct was hardly raised among the flagship Sunday political
talk shows, though MSNBC and CNN did call Carroll in for on-camera interviews within their
normal run of scheduling. On the print side, Media Matters highlighted the absence or relative
diminution of the charges on the Saturday front pages of many of the most august newspapers in
the country, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago
Tribune and others.
The most peculiar editorial decision was that of the Times to locate the story on its books pages (a
nod at What Do We Need Men For?, Carroll’s forthcoming book in which she lays out the
allegations). Quizzed by the paper’s readers’ editor on this peculiar placement, executive editor
Dean Baquet conceded “we were overly cautious” and said the basic details of the story
“should’ve compelled us to play it bigger”.
Baquet went on to say that in retrospect guidelines laid down for #MeToo reporting of sexual
assault allegations relating to the New York Times’s own investigations of Harvey Weinstein and
others had been misapplied to a major statement by a well-known individual made in a different
media outlet.
But whatever the finer details of the editorial choices made by top newspaper and TV outlets, the
collective appearance of lack of enthusiasm for the story left many observers rattled.
“This is extremely worrying and I really can’t understand how we ended up here,” Barbara Davis, a
best-selling women’s fiction writer, told the Guardian. “We seem to be experiencing in the entire
country a desensitization towards cruelty, lawlessness and bad behavior – we are becoming numb
when we should be taking to the streets.”
Trump has repeatedly and vociferously denied that he assaulted Carroll, stating that he has never
even met her though a photograph of them together in a social setting has resurfaced.
More than 20 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Carroll is the second to allege
an attack amounting to rape, the first having been his former wife Ivana Trump who is reported to
have made the rape claim in a sworn divorce deposition though she later backtracked and said
she had not used the word in a “literal or criminal sense”.
Trump has admitted to sexual misconduct. He was recorded in the notorious Access Hollywood
tape, released shortly before the 2016 election, bragging about forcibly kissing women and using
his celebrity power to “grab ’em by the pussy”.
That he was caught expressing such repugnant attitudes towards women yet went on within
weeks to win the presidency is a sign of Trump’s singular ability to survive revelations that have
floored many other men in the #MeToo era. The events of the past few days will only increase
speculation around the media’s role in affording him a metaphorical – and perhaps even literal –
get out of jail pass.
A soft penalty and questionable selection: the US got lucky against Spain
Hope Solo
Questions remain over the US defense and goalkeeping. When they face France in the quarter-
final they may need to rely on their talented attack
The United States got lucky against Spain. They didn’t score from open play and their second
penalty was very soft – if it was a penalty at all. I watched the replay in the broadcasting booth
over and over again, and none of us could see if Rose Lavelle was touched or not.
Spain’s quality should not have been a surprise. If you’d been properly prepared and watched
their recent games – and then re-watched their games – you would know that this team was going
to cause the US trouble, and could beat them.
Spain have a quality team, and Jorge Vilda is an excellent coach. He has demanded the team
have fantastic fitness levels and even though they play possession-oriented soccer they know
when to go direct. They were organized on set pieces which is often the US’s strength. Their
youth teams have an impressive recent record: they were runners-up in the last Under-20
Women’s World Cup and won the 2018 Under-17 Women’s World Cup. The development of
Spanish women’s soccer has accelerated so much in the past four years. It shows what the
outcomes can be if you invest in women’s football. It is amazing to see and I think they can win
the World Cup in 2023.
Already playing against a great team, you never want to see a goalkeeper make the type of error
that Alyssa Naeher made in the build up to Spain’s goal. So many goalkeepers have the right
attributes to make game-winning saves but the position is also much more about decision-making.
That ability is what sets great goalkeepers apart and it requires a whole different level of
goalkeeping. What makes the position so tough is being able to read the game and make the right
decisions under pressure. Alyssa has power and ability in the air but her decision-making needs to
improve. The challenge for her is that decision-making often comes from experience and the
ability to read the game. People often overlook how long it can take to get confident in your
decision-making or to even change that aspect of one’s game.
Megan Rapinoe did very well to convert her penalties under pressure but I didn’t understand why
Alex Morgan was about to take the second penalty and then walked away from it after the VAR
delay. That showed she was off her game. Spain put her on the floor a few times early in the
match and she didn’t overcome that. For her to be considered one of the best forwards she needs
to step up and put that penalty away when she had the opportunity. Alex needs to score when it
matters.
What will add to Friday’s quarter-final is that no one knows what to expect – from France or the
US. The USA can’t prepare anything radical for France in just three days so on Friday they will
give us what they’ve got. Without a doubt, Lindsey Horan needs to return to midfield. She can
control the tempo of the game and helps keep possession. It seems Jill Ellis left Lindsey out
against Spain to protect her from getting another yellow card and missing the quarter-final, but to
me that was a little arrogant. Putting Lindsey on in the 89th minute seemed a little bizarre: she is
either being protected or she isn’t.
The US defense is going to be what it is, so against France, Tobin Heath and Lavelle will need to
add to their list of great games. Rapinoe will have to be at her best and I want to see Christen
Press and Carli Lloyd come on earlier if they don’t start. There is so much depth on that team that
should be used – and not in the final minutes of the game.
It’s to the US’s advantage that France are coming off an emotional and exhausting game against
Brazil. I’m not sure France were the better team in that game and I’m not sure they have another
victory in them, even though I chose France as my favorite to win the tournament. It is so hard to
overcome the emotions from games like the one they played against Brazil so I hope they haven’t
given us all they have. As the host nation, they have the weight of their country on their shoulders.
We don’t yet know if that expectation is going to be an extra player for France – or the US.
How Peru fell in love with a sea giant worth far more alive than dead
The giant manta ray is at risk in the Pacific ocean, but the rise of ecotourism is changing attitudes
among local fishermenFishermen heading out to sea off Peru’s northern coast keep a keen eye on
the turquoise waters below them, hoping for a glimpse of the elusive giant manta ray gliding by.
Nowadays the boats are taking tourists rather than nets. The fish they once caught are now in
decline, and the fish the visitors want to see now are worth far more alive than dead.
This wildlife-rich stretch of the eastern tropical Pacific shared with Ecuador is home to one of the
largest populations of the world’s biggest ray – the giant manta – and the local community, led by
marine scientist Kerstin Forsberg, is trying to conserve the creatures.
These ocean-going giants are targeted for their gill plates, used in Chinese medicine, or, more
commonly in Peruvian waters, they become entangled in fishing nets. With a wingspan that can
measure as much as nine metres across, the giant manta rays have declined by up to a third
globally and are classified as vulnerable on the red list of the International Union for Conservation
of Nature.
“This species was really overlooked in my country,” says Forsberg, 34. But that is no longer the
case in Zorritos, a village arranged along a stretch of Peru’s west-facing Pacific coastline.
In eight years, Forsberg has changed the mentality here towards the mantas. She has helped
create a fisherman’s association focused on ecotourism encouraging local and foreign visitors to
observe or even swim with the rays. The Guardian spotted rays leaping out of the sea and
swimming close to the boat on one of these trips.
Quick guide
What's special about giant manta rays?

“People here now get excited about giant manta rays. Before, they didn’t even notice that they
existed,” Forsberg says. “Now if the manta ray gets entangled in their nets, fishermen start
releasing them and report on it excitedly. They’re happy to mention it to their peers.”
Edgardo Cruz, 50, has been fishing these rich waters since he was 15. His diesel-engined
wooden craft, christened Pollito, chugs through the opalescent waters as he scans the horizon for
signs of fish. He once caught a giant manta ray weighing one-and-half tonnes, he says. It was so
heavy a crane was needed to lift it on to the shore. Despite his efforts to land it, he was paid
around 200 Peruvians soles (£47) for the meat, which is not highly prized.
“Before, if one got stuck in the net, we’d grab it, stick a knife in it, then tie it on to the boat and take
it to the shore,” he says, his hand on Pollito’s tiller.
“Not any more – now we use the knife, not to kill it but to free it so it swims away alive.
“We cut the net because we know it would be destroyed by such a large animal. But you do so
knowing that this will be the future for we fishermen.”
Sustainable ecotourism could bring in more income than small-scale fishing. As tourism focused
on marine megafauna grows globally, the manta tourism model could be particularly lucrative.
One estimate predicts a living ray, with its 40-year lifespan, could generate more than
$1m (£790,000) in revenue. Dead, it is worth between $40-500, according to the same 2013
study.
“We’re talking about a species which can’t reproduce quickly and is quickly jeopardised if we’re
extracting too much of the population,” says Forsberg. Manta females reach sexual maturity at
between seven and 10 years, and have only one live-born pup every two to seven years.
In 2013, Forsberg and Planeta Océano, the organisation she founded in 2009, succeeded in
securing legal protection for giant manta rays, winning a ministerial resolution that made it illegal
to capture, sell or eat them in Peru.
Foreign volunteers arrive too, helping with research such as collecting samples of zooplankton,
which the mantas feed on. They also assist in getting tissue samples from the rays used by
scientists to trace their population movements at a laboratory belonging to Peru’s sea
institute, Imarpe.
Veteran volunteer Ken Dubuque, a board member for Earthwatch, says: “What we’re really
pushing is local community involvement and this project exemplifies that.”
But the mantas face problems that community-based conservation may have little impact on.
Ocean microplastics are a growing threat to these filter-feeding giants, says Forsberg. Scientists
are studying how the climate emergency might affect ocean wildlife at this juncture between the
cold-water, nutrient-rich Humboldt Current, which sweeps up from Antarctica, and warmer tropical
waters.
But in this region renowned for its sunny beaches and seafood, the ecotourism incentive is
providing protection not just for the giant manta ray but also for five types of sea turtle, sea lions,
whale sharks and breeding humpback whales.
SpaceX satellites could blight the night sky, warn astronomers
Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellites ‘have no public consensus and may impair view of
the cosmos’
Mega constellations of human-made satellites could soon blight the view of the night sky,
astronomers warned following the launch of Elon Musk’s Starlink probes last week.
The first 60 of an intended 12,000 satellites were successfully blasted into orbit on Thursday by
Musk’s company, SpaceX, which plans to use them to beam internet communication from space
down to Earth.
Sightings of the procession of satellites trailing across the heavens, such as that posted online by
the amateur astronomer Marco Langbroek, initially prompted excitement and astonishment.
The spectacle was so bizarre that a Dutch UFO website was inundated with more than 150
reports from people suspecting an alien encounter was close at hand.
But for astronomers the initial excitement quickly gave way to dismay as they began to calculate
the potentially drastic impact on people’s views of the cosmos.
“I saw that train and it was certainly very spectacular,” said Cees Bassa, an astronomer at the
Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. “With that comes the realisation that if several
thousands of these are launched it will change what the night sky looks like.”
The Starlink satellites, which were at an altitude of 280 miles (450km) on Tuesday, were still
visible with the naked eye and taking about five minutes to cross from one horizon to the other,
meaning they appear at predictable times in a given location. It is not clear what their eventual
brightness will be when they reach their operating orbit of 340 miles in the coming month.
“Everyone’s quite surprised by how bright they are,” said Darren Baskill, an astronomer at the
University of Sussex. “I live on the outskirts of Brighton in light-polluted skies and I could easily
see this line of satellites going across the sky.”
Responding to concerns on Twitter, Musk initially suggested that the satellites would be in
darkness when the stars were visible. However, others disputed this, including Bassa who has
done some preliminary calculations of the number of Starlink satellites likely to be visible to
observers. Since the satellites are higher than the Earth’s surface, they remain illuminated by
sunlight after sunset here.
“My aim was to show people these satellites were going to be more visible than people said they
would – amongst them Elon Musk,” Bassa said.
His estimates suggest that once the first 1,584 satellites are launched, for which the trajectories
have already been made public, there will be about 15 satellites clearly visible above the horizon
for three to four hours after sunset and before sunrise.
This means that in winter there would be several hours of the night during which no satellites
would be visible. But in summer the satellites would be visible all night.
Once all the 12,000 satellites are launched (assuming they are placed in similar orbits) 70 to 100
would be visible at night during the summer months, Bassa calculates. “These mega
constellations are going to add drastically to the number of satellites that are visible at any time,”
he said.
Néstor Espinoza, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, said:
“It’s basically a private company staining our sky for everyone. It’s interesting that there’s no
consensus about it. No one asked us.”
SpaceX is just one of nine companies known to be working on global space internet, meaning the
eventual number of satellites could be far in excess of this.
The satellites, in addition to changing the face of the night sky, could be problematic for
professional astronomers, said Espinoza. “We deal with satellites all the time. Whenever they
come into your image you have to find ways to fix that. If you put 12,000 in the sky that will be a
problem.”
Baskill said that the satellites, when in their final orbits, would probably appear fainter than the
brightest 500 stars in the sky – although this is still uncertain. If that were the case, the real impact
would be felt by astronomers and star gazers in remote areas, where between 1,000 and 2,000
stars can be seen.
“Even in the most remote dark places, you won’t be able to hide from this constellation of
satellites,” he said.
Musk later added that SpaceX was investigating ways to reduce the amount of light bouncing off
the Starlink satellites.
“Sent a note to Starlink team last week specifically regarding albedo reduction. We’ll get a better
sense of the value of this when satellites have raised orbits and arrays are tracking to sun.”
Liftoff: the new race to the moon begins
With Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and others making plans, the race is on to put people
back on the moon
by Stuart Clark
For Nasa employee Ryan Zeigler, the prospect of astronauts returning to the moon got real in late
April. He took a call in his Houston laboratory from the space agency’s headquarters in
Washington DC.
“They said: ‘So, we’re going back to the moon,’” he recounts, just days after the phone call. “I’m
like: ‘Yeah, about that…’”
Along with many others at Nasa, he’s got a lot of work to do in about half the time he thought he
had to do it. Unlike others, Zeigler’s job does not begin the moment the astronauts set foot on the
moon, but the moment they arrive back on Earth. He is the manager of
the Astromaterials Acquisition &Curation Office at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, and is
in charge of the 2,200 samples brought back from the moon by the Apollo missions half a century
ago.
The phone call was to warn Zeigler that a curation plan would be needed for the new rocks, which
would be arriving back on Earth in 2024 – rather than the “2028 at the earliest” that everyone was
expecting.
The trouble is that the plans are at such an early stage that no one at Nasa headquarters knows
exactly where the astronauts will land yet – and therefore what kind of rocks Zeigler might have to
look after.
The samples collected by Apollo have told us that the moon almost certainly formed after a
cataclysmic collision between Earth and another planet more than 4bn years ago, but the details
remain highly elusive. They have also suggested that an intense bombardment of the planets
occurred 3.9bn years ago that could have been instrumental in the development of life on Earth.
However, doubts have recently been raised about this scenario. To solve both mysteries, fresh
rocks from different lunar locations would be needed.
The unexpected call to arms began on 26 March, when Vice-President Mike Pence spoke
following a meeting of America’s National Space Council at another Nasa centre, the Space &
Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He told the gathered press that the White House had
charged Nasa with getting Americans back to the moon within the next five years, almost slashing
in half the previous time frame Nasa and its international partners had been working towards. A
few days later a statement by the Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstineconfirmed that Nasa was
beginning an internal rearrangement to accelerate their programme and work towards landing
astronauts somewhere close to the lunar south pole by 2024.
“I know Nasa is ready for the challenge of moving forward to the moon, this time to stay,” said
Bridenstine.
For nearly a month, Nasa said little else, leaving pundits and commentators to fill the void about
whether it was possible and how much it would cost.
Then, on 13 May, Nasa called a media teleconference in Washington DC with less than 90
minutes’ notice to talk about the new mission.
“It turns out that Apollo had a twin sister, Artemis. She happens to be the goddess of the moon.
Our astronaut office is very diverse and highly qualified. I think it is very beautiful that 50 years
after Apollo, the Artemis programme will carry the next man – and the first woman – to the moon,”
said Bridenstine.
The big news, however, was that Nasa declined to state how much they would need in total to
perform this mission. Instead they asked for a “downpayment” of $1.6bn in addition to their
already agreed $21.5bn budget for 2020 to get things started.
There is absolutely no guarantee that Congress will grant this request. The biggest question that
Nasa will be asked to answer is: why the sudden rush?
First, it is escaping no one’s notice that a landing in 2024 would coincide with the end of Trump’s
possible second term in office. Second, America could just want to keep up with the rest of the
world.
Keith Cowing, a former Nasa employee who now edits nasawatch.com, says: “Everyone is
running in the general direction of the moon. I think there is a kind of moon fever, that’s got
everybody interested.”
On 3 January this year, the Chinese landed the Chang’e 4 spacecraft on the far side of the moon,
a place no one has ever been before. Their next mission is scheduled for launch at the end of this
year and is designed to robotically return 2kg of moon rocks to Earth for analysis. India is planning
to launch the Chandrayaan-2 mission this summer, which if successful would make them only the
fourth country to land anything on the moon.
While for many years Nasa had dismissed such achievements as simply catching up with
something they did decades before, now the mindset is changing, says Cowing. “Here in the US
it’s like: ‘Well, wait a minute, why aren’t we going?’”
Nasa’s original plans for returning to the moon relied on a strong collaboration with the countries
that came together on the International Space Station. Nasa is testing a gargantuan rocket known
as the Space Launch System. Bigger than the original lunar rockets, it would propel its Orion
space capsule to the moon, where it would dock with a space station in lunar orbit known as
the Lunar Gateway. From here, the lunar lander would ferry astronauts to the moon’s surface.
The Lunar Gateway was to be the biggest area of collaboration but in order to meet the new time
frame, Nasa proposes to “descope” the gateway, so that a smaller version can be ready in time.
This largely removes the need for the international partners to accelerate their own programmes
to match Nasa. Instead, there is the option for them to complete the original full version of the
gateway on the original time frame to facilitate future lunar visits.
However, one place international cooperation is still critical is on the Orion crew spacecraft. While
Nasa is making the crew compartment, the European Space Agency (Esa) is building almost
everything else. The service module they will provide is a large cylindrical spacecraft that attaches
to the crew capsule and supplies it with power and propulsion. Without this, Orion will be going
nowhere.
David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at Esa, is confident they can supply all the
Orion service modules that Nasa needs as soon as it needs them. He says Esa has two service
modules in various stages of completion and is setting up the construction of a third – the one that
could take astronauts to the lunar surface.
“We’ve just been waiting for Nasa to say they’re ready to put boots on the moon,” says Parker.
Even if they can justify the need to race back to the moon, there is still the big question of whether
Nasa will get the money. In the traditional scheme of things, Nasa contracts the big US aerospace
companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin to make rockets and flight hardware to their
specifications. As with everything bespoke, the price tag is eye-watering.
If that price proves unpalatable to Congress, Nasa could change tack and suggest buying in
cheaper, commercial hardware from companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff
Bezos’s Blue Origin to get the job done.
By pure coincidence – if such things ever really exist – a week before the budget
announcement, Bezos unveiled a mock-up of a lunar lander that Blue Origin have had in
development since 2016. He said that it could be ready by 2024. “What you have here is Bezos
calling Nasa’s bluff, saying, ‘Hey, over here, I can do it!’” says Cowing.

Certainly the lunar lander is the biggest mountain to climb; $1bn of the first year’s extra funding is
going into jumpstarting its development. So if Congress refuses the request, the accelerated
return will be dead before it has even started – unless Nasa can come up with a cheaper way of
doing it, such as buying spacecraft from Bezos, whose company rather than the US taxpayer
funds the development.
“In the back of my mind that’s what I think could be the game plan,” says Cowing.
Given the animosity between Trump and Bezos, enabling a crowning achievement of Trump’s
time in office could be bittersweet for the Amazon founder.
It is not just American private companies that are looking to get in on the lunar action. Berlin-
based PTScientists is developing a commercial lunar lander that could deliver up to 100kg of
payload to the lunar surface. On 8 May it signed a memorandum of agreement with the
ArianeGroup, which builds and develops the European Ariane rockets, to jointly develop lunar
missions. PTScientists is also developing a separate lunar lander with Esathat would prospect the
lunar south pole for water and other resources that could be used by astronauts.
And while the company has been happy so far to do the groundwork alone, it is now looking for
governmental assurance that there will be a market for the products it is developing. In short, it
wants to know whether Europe wants to go to the moon.
“We would like to see a political commitment that lunar exploration is important,” says Mari
Eldholm, government affairs manager at PTScientists. “If Europe wants to join this effort, we really
need to act now or be left behind.”

The opportunity for that commitment is coming up at the end of this year when Esa convenes a
meeting of Europe’s science ministers that will effectively define its space exploration goals for the
next decade.
“When I was a kid, we watched the moon landings on television. It was something America did,”
says Parker. “Now the question for our ministers is: ‘Do you want to be part of it too this time?’”
To fully participate in the return to the moon, Parker plans to ask for a modest budget increase. It
would be the equivalent of asking for an additional 20 euro-cents per year from everyone in
Europe. It would take Esa’s space exploration budget from €550m to €660m a year.
A lot could depend on what happens in the US this summer, when the decision about whether to
stump up the extra cash will be made. And it’s by no means a done deal.
“Let me tell you what I think is going to happen,” says Cowing, before describing the political row
in the US over whether the island of Puerto Rico has received enough money to assist with its
recovery from hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.
Why is this important? Because the chair of the appropriations committee that must sign off on
Nasa’s extra grant money is José Serrano, who was born in Puerto Rico. So when Nasa
administrator Bridenstine asks for an extra $1.6bn, “representative Serrano is going to look at him
and say the lights are still out in Puerto Rico,” says Cowing.
The private frontier: corporate space explorers stand by for a $1tn lift-off
President Donald Trump has struggled with some of his signature policy promises, but now he has
set his sights higher: a return to the moon, five decades after humans last set foot there.
The White House has spoken of landing the first woman on the moon within five years and
Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has made it clear that the private sector – much of it backed
by a handful of billionaires – could play a big part in the plans.
Trump’s extraterrestrial ambitions are probably spurred by rather more down-to-earth concerns:
his desire for attention-grabbing headlines and an ambition to stay ahead of geopolitical rivals.
China, Trump’s main perceived trade rival, landed a rover on the far side of the moon in January,
while the US has had to rely on Russia to take its astronauts into space.
But a new US government moonshot would be a big boost to the already burgeoning private
space industry, which is forecast to triple in scale over the next 20 years.
Analysts at investment bank UBS expect the space business to be worth nearly $1 trillion
(£770bn) a year – roughly equivalent to the GDP of Indonesia, the 16th biggest economy in the
world – within the next two decades, up from $340bn currently.
Felix Tran, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, reckons “Space Race 2.0” will make the
industry worth $2.7tn by 2045. And the US government’s commitment, he says, will provide an
important boost to private investors’ sentiment.
The private sector has already taken on a much bigger share of work in space, including rocket
launches traditionally confined to state agencies such as Nasa. And they have a keen focus on
reducing costs.
Earlier this month, SpaceX, the firm founded by the serial tech entrepreneur and founder of Tesla,
Elon Musk, completed the first full commercial launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket. Aside from being
the world’s most powerful operational rocket (it has 27 engines and carried a Saudi Arabian
communications satellite into orbit, after carrying a Tesla car into space on its debut last year), the
Falcon Heavy’s main attraction is the cost advantage provided by its reusable rockets, which can
land back on Earth in one piece.
That, at least, is the theory, although the central core of the Falcon, which successfully landed
upright on a drone ship off the Florida coast, then toppled over in rough seas.
Nasa, however, seems willing to outsource operations to SpaceX. Last week it hired the company
for a venture that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Bruce Willis film Armageddon –
firing a rocket into an asteroid to see if it might be possible to deflect one headed for Earth.
Other rocket companies are pursuing a similar approach to cutting costly waste. Blue Origin,
owned by Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is aiming to produce a rocket with twice the
capacity of any other existing launch vehicle.
Stratolaunch, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, successfully flew the world’s
largest ever aircraft last weekend, with the ultimate aim of using it to carry rockets high into the
atmosphere. And US companies Boeing and Lockheed have a venture with the US government to
produce a vehicle that can carry heavy payloads, and is aiming for its first rocket launch in 2021.
The UK is involved in the “new space race”, says Mark Thomas, chief executive of Oxfordshire-
based Reaction Engines. His company, backed by BAE, Boeing and Rolls-Royce, is developing
its Sabre engine, which it hopes will be capable of pushing a spaceplane to Mach 5.4 in the
atmosphere and then to Mach 25 in rocket mode, using an onboard oxidiser, for space flight.
(Such speeds could also revolutionise air travel: Concorde’s top speed was about Mach 2.)
Reaction tested its key cooling technology at Mach 3 temperatures this month, and plans to test
its core system next year. If all goes to plan. Thomas says, its test system could be flying by 2025.
Reaction forecasts it could reduce the cost of launches from $60m to just $6m, enabling much
greater human activity in space.
“If you’re going to get people seriously off the planet – and that’s an ‘if’ – you’re going to need
some serious infrastructure in space,” says Thomas. “It does all say you need more routine,
reliable access to space.”
With falling costs come other opportunities. Satellites and related services still comprise the bulk
of the space industry – 77%, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch – but it is space tourism
which has captured the imagination of many.
Separate UBS research predicts space tourism will generate $3bn by 2030. In January, Sir
Richard Branson said he expected to make his first journey into space “in the middle of this year”
on a Virgin Galactic flight. Bezos and Musk are planning crewed flights within a year.
The British billionaire has made several similar promises in the past: he initially promised space
flights 12 years ago, with the aim of getting passengers into space by 2010. However, this time
might be different. In February, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, with two pilots on board, reached
55.87 miles above sea level – above the 50-mile mark used by Nasa to mark where space starts.
Eventually Virgin Galactic hopes to be taking six passengers at a time for joyrides on the edge of
space, and has taken deposits from 700 people – some of whom have already been waiting for
years – on tickets priced at up to $250,000.
Other companies are aiming slightly lower: Spanish company Zero 2 Infinity and Arizona-based
World View both aim to take passengers in balloons to the very edge of earth’s atmosphere, four
times higher than airliners fly.
As launches become cheaper, another group of entrepreneurs are already making plans for the
next step: space hotels. Robert Bigelow, the founder of hotel chain Budget Suites of America,
attached an inflatable living module to the International Space Station in 2016, and the company
now has ambitions for a full commercial space station accommodating first scientists and then
paying customers.
Yet for all these recent developments, which appear to herald a new, cheaper space age, UBS
warns that anything approaching mass-market travel to space remains some way off. As it
reminded its clients: “This is still rocket science.”
‘We have not managed to land successfully’: Israel's moonshot fails
This article is more than 2 months old
Spacecraft crashes in to lunar surface after engine and communications breakdown
An Israeli spacecraft has crashed into the lunar surface, ending the first privately funded attempt
to land on the moon.
About the size of a washing machine, the 585kg (1,290lb) robotic lander experienced an engine
and communication failure in the last seconds of touchdown.
The mission ended Israel’s hopes of joining the ranks of Russia, the US and China as the only
countries to have made controlled landings on Earth’s nearest neighbour.
“We had a failure in the spacecraft. We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully,”
said Opher Doron, the general manager of IsraelAerospace Industries’ space division.
“It’s a tremendous achievement up to now,” he added, saying the probe had already made Israel
the seventh country to orbit the moon and the fourth to reach the lunar surface.
View image on Twitter
Named Beresheet, the Hebrew word for genesis, the four-legged craft had intended to measure
magnetic fields from its landing site on a lunar plain called Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity.
Its frame held a time capsule of digital files the size of coins containing the Torah, children’s
drawings, dictionaries in 27 languages, Israeli songs, as well as memories of a Holocaust survivor.
Beresheet was launched in February aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, one of SpaceX’s private fleets run
by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
While crewed lunar trips have taken around three days, the probe took a much more circuitous
route for its four million-mile (6.5m km) journey. It has spent 47 days, gradually making ever-
widening elliptical orbits around the Earth until it was “captured” by the moon’s gravitational pull
and looped closer to its surface.
On Wednesday, the lander made a manoeuvre to lower its altitude for a lunar orbit of between
nine and 124 miles while preparing for the landing. It managed to take a photo of the moon
minutes before communication was lost.
Funded almost entirely by donations, Beresheet was built by SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit set up
for the mission, in partnership with the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries. It cost about
£70m, a fraction of the cost of previous state-led missions.
Morris Kahn, a South African-born Israeli billionaire, is the main backer but the US Republican
party and pro-Israel funder Miriam Adelson and her casino-owning husband, Sheldon, also gave
$24m.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was at mission control, said: “If at first you don’t
succeed, try again.”
US and European space agencies intend to use an expanding commercial space industry to send
people back to the moon. A Nasa-led plan is already underway to build a small crewed space
station orbiting the moon, and the private sector has been tasked with helping to build it.
Russia was the first country to make a soft landing, rather than a plummeting crash, on the
surface of the moon in 1966. Following the end of the space race in the 1970s, there was no
return until China sent a lander in 2013. In January this year, Beijing made history by landing a
spacecraft on the far side of the moon.
SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashes down successfully in Atlantic
This article is more than 3 months old
Nasa’s quest to resume manned space flight from the US moves a step closer
The SpaceX commercial astronaut capsule has splashed down successfully in the Atlantic Ocean,
marking a significant step in Nasa’s quest to resume manned space flight from the US.
The Crew Dragon capsule, whose lone occupant was a test dummy named Ripley, spent a week
docked at the International Space Station (ISS) before returning to Earth on Friday morning.
Footage of the landing shows the capsule hitting the water gently under four billowing red and
white parachutes. A boat, the GO Searcher, was waiting to recover the capsule, which splashed
down about 280 miles (450 km) from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The mission appears to have gone smoothly, which bodes well for plans to use the capsule to
ferry astronauts to the ISS this year. After docking at the ISS, the Canadian astronaut David Saint-
Jacques was the first to enter the capsule, describing it as a “business-class” experience.
The descent through Earth’s atmosphere had been expected to be the most challenging part of
the Crew Dragon’s maiden mission, Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder and chief executive, said.
The capsule’s heat shield and parachute system were relatively untested. After the Crew Dragon
was launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday, Musk said there was a chance that the
shield’s irregular shape could cause instability at hypersonic speeds.
Since the retirement of Nasa’s space shuttle programme eight years ago, US astronauts have
relied on Russian rockets to travel to the ISS. Nasa hopes to use commercial SpaceX rockets
from this year.
Ripley is covered in sensors to monitor the forces that human astronauts would be subject to on a
similar flight.
The demonstration flight follows news that the Pentagon is reviewing Musk’s security
clearance after he smoked marijuana on a Californian comedian’s podcast in September.