NASA promised the Moon by 2020; the official timeline now says 2024

NASA promised the Moon by 2020; the official timeline now says 2024

In August 2009, a popular science magazine put the lunar return on its cover under the title Return to the Moon. On its own website, NASA illustrated the plan with drawings of an outpost beside Shackleton Crater, at the lunar south pole, and capped it with a line that has aged badly: astronauts would return “before 2020”. Anyone who types “NASA returns to the Moon 2020” into Google isn’t looking for a riddle. They’re trying to check whether it peine. It didn’t.

The same official material offered other dates. One document spoke of returning “before 2020”; another said astronauts would explore the surface “before the end of the next decade.” And an earlier note announced four astronauts on the Moon by 2018. Three calendars, three different years, and not one crewed mission in any of them.

When was NASA going to return to the Moon?

The plan the agency presented at the time relied on two vehicles already in development: the Orion spacecraft and the Ares rocket. The goal was to put four crew members on the surface for short missions, with no extended stay. The BBC covered the announcement with a headline that today reads with a smirk: “Nasa plans return to Moon by 2020.” US media and a science magazine that put the lunar return on its cover did the same.

The fine print came separately. An agency official detailed that the first mission would leave four people on the surface and that the fully functional base, with continuous rotations like those on the International Space Station, would not be ready until around 2024. In other words: even then it was known that 2020 was the showcase and that the real infrastructure lay four years beyond. The document-by-document breakdown, with what each pdf said and in what year, leaves a trail of versions that don’t fit together.

Permanent base at Shackleton Crater: from drawing to mock-up

The outpost was drawn near Shackleton, at the south pole. On paper, a colony.

On paper. What emerged were mission emblems —the logos of the Constellation program— rather than operational landing modules. Part of the analysis argues that the project never got beyond a mock-up because the budget couldn’t stretch any further. A fact often repeated cuts against that: US nuclear capacity was far superior to the Soviet Union’s when people said the USSR was winning the space race. If the political muscle existed, the technological muscle should have trinc.

Lunar mirrors and the laser: a double-edged argument

The most cited resource for settling the controversy are the retroreflectors. According to the official account, the Apollo missions left mirrors on the surface; aiming a laser from Earth at those coordinates, the beam returns. The distance is put at around 380,000 kilometers. As for the spread of the shot at 365,000 kilometers, some speak of dozens of square meters.

Some turn the argument on its head. First, because the Soviet Union also left mirrors, and there they were placed by robots, not people. Second, because receiving the rebound at the same station that emits it, with Earth moving, demands an accuracy some call dubious. None of those objections is proven; nor do they make the physical evidence false.

Return for what: propaganda, Musk and public funding

The underlying question is economic. Supporters of the return talk about testing technologies for Mars. Skeptics respond that for Washington the only payoff is propaganda, and that payoff has already been collected: the real interest would be in China, and the rest trinc out of a sense of pride.

At the same time, space has become a business for the ultra-rich. The top two on the list, Musk and Bezos, jumped in headfirst. And there the accounts get mixed: mock-ups, videos and audiovisual productions paid for with million-dollar budgets. The question is no longer whether they will return, but who gets the credit for the movie.

The unproven theories about the Moon landing

At the far end of the spectrum circulate unsupported claims. That the Moon is not landable, that it is a plasma light, that Earth is flat and that everything is fake space. It is also maintained that the Apollo missions were a set piece filmed on a soundstage. These are hypotheses that have not provided any verifiable proof.

A curious ally of skepticism: that half a century later the full declassification of the program’s papers is not on record, when the usual period in the United States is fifty years. And a detail that doesn’t help either: Moscow did not dismantle the official version when it had every incentive to do so.

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With the current calendar, the list of promised dates for returning to the Moon —2018, 2020, 2024, 2025— is already longer than the list of years in which any were met. And the fact that throws you off is none of those. It’s a suitcase-sized mirror, 380,000 kilometers away, sending a glint back to whoever aims well.