In 2023, Russia, India and the European Space Agency will launch missions to the Moon and beyond.

This follows NASA's Artemis I mission, which recently orbited the moon in a spacecraft designed to bring humans back to the moon.

India plans to launch the Chandrayaan 3 mission to the Moon in June 2023, using landers and robotic rovers to explore its surface. India landed on the moon for the first time in 2008 with her Chandrayaan 1.

Russia plans to launch the Luna 25 mission in July 2023, placing a rover on the Moon to collect samples from the Antarctic region. SpaceX plans to take Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and eight other passengers on a costly lunar trip in late 2023. This will be the first mission for his starship vehicle, which can carry 100 people.

In 2024, the American space agency Nasa intends to launch its subsequent Moon mission. Astronauts will travel on board the Artemis II spacecraft to orbit the Moon.

The Artemis III mission, which will send the first woman and the first person of colour to the Moon, is scheduled to be launched by the US Agency in 2025 or 2026.

Since the final Apollo mission by NASA in 1972, there have been no human landings on the Moon. According to NASA, the Space X Starship will be used for the mission.

A joint base will be established by China and Russia on the Moon by 2035, but no timetable has been specified for the project.

The goal of space powers such as the United States, Russia, and China is to build a base on the moon for astronauts to live on. McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States.

"The moon is used as a stepping stone to places like Mars," he says. "It's a great place to test deep space technology."

Also, launching a spacecraft from the moon requires less fuel than going to space from Earth, he says. Lucinda King, Director of Space Projects at the University of Portsmouth, said:

She added that a fuel source had been discovered on the Moon.

"It's known there's water at the south pole of the Moon," says Dr King. "This could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, which could be used to refuel craft for journeys to Mars and elsewhere."

"That's one reason why there's a rush to get back to the Moon - to stake a claim to the water there."

What other space missions are planned in 2023?

Nasa will launch its Psyche spacecraft in summer 2023 to explore an asteroid called 16 Psyche, thought to be the remnant of a planet created in the earliest days of the solar system.

The European Space Agency (Esa), an organisation backed by 22 European countries, plans to launch its Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) in April 2023.

The probe will look for signs of life in the water ice believed to lie under the surface of three of Jupiter's moons - Ganymede, Callistro and Europa.

However, in protest at Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Esa will no longer use a Russian rocket to put its Euclid space telescope into orbit next year. It will instead use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

It has also stopped working with Russia on its ExoMars mission to send a rover to Mars, delaying the launch until 2028.

China plans to put a telescope called Xuntian into low Earth orbit in December 2023, to map distant stars and black holes.

It has already landed probes and robotic rovers on the Moon and Mars, and it has put a scientific research station into space, called Tiangong.

According to Dr. McDowell, "a vision of humanity reaching out to Mars and beyond has been emerging in recent years."

According to him, this is why nations like China and India, along with the US, Russia, and Europe, have recently emerged as space powers.

Their governments are pondering the following: "If that is the future, we don't want our country to fall behind."