An upcoming project conceived by an American company that got the go ahead from Washington will be the launch of a satellite by the Russian Space Agency in the first half of 2003.

The Trailblazer satellite by California-based Transorbital will carry high-resolution video cameras, with the goal of returning images of the sites visited by the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972.

Images of equipment left behind during previous missions will also silence skeptics who still claim Americans never landed on the Moon, but staged the event on a Hollywood-style movie set.

The European Space Agency is also planning to send a spacecraft to the Moon. The project aims to have the spacecraft ready early in 2003 with a satellite carried as an Ariane-5 auxiliary payload.

The European Space Agency is planning to place in lunar orbit satellite SMART-1, equipped with a miniaturized high-resolution camera for lunar surface imaging, a near-infrared point-spectrometer and compact X-ray spectrometer to investigate lunar mineralogy and elemental composition.

Meanwhile, China has been taking steps towards manned flight.

"China is expected to complete its first exploration of the Moon in 2010 and will establish a base on the Moon," said Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China's moon exploration program quoted by the state run China Daily.

Last month China lofted an unmanned Shenzhou spacecraft that returned to Earth safely after 108 orbits, a prelude to a first human mission set for 2005.

But sending men to the Moon once more is not on NASA's immediate agenda.

"NASA exploration team has looked at human explorations for the future. The Moon is one of many possibilities," Don Savage, NASA's Public Affairs officer, said.

"We have not sent humans out of Earth orbit for 30 years," former NASA director of the Johnson Space Center George Abbey said during a symposium organized by the Space Frontier Foundation in Houston in July 2002.

"The Moon is a steppingstone to the future and we need that understanding if we are going to fly missions to Mars," he said.

On the subject of a mission to Mars, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said he believed in round trips.

O'Keefe also recalled NASA's budget for fiscal year 2003 which includes a major nuclear systems initiative that sets the stage for faster trip times by spacecraft exploring the solar system.

SPACE.WIRE