Moon, the creepy sci-fi flick opening in London this month charts the mental breakdown of a lonely American nuclear fuel miner stranded at a remote base on the dark side of the Moon. The plunder of lunar resources to reverse Earth’s energy crisis might be a realistic prospect, but is Sam Bell’s loneliness? Or, for that matter, his nationality?

Forty years on from the first Apollo mission to the Moon, the world is gearing up for a lunar scramble that could see the Earth’s largest satellite swamped with competing Moon missions. With India joining Russia, America, China, Japan and the European Union as lunar prospectors, the looming race for the Moon could become as acrimonious as the scramble for the Arctic seabed.

Moon landings went out of fashion in 1972, just three years after the US beat Russia to it becoming the first and only nation to plant its flag on its cratered surface. The symbolic value of the lunar landings was such that scant attention was paid to the Moon’s scientific or strategic significance.

Now, with Earth’s resources at full stretch, attention has turned back to the Moon’s potential to provide minerals, energy, space and prestige to established and emerging superpowers alike.

How US was nearly pipped to first moon rock samples

Sir Bernard Lovell tells Erica Wagner how he listened from Jodrell Bank to the drama, with the original audio from 1969

BACKGROUND

• DIY on the Moon: how Buzz saved the launch back to Earth

• Moon rock of ages

• Apollo Gadgets: Can you guess what they were for?

• The Moon: Gods, myths and legends

Related Internet Links

• Moon landing 40th anniversary special supplement

• The 21 best space toys

India, which launched its first lunar satellite in October to a nationalist fanfare unseen since its controversial nuclear weapons tests, plans to put a man into space in 2014, then follow up with a manned Moon mission in 2020. China is aiming to land astronauts on the Moon in the same time frame in a joint mission with Russia. It launched its first successful manned space mission in 2003 and its first lunar probe nearly two years ago.

The race between India and China to reach the Moon first promises to be a battle on the scale of the original competition between the US and Russia. Beijing and New Delhi are sensitive to the implication that ego is a factor, but this second generation of space pioneers regards its progress as a mark of national honour. India’s first lunar probe that slammed into the Moon’s surface in November was painted with the white, green and saffron tricolor, allowing it to boast that it, like America, had planted its flag on the Moon.

Reaching the Moon is a childhood dream of Madhavan Nair, the chairman of India’s space programme, but its budget remains two and a half times smaller than China’s at just $1 billion. Russia’s decision to pal up with China speaks to its own strained budget.

In economic terms India and China are driven both by the doctrine of self-reliance and the desire to capture as much as they can of the market for launching cut-price satellites.

The other great prize is the Moon’s resources, including helium 3, the nuclear fuel that Sam Bell is sent to mine in the Moon. How realistic Moon mining is remains to be seen but the upsurge of interest in lunar exploration suggests that plenty are prepared to take the risk.

Japanese craft have yet to touch the lunar surface, although they have been in the Moon’s orbit, but plans are afoot to land a rover there within a decade.

Britain’s maiden unmanned Moon mission, MoonLITE, will launch between 2012 and 2014. But after years of designing smart robots and explorer craft such as Britain’s ill-fated Mars rover Beagle, space scientists have realised that there is no substitute for human exploration. The Moon is the only place where that is possible.

It may be 36 years since Americans last landed on the Moon but, earlier this year, Nasa took the first step in its plan to return and set up a permanent Moon base by 2020. With so many others vying to join the space agency, it looks like being anything but lonely up there.

Newsflash from the big day

• It started with Apollo 8, Christmas, 1968. This was Nasa’s first moon flight. It was to orbit the Moon ten times before returning to Earth. The splashdown was due at around 5.15pm on Dec ember 27, David Nicholas writes.

ITN offered to the ITV network live coverage of the first splashdown in the Pacific after a translunar flight. The network was reluctant to interrupt children’s shows. They suggested a one-minute newsflash between Pinky and Perky and Skippy.

Such was the massive impact of the Apollo 8 ring-round-the-Moon on Christmas Day, that our one-minute newsflash morphed into an hour and a half’s live coverage of the splashdown in the Pacific . Apollo 10 in May 1969 was the second round-the-Moon flight. It was to test the separation of the lunar module from the command module . There were no live pictures — just the Apollo Voice from Houston. The ITV network was delighted with the ratings.

And so to the Big One — Apollo 11, Man Landing on the Moon. Nigel Ryan, the Editor of ITN, and I went to the ITV network chiefs. The ITN proposal was for a programme on Sunday night, July 20, 1969, to cover the Moon landing non-stop until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin completed their moon walk. It turned out to be a 16-hour broadcast.

We came up with a winner. Viewers loved to listen in to the astronauts talking to Houston Control. The trouble was that we had no idea when they would speak and often the dialogue was technical. Cyril Tweed, ITN’s head of engineering, found a new device called a character generator. It could store hundreds of two-line word captions, which could be retrieved by pressing a keyboard.

Frank Miles, my associate producer, translated the acronyms and technical details of the flight plan into pithy two-liners for superimposing at the bottom of the TV screen. They described what was going on at that very moment in the moon landing craft, while the voices of the astronauts gave a sense of what it was like to be there.

So for the 12 minutes of the descent to the Moon, we closed down the studio microphones and let the viewers hear only the astronauts’ voices, supplemented by information from the captions.

Sir David Nicholas is a former editor and chief executive of ITN

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