The moon is ‘pretty much’ inevitable. Mars is another matter entirely

There was a time when almost every child who looked up at the night sky imagined, at least once, that they might end up out there. More than 50 years on from the last time a human being actually did, that promise keeps resurfacing, and just as often fading again.

Ask Connor Sant Fournier and Jackson Levi Said whether this time will be different, and the answer comes without much hesitation.

“The eventuality that we’ll make it to the moon, no matter what ethical grey lines we have to cross, will happen,” Sant Fournier, executive at the Xjenza Malta Space Unit, says.

Mars, both researchers agree, is a different story altogether.

Why the moon feels close again

Part of the confidence that humans will be back on the moon comes down to who is paying for it. Unlike the original moon landings, driven by political and scientific rivalry, today’s push is different, Sant Fournier says. “Now it’s for marketing and commercial reasons,” he adds and with more private companies involved, “the motivation is much higher”.

Jackson Levi Said, a professor at the University of Malta’s Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy, highlights asteroid mining as a key commercial angle. He explains that while reaching an asteroid directly is complex, going from the moon to an asteroid is much easier.

Establishing a base on the moon, he adds, “opens a lot of commercial aspects as well”, on top of continuing political competition between the US, China and India.

That confidence stems from NASA’s Artemis II mission in April this year, when four astronauts orbited the moon and returned to earth. It was the closest anyone has been to the lunar surface since the Apollo mission ended in 1972.

The crew, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, spent about 10 days in space before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

NASA’s Artemis III mission was initially set for 2025 but has been delayed. The first crewed landing on the moon since Apollo is now anticipated on Artemis IV, targeted for 2028, though that date might shift again.

Levi Said says the delays are not unusual for missions of this scale, citing the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which also began operating years later than originally planned.

“It’s a normal thing in broader science,” he says. “It’s not a sign of things about to fail.” Space missions, by contrast, can slip by a year or two “and they’ll get there”, he says.

Sant Fournier also points to the Trump administration in the US as a factor pushing timelines back, saying it wants “to define science”.

Asked what a human presence on the moon adds that robotic missions cannot, Sant Fournier points to Artemis II itself. Unlike its uncrewed predecessor, the crewed flight produced observations “that the data would not have ever suggested”. Astronauts bring a subjective element that instruments alone cannot, he notes. “Humans are best for inspirational reasons.”

Levi Said describes says it’s like a traffic jam of rockets preparing for landing. The first would establish camp, but people need to be sent beforehand.

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window on 6 April 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the moon (Photo: NASA)

A one-way ticket, sort of

The picture is less settled regarding Mars. Nothing in NASA’s current plans commits the agency to a launch date, and officials have spoken of a crewed mission “in the 2030s” for years without settling on a specific decade.

Unlike a trip to the moon, a Mars mission is a commitment measured in years rather than days, with no way back partway through.

“If you’re on your way to Mars, you’re committed at that point,” Levi Said notes. And there is little commercial reward to offset that risk. “It’s not like you’re going to dig something up there,” he says, adding that the amount of money it would take to extract and return even a kilogramme of gold or diamonds from Mars would far outweigh its worth.

Sant Fournier compares the moon to an airport terminal; a staging point easing the trip to Mars with less atmosphere.

Nonetheless, Mars remains a distant goal so far. Levi Said compares the trip to Mars to how skyscrapers looked before lifts became fast enough to make them practical.

“Right now, going to Mars is a two-year commitment,” he says. “If it somehow became like the moon, where you could get there in three days, then maybe that could change.”

A small island’s quiet fingerprints

Malta’s own contribution to the wider effort, though modest, is not new.

Asked whether a country of Malta’s size, could really matter to a mission like this, Levi Said points to how science credits its breakthroughs. “Einstein didn’t do this on his own, but it’s got his name because he had the biggest contribution,” he says. “Forget about a small country. Anyone can have a significant input.”

Malta joined the European Space Agency’s Plan for European Cooperating States (PECS) agreement in 2024, reportedly worth about €1.6 million a year.

Sant Fournier says the scheme is designed to nurture Malta’s space ecosystem, opening funding to private companies and academics and inviting people with terrestrial expertise in fields such as ICT or machine learning to apply it to space-relevant work. Malta is leading the fifth PECS funding call, due later this year, he says.

Malta has also contributed to the Euclid Space Telescope, with one of its main software components developed by a Maltese researcher, Sant Fournier says.

Levi Said points to Malta’s role in processing data for the Square Kilometre Array, a radio telescope project spanning Australia and South Africa, and confirmed a Maltese researcher’s involvement on the THESEUS proposal team, a mission under consideration by the European Space Agency to send a multi-instrument probe deep into the universe to answer key existential questions.

But Malta also has a small existing link to human spaceflight.

The Astronomical Society of Malta took part in outreach for Fram2, a crewed SpaceX mission that circled the poles last year, after being approached by the mission’s organisers, Spaceomix. In exchange, the society’s logo was placed on a sticker that flew on board.

However, light pollution stands in the way of Malta doing more from the ground. Sant Fournier’s own research has found that sky glow from built-up areas spreads up to 5km up into the atmosphere and spans the length of the country.

The Artemis II crew captured a portion of the moon coming into view along the terminator—the boundary between lunar day and night—where low-angle sunlight casts long, dramatic shadows across the surface (Photo: NASA)

“There is not a single point between Malta and Sicily which is completely dark,” he says, adding that the problem is reversible with better lighting practices, but remains one of the country’s main limits on ground-based astronomy.

Plans are also under way for a Space Park at Fort Binġemma. Sant Fournier describes the goal as “something of an explorer equivalent for space”, alongside a research component for visiting and local researchers.

Malta may not be part of the space mission that will eventually return humans to the moon but its modest contribution to space research can help provide a better understanding of the vastness and mysteries of the universe.