Our moon is the hottest property in the solar system right now

The space race is heating up again in ways we haven't seen since the end of the Cold War. We haven't been to the moon since 1972 but a number of private companies and national agencies have begun looking to our nearest celestial neighbor with renewed interest, not only as a site of scientific study but also as a fuel resource and potential staging area for trips further out into the solar system. Last December, Trump signed Space Policy Directive-1, which directs NASA "to lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities." Essentially, the move will help NASA better organize exploratory efforts with its international partners and private spaceflight companies."I "What we're doing now is entirely different than what we did back [during the Apollo era]." To that end, NASA has since submitted to Congress a plan to establish the necessary infrastructure to not just get us back to the moon but to return there regularly. Dubbed the "Exploration Campaign", this plan focuses on three core areas: low-Earth orbit (LEO), the crewed missions to the moon for long-term habitation and study, and robotic missions to Mars and beyond. "EM-1 will take Orion and the Space Launch system into a high lunar orbit and that's actually the orbit that NASA has identified to do the asteroid retrieval mission that will bring a large boulder into that orbit" Lockheed Martin's Orion program manager Mike Hawes told the Observer in 2016. "This will essentially be a dress rehearsal for that mission.