British astronaut Tim Peake has urged the US and China to de-escalate talk of a space race and instead return to the moon with a “spirit of collaboration”.
In an interview with Sky News to mark the 10th anniversary of his launch to the International Space Station (ISS), Mr Peake said it would be “foolish” to start a new era of hazardous lunar exploration without contingency plans for rescuing astronauts from other countries in an emergency.
“Space is incredibly hard, a very hostile environment,” he said.
“It would be foolish to not have things like common docking systems so that we can help each other out if people got into trouble.
“That’s the whole spirit of exploration. Okay, we might be coming from different positions, but we’re also one species and there to cooperate and collaborate.”
Sean Duffy, the acting NASA chief, has vowed the US will build a sustainable presence on the moon before China.
“We’re going back to the moon – and this time when we plant our flag, we stay,” he said in a NASA video in September.
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“Our mission is maintaining American dominance in space.
“China wants to get there, but we’re getting there first. We will win the second space race.”
But Mr Peake said lessons should be learned from the space station, where astronauts from Russia and Western nations had successfully worked alongside each other for 25 years despite geopolitical tensions.
“I think as we move forward again and are focusing on the moon as a goal, we should embody this spirit of collaboration,” he said.
NASA is just weeks away from launching four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon for the first time since the final Apollo landing in 1972.
It’ll be the first crewed flight of NASA’s new SLS mega-rocket that will be the workhorse of the Artemis space programme.
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A test flight in 2022 without humans on board identified a series of serious problems with the crew capsule, but the agency is confident those have been fixed.
“This SLS rocket is only on its second mission, so there is definitely a greater level of risk associated with it,” Mr Peake said.
“But the astronauts are completely committed to what they’re doing, passionate about what they’re doing, and all the experts who are working on the Artemis mission would have gone to every effort to make sure the risk is as low as possible.”
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The European Space Agency said earlier this month that an as-yet unnamed German astronaut will be the first from Europe to join a future Artemis mission to the moon.
But Mr Peake, who retired from ESA in 2023, was confident the UK’s turn would come. Rosemary Coogan, from Northern Ireland, is part of the agency’s trained astronaut corps.
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“It would be great to see that first European on the moon,” he said.
“But I’d love to see a Union flag on the surface in the not-too-distant future.”
