The Global Perspective

By Giacomo Valentini 2022 marks the launch of the operative phase of Artemis, the ambitious moon project by US space agency NASA in collaboration with European and other agencies. The goal is to return a human to the moon by mid-decade, followed by a permanent moon based by the end of the 2020s. The programme includes building an orbiting mini-space station in lunar orbit (the Gateway) to serve as a communication hub, science laboratory, short-term habitation module, and holding area for rovers and other robots. Artemis will rely on a complex of vehicles, including various types of launchers, spacecraft and moon rovers. The project is likely to raise tensions with the West’s traditional rivals - Russia and China. The risk is a push for militarisation of cislunar space, i.e. the area of space within the lunar orbit.  The Artemis programme is very ambitious, and will rely heavily on international cooperation and private participation to produce viable results. The operational agreeme...

By Giacomo Valentini I met Mr. Scafarto in 2004, when I was living in Brussels, and I immediately took to liking him. He was a retired EU civil servant, from Naples, Italy. We spoke Italian among us, though with other people around he would speak French. Amazingly, he was even able to speak French with a Neapolitan accent! He used to like telling me stories of his life, and one of them concerned his first weeks at his new job back in the early 1960s at the European Commission’s Luxembourg offices. There, he said, the department he had been assigned to was headed by a Dutchman, who immediately made it clear that he did not like Italians, he thought they were lazy, inefficient and generally uneducated. But the EU civil service at the time was pretty short-staffed, which condemned the two to working together - the boss needed all the human resources he could get hold of. Long story short, Mr. Scafarto was proud to tell me that by the time he was promoted to a new department, his boss had ...