A Japanese spacecraft arriving at the Moon on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik this week marks the beginning of what may be a lucrative sweepstakes in space for generations to come.

But instead of Cold War-style political prestige, the purse for this space race could be long-term market position as the world’s high-tech economy begins to move off-planet.

With China, India and the U.S. planning to follow Japan’s Selene and her two piggyback “daughters” into lunar orbit by the end of 2008, lunar missions are becoming almost a fad. Those nations are already at work on follow-ons, while Germany and the U.K. are plotting their own lunar-development roles.

All are among the 14 nations working out a “collaborative” human exploration model that will use the expected early deluge of lunar-orbital data to guide the construction of permanent multinational outposts where they can showcase their technologies for terrestrial markets.

An early plan to send a DLR orbiter skimming as low as 45 km. over the lunar surface “shows the competitiveness of German space entities,” says Johann-Dietrich Woerner, chairman of the German space agency DLR.

As usual, the International Space Station (ISS) partnership is under a strain, this time, over NASA’s plans to bail out after 2015. But at the 2007 International Astronautical Congress here Sept. 24-28, the skepticism of previous years over U.S. efforts to return to the Moon has given way to enthusiasm.

Canadian robot manufacturers are slotting their wares into NASA’s latest lunar-surface architecture (AW&ST Sept. 17, p. 32), while the European and Russian space agencies are refining their concept for a joint Crew Space Transportation System to supplement NASA’s Constellation family of piloted lunar-access vehicles. Lunar filling station, power plant and strip mine ideas pepper the papers presented here.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, among the strong turnout by space-agency chiefs this year, reminded the congress that President Bush’s original exploration directive called for international and commercial participation.

Sun Laiyan, Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) chief, says China has yet to decide whether it will send its citizens to the Moon, even though Griffin says it’s his personal belief that the Chinese will get there first this time (AW&ST Sept. 24, p. 31).

Sun says the CNSA is ready to cooperate with anyone “but only as an equal,” and NASA invited CNSA to participate in the series of workshops that produced an initial “framework document” last summer (AW&ST June 11, p. 32). But so far, it’s an arm’s-length relationship.