List: $10.99
| Sale: $7.70
Club: $5.49
America Is Losing the Race Back to the Moon
Artemis, China’s Lunar Program and the Race for Ice at the Moon’s South Pole
Author: Damien Kessler
Narrator: AI Voice James
Unabridged: 1 hr 21 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 10/28/2026
Synopsis
This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
For fifty years after the last boot print was left in the grey dust, nobody went back. The Moon became a place humanity had visited once, in a burst of Cold War competition, and then quietly abandoned.
That era is over, and the second race is not going the way most people assume.
The reason is water. Frozen in permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole, billions of years old, sitting in the only patches of ground in the solar system that never see sunlight. Water means drinking water, breathable oxygen and rocket fuel manufactured on site. It turns a dead rock into a filling station — and it exists in only a handful of locations. There is no sharing the good real estate. Whoever is standing on it sets the terms.
On one side, NASA and a rocket that was designed in Congress as much as in an engineering office, flying a lander that must first solve a problem no one has ever solved in orbit. On the other, a program that has already landed robots on the far side, already returned samples no other nation has, and that has not missed a declared deadline in twenty years.
One of these programs moves in a straight line. The other keeps being rebuilt mid-flight.
This is the full story of Apollo’s abandonment, the Starship refuelling problem that the entire American timeline now rests on, the mining and base-building plans already drawn up, the legal vacuum over who owns lunar ground, and the road from the Moon to Mars — plus the argument, taken seriously, that none of it is worth doing at all.
Earthrise was seen by a handful of astronauts, then by nobody for half a century. Whether it becomes an ordinary view from a kitchen window is what this race decides.
For fifty years after the last boot print was left in the grey dust, nobody went back. The Moon became a place humanity had visited once, in a burst of Cold War competition, and then quietly abandoned.
That era is over, and the second race is not going the way most people assume.
The reason is water. Frozen in permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole, billions of years old, sitting in the only patches of ground in the solar system that never see sunlight. Water means drinking water, breathable oxygen and rocket fuel manufactured on site. It turns a dead rock into a filling station — and it exists in only a handful of locations. There is no sharing the good real estate. Whoever is standing on it sets the terms.
On one side, NASA and a rocket that was designed in Congress as much as in an engineering office, flying a lander that must first solve a problem no one has ever solved in orbit. On the other, a program that has already landed robots on the far side, already returned samples no other nation has, and that has not missed a declared deadline in twenty years.
One of these programs moves in a straight line. The other keeps being rebuilt mid-flight.
This is the full story of Apollo’s abandonment, the Starship refuelling problem that the entire American timeline now rests on, the mining and base-building plans already drawn up, the legal vacuum over who owns lunar ground, and the road from the Moon to Mars — plus the argument, taken seriously, that none of it is worth doing at all.
Earthrise was seen by a handful of astronauts, then by nobody for half a century. Whether it becomes an ordinary view from a kitchen window is what this race decides.