ESA Director General Jan Woerner (center) and Nicolas Chamussy, executive vice president of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space (second from right) get some help from organizers of The Moon Race holding up the inflatable moon that made the rounds at the 2018 International Astronautical Congress in Bremen, Germany, Oct. 1-5.

At this year’s just-concluded International Astronautical Congress in Bremen, Germany, human Mars exploration was eclipsed by discussions about going back to the moon.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...