© Neil A. Armstrong/NASA/AP Photo FILE - In this July 20, 1969 file photo, astronaut Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. poses for a photograph beside a U.S. flag planted on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. On Friday, April 13, 2018, The Associated Press has found that stories circulating on the internet that Aldrin passed a lie detector test about alien life, are untrue

Bob Richards remembers watching the gray, ghostly figures bounce across his family’s black-and-white TV screen nearly a half-century ago: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first humans walking on the moon.

Enthralled by the success of Apollo 11, which touched down 49 years ago on July 20, and by the future portrayed in pop culture by “Star Trek” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Richards was certain that routine flights to the moon and space stations were inevitable within a few decades.

It never happened: The United States canceled its big-budget moon program just a few years after an epic Space Race victory over Russia, and astronauts haven’t left orbits near Earth since.

But Richards, the CEO of Cape Canaveral-based Moon Express and a self-described “orphan of Apollo,” now is confident that Americans are within a decade or so of returning to the lunar surface — this time to stay.

“It’s a different paradigm, to have economics introduced to exploration and science,” said Richards, whose company is trying to lower the cost of robotic lunar missions. “It has to be part of a growing, continuing expansion of the human economic and social sphere to the moon, then to Mars, and eventually to the stars.”

Under new direction from the Trump administration, NASA plans to partner with companies like Moon Express to fly small, robotic landers carrying scientific instruments to the moon, as soon as next year.

It’s a modest start to public-private partnerships that aim to help companies develop increasingly capable landers quicker and at lower cost than NASA could on its own. A first medium-size lander could fly a demonstration mission as soon as 2022, helping to inform the design of a larger, human-class lander.

A similar approach has successfully kept the International Space Station supplied since the space shuttle’s retirement seven years ago.

SpaceX and Northrop Grumman rockets and spaceships now deliver cargo to the research complex in low Earth orbit. SpaceX and Boeing hope to fly astronauts there within a year or so.

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In the process, with help from NASA, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has become the nation’s most frequently flown rocket, growing the U.S. launch market by winning back commercial satellite mission that had moved overseas.

“What happened to the commercial launch industry is about to happen to the commercial lunar industry,” said Richards. “I think there are very strong analogies between the two.”

Moon Express hopes to fly to the moon more than once a year for government, commercial or university customers. Other small lander companies that have worked with NASA include Astrobotic and Masten Space Systems.

NASA’s proposed partnerships also have the potential to leverage the interests of billionaires who believe in a sustained lunar program. One is Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also was heavily influenced by seeing Apollo 11 as a boy.

Blue Origin, which Bezos backs to the tune of $1 billion a year, is developing rockets to fly people, and has proposed a “Blue Moon” delivery service for heavy cargo that could establish and support a lunar outpost.

“I think we should build a permanent human settlement on one of the poles of the moon,” Bezos said last year. “It’s time to go back to the moon, but this time to stay.”

NASA’s embrace of commercial moon partners follows President Trump’s issuance last December of Space Policy Directive 1, which re-established the moon as the space agency’s next deep-space destination for astronauts.

“It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use,” Trump said in a ceremony unveiling the policy. “This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints — we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.”

The Obama administration had canceled an earlier moon program, Constellation, that was hatched after the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. An independent review found the program too far behind schedule and over budget.

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Obama set Mars as the agency’s focus for human exploration, contemplating a mission in the 2030s, and it remains the passion of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

NASA began developing the Space Launch System — which will be more powerful than the Apollo program's Saturn V rocket — and Orion capsule for deep space missions.

The space agency now also plans to place a small space station, or “gateway,” in lunar orbit that Orion astronauts could visit by the mid-20s, but with no way to reach the surface unless commercial or international partners supply a lander.

Trump’s direction, and his revival of a National Space Council, were “important in the sense that it helped reestablish a direction that had been lost,” said Paul Spudis, a lunar scientist. “What’s needed now is to sit down and figure out a detailed plan, an architecture to return.”

Spudis advocates for an incremental return that does not resemble the sortie missions lasting a few days flown by Apollo crews.

“This return to the moon should be different,” he said. “What we should do is concentrate on placing permanent assets and infrastructure at the moon's polar regions, and begin to establish a permanent presence. So the emphasis should be on resource prospecting, cislunar transportation and habitation.”

Why go back to the moon?

In the past 20 years, robotic probes have confirmed that the moon harbors water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the poles.

That’s a resource that could sustain astronauts with air and drinking water without having to launch everything from Earth. It could be used to store energy and create rocket fuel by breaking the water down into hydrogen and oxygen. A better understanding of the ice’s location — which pole is the better target — and concentration is key to figuring out where people should establish a permanent foothold.

With fuel depots and reusable spacecraft, missions could move to and from the moon regularly to a wide variety of orbits, as compared to the single-purpose missions completed under Apollo.

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And the technologies needed to harvest resources could be perfected closer to home – days away from Earth rather than the eight-month-distant trip to Mars.

The vision now exists on paper, but NASA’s budgets, plans and schedules remain vague. The budget outlook assumes NASA will scale back spending on the ISS as soon as 2025, a plan that that has proven unpopular in Congress.

NASA for decades has struggled to achieve lofty exploration goals with a budget that is a fraction of the peak Apollo levels — less than half of 1 percent of federal spending, compared to more than 4 percent in the mid-'60s.

“A big part of our problem is that unrealistic expectations are out there, both in terms of what can be done and how much it’s going to cost to actually accomplish it,” said Dan Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, who previously had a leadership role in NASA's under-funded Constellation program.

The lack of a driving goal as clear as Apollo’s — to beat the Russians — may continue to prove a challenge.

“This return to the moon is for practical purposes, scientific, economic and national security goals,” said Spudis. “It’s much harder to justify that, so it’s easy to get distracted and get off track. We’re just going to have to wait and see how it’s all going to pan out.”

No one is sure exactly when humans might land on the moon again, or what mix of government and commercial systems might pull it off.

Space historian John Logsdon is skeptical that a compelling business case exists for mining lunar resources such that private companies will drive a return to the moon.

“I still think (the rationale for going) is because we want to go,” he said. “It’s still geopolitical.”

NASA is slowly nearing a first launch of the SLS rocket from Kennedy Space Center in 2020, with an Orion crew potentially flying around the moon in 2023, and private partnerships being hatched. The progress may seem slow, but still represents momentum toward fulfilling Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan’s wish that his boot prints not be the last left in lunar soil.

“We’re closer to getting back to getting humans on the moon than we’ve been since 1972,” said Logsdon. “There now seems to be political support in both the White House and the Congress for a return to the moon. So I think both technically and politically, we’re closer in mid-2018 than we’ve been in 46 years.”

Momentum may build as the nation nears 50th anniversary celebrations of Apollo 11 next year, events that Logsdon said "are going to remind us that this is something that we once did, and it was great doing it."