If we are to believe noises coming out of the European Space Agency (ESA), by the end of the decade humans will once again walk on the moon. The date currently being mentioned is 2029. That’s a full five years later than former US president Donald Trump’s bullish prediction of 2024, and exactly six decades since the first human, Commander Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11, made that giant leap for mankind in 1969.

It was only three years later when the almost forgotten Gene Cernan became the last of the canonical 12 all-American “explorer-astronauts” to get his space boots dusty. On 14 December 1972, as Cernan stepped back onto Apollo 17’s Lunar Module, he paused to trace his daughter’s initials in the lunar surface. And that was that. We’ve not been back since.

But all that could be set to change with ESA’s recent announcement that it has selected 17 new astronauts – the first in 13 years – from its member states. For anyone thinking that Brexit will have put an end to our space ambitions, the government has issued a stern reminder that ‘the UK’s membership of ESA is not affected by leaving the EU as ESA is not an EU organisation’. Glad we got that cleared up then. But what it really means for adventure aficionados is that Britain has got skin in the game in the form of three newly minted astronauts: Meganne Christian, Rosemary Coogan and John McFall.

But does this get us any closer to walking on the moon again? ESA’s director general Josef Aschbacher thinks it does when he says that by putting together his new international team of rocketeers we’ll strengthen ‘our endeavours… not only in low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station. We’ll be going forward to the moon and beyond’.

The ESA Class of 2022 will start by taking up residence at Germany’s European Astronaut Centre near Cologne. Coogan has signed on as a career astronaut, following in the footsteps of British legends Tim Peake – the first UK astronaut to undertake a spacewalk – and Helen Sharman, who in 1991 became the first woman to visit the Mir Space Station. Meanwhile, Christian, who is an industrial chemical engineer, joins as a member of the Astronaut Reserve, while former Paralympian McFall becomes the first British “parastronaut” and will take part in the ESA’s feasibility study to ‘improve our understanding of, and overcome, the barriers space flight presents for astronauts with a physical disability’.

As all three can attest, getting to be an astronaut isn’t easy. The British trio succeeded in making the cut from an application pool of 22,500 hopefuls after a screening process involving psychological, practical and psychometric testing, as well as a gruelling medical and interview selection. While in Cologne they’ll endure 18 months of intensive training that includes not just getting to grips with the physics of spaceflight and learning how to fly a spacecraft, but also survival training and learning several new languages. Assuming they are successful and are assigned to a mission, there’s a further two years’ training, meaning that he might be understating the case when Science Minister George Freeman says, ‘space is the ultimate environment to show our commitment to the values of shared endeavour for the good of humanity and the planet’.

Which is all light years away from what space exploration used to be about. Back in the 1960s, it was a proxy arms race between Cold War superpowers. But as recently discovered official documents reveal, while America and the Soviet Union raised the stakes in their nuclear standoff by playing “beat your neighbour” in space, there were plans in the ’50s for a British mission to the moon. It’s all so different these days: above board, collaborative and inclusive. And, you’ve got to hope, with a far greater chance of successfully putting British boots on the moon.