Mission to Mars (14 page)

Remote and far away: Amundsen-Scott Station, base camp on Antarctica

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Illustration Credit 4.8
)

The tab for the U.S. Antarctic Program—an effort that supports scientific research in Antarctica and the waters surrounding, with the goals of fostering cooperative research with other nations, protecting the Antarctic environment, and conserving living resources—is picked up by the National Science Foundation.

On my own trek to Antarctica I could clearly see an analogy between five-plus decades of research in that icy wasteland and what awaits us on the moon. There’s a long line of people who hunger to travel to Antarctica and carry out research tasks. Seeking answers to questions leads to new inquiries. The moon is just as complex, as remarkable, and as fruitful in an exploratory sense as Antarctica.

Over the last few years, for instance, a number of different lines of evidence have pooled together to help shore up the case for water on the moon. For example, the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft carried a NASA instrument, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper. It found evidence of water molecules on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Impact Probe (MIP) also sensed that it flew through an exospheric “water cloud” during its 2008 plunge onto the lunar landscape. What the MIP found might have been water actually in motion that migrates and concentrates in the ultracold, permanently shadowed lunar craters.

Then there were the NASA Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) observations in 2009 that detected water vapor and ice particles kicked up after the LCROSS Centaur upper stage was purposely slam-dunked into the moon.

And here is another appealing link between Antarctica and the moon. Shackleton crater is a large and deep impact feature that lies at the south pole of the moon. This crater was named after Ernest Henry Shackleton, the intrepid Anglo-Irish explorer who took part in the period later labeled as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, a time span that stretched from the end of the 19th century to the early 1920s.

The shadowed portion of the crater was scanned with the Terrain Camera on board the Japanese SELENE spacecraft in October 2008, helping to gauge the slopes and central peak of Shackleton crater. Those observations were followed by the launch in 2009 of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It has played a significant role in eyeing Shackleton with radar and an array of other sensors.

Shackleton crater is more than 12 miles wide and 2 miles deep, about as deep as Earth’s oceans. The peaks along the crater’s rim are exposed to almost continual sunlight, while its interior is forever in shadow. All this adds up to this captivating feature being an ideal spot for the International Lunar Research Base situated on the edge of the crater. Shackleton hosts both regions of near-permanent darkness and near-permanent sunlight, just the thing for sun-energized power stations. And like real estate here on Earth, it’s all about location.

Having water ice within sun-shy Shackleton raises the outlook of harvesting those cold-trapped deposits, an extraterrestrial commodity that would minimize the need to carry water from Earth to the moon. Not only can it be processed for human consumption, it can also be transformed into fuel. Yet another bonus about this crater is that roughly 72 miles away is Malapert
Mountain, a peak that is perpetually visible from Earth and can be topped by a radio relay station.

While there is mounting consensus regarding Shackleton as a future encampment, resolution of the ice issue is likely to require more on-the-spot survey work by robotic craft.

As can be hammered out at the Hawaii-based International Lunar Research Base prototype, a crew situated at the Earth-moon L2 position would assemble this permanent facility via telerobotics, piece by piece, module by module. America’s return to the moon is one that is robotic, to offer infrastructure and leadership. This pathway eventually spurs private-sector involvement and commercial science that leads to commercial mining. The free enterprise system, if we have a system that’s worth its salt, ought to do reasonably well without massive government subsidy. It’s American leadership that can create the conditions for commercial development of the moon.

There is a choice to be made. As a country, we can sit around and do nothing. Alternatively, we can take a position of general awareness and accept the role of leadership that we carved out for ourselves in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s very important, in my analysis, to never forget the fact that Apollo affirmed America as a leader in space. Apollo also inspired a new generation to pursue scientific and engineering careers. We should not reengage in a second moon race—we won that contest more than 40 years ago. We should help
others in finding their niche in space, while, at the same time, focus on our longer-term goal of permanent human presence on Mars.

Without a doubt, new discoveries about the moon lie ahead.

That, too, is the sense of Paul Spudis, a senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. The moon is close, it is interesting, and it’s useful, he observes. As the rocket flies, traversing cislunar space—traveling from Earth to the moon—takes just three days. Additionally, the moon contains a record of planetary history, evolution, and processes unavailable for study on Earth or elsewhere. In terms of its usefulness, projects at the moon can help retire risk for future planetary missions—say sending people to Mars or to the asteroids—by sharpening our space skills and putting to the test exploration hardware for future deep space sojourns.

All this adds up to something Spudis likens to a mantra for moon exploration: “To arrive, survive, and thrive.”

Detailed work done by Spudis, gleaned from moon-circling spacecraft instruments that he has helped to develop and operate, reveals that the moon’s north pole—at a
minimum
—is home to a large repository of ice. He places it at 600 million metric tons, which, when converted to liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, is the equivalent of fuel for a space shuttle launch every day for 2,200 years.

Water is by far the easiest and most useful substance that can be extracted from the moon and utilized to establish a cislunar spacefaring transportation infrastructure. Establishing a permanent foothold on the moon opens the space frontier to many parties for many different purposes, Spudis contends.
By creating a reusable, extensible cislunar spacefaring system, a “transcontinental railroad” in space can be built, connecting two worlds, Earth and the moon, as well as enabling access to points in between.

Spudis and I share a similar perspective. A future lunar outpost can be internationalized, a common-use facility for science, exploration, research, and commercial activity.

Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and the last man to step onto the lunar surface, has argued for and written extensively about mining helium-3 on the moon to generate economical fusion power on Earth. He advocates a public-private partnership to extract the nonradioactive isotope on the moon.

Veteran space industry entrepreneur Dennis Wingo agrees. He is CEO of Skycorp Incorporated, a small commercial company located at the NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field, California.

“Thinking about what can be done with the moon is a lot more practical than complaining about the difficulties,” Wingo suggests. He is firmly convinced that the economic possibilities of the moon are great. What remains to be determined is how the moon can be leveraged to solve the 21st-century problems of sustaining and expanding the reach of civilization here on Earth for the nine billion people who will be living here within a single generation.

“It is my firm conviction that the industrialization of the moon is the necessary and logical first goal of the second American space age,” Wingo maintains. “The industrial capability of the moon and its near-space environs can now be developed. The industrialization of the moon paves the way for reusable
human interplanetary spacecraft, large communications and remote sensing platforms in geosynchronous orbit, and the settlement of Mars.”

There are many others who envisage groundbreaking activities on the moon. I can attest to the fact that the moon is a Disneyland of dust. The more time you spend there, the more you get covered from helmet to boots with lunar dust.

But despite its apparent grunge face, the lunar regolith—surface material that’s composed in part of rock and mineral fragments—is rich in silicon, aluminum, magnesium, and other useful elements that can be usefully extracted. Two leaders in the use of lunar resources for energy generation on the moon are Alex Ignatiev and Alexandre Freundlich of the Center for Advanced Materials at the University of Houston. Since energy is fundamental to nearly everything that humans would like to do in space, for scientific purposes, commercial development, or human exploration, they are seeking raw materials on the moon that can be utilized to create solar cells on the spot. The moon is an ultrahigh vacuum environment, thus an appropriate setting for the direct fabrication of thin-film solar cells. The lunar vacuum negates the need for vacuum chambers within which to undertake thin-film deposition processing.

The ability to fabricate solar cells on the moon for use on its surface as well as in cislunar space, the researchers believe, can result in an extremely energy-rich environment for the moon.

Ignatiev and Freundlich have looked into the machinery needed to deposit solar cells directly on the surface of the moon. This can be accomplished by the deployment to the moon’s surface of a moderately sized cell paver/regolith processor system with the capabilities of fabricating thin-film silicon solar cells. The system could extract needed raw materials from the lunar regolith and prepare the regolith for use as a substrate.

Evaporation of the silicon semiconductor material for the solar cell structure directly on the regolith substrate is done by the paver, with deposition of metallic contacts and interconnects finishing off a complete solar cell array.

This on-moon fabrication process will result in an electric power system that is repairable and replaceable through the simple fabrication of more solar cells, therefore allowing for the expansive use of the moon.

Circular solar panels and tubular habitations in a visualization of a lunar outpost

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Illustration Credit 4.9
)

A power rover could harvest lunar materials for solar cells
.

(
Illustration Credit 4.10
)

All this is good news for another lunar visionary, David Criswell, now retired director of the University of Houston’s Institute for Space Systems Operations. He has long advocated solar power stations built on the moon as a way to provide sustainable and affordable electric power to Earth. The airless moon receives more than 13,000 terawatts of solar power. Harnessing just one percent of that sunlight could satisfy Earth’s power needs.

Criswell has promoted a lunar solar power (LSP) system, large banks of solar cells on the moon that collect sunlight. The sunlight is then exported back to receivers on Earth via a microwave beam. That microwave energy is collected on Earth, converted to electricity, and fed into the local energy grid. The LSP
can be scaled up on the moon, he contends, to supply the 20 terawatts or more of electricity required by ten billion people.

“The critical frontier for humankind is economic development of the solar energy and material resources of the moon,” Criswell concludes.

As I stated earlier, the moon is a far different body today than when Neil and I boot-marked our way across its forbidding face. Scientifically, we know so much more about our celestial next-door neighbor caught in Earth’s gravity grip. While there are those who might question the very premise of our undertaking such a journey in the first place, its characteristics were born of the time. It was a Cold War, one-upmanship way to outdistance the former Soviet Union. The moon was the finish line. Apollo was a get-there-in-a-hurry, straightforward space race strategy, and don’t waste time developing reusability.