LUNAR
PROSPECTOR AND THE ROAD TO THE LUNAR FRONTIER
by Peter Kokh Editor, Moon
Miners' Manifesto
(NOTE: this article was written specifically for the ALS by Peter
Kokh.
Here we
are, almost thirty years since Apollo 11, and a manned return to the Moon seems
nowhere in sight. The fact is that Congress has a shallow "been there, done
that" attitude towards the Moon and doesn't want to hear NASA mention the word.
But happily, NASA is not the whole story about space.
In 1994,
the Air Force's Clementine orbiter put together an exhaustive photographic
record of the entire lunar surface in unsurpassed detail - and found teasing
hints of ice at the south pole. In 1998, Lunar Prospector was conceived and
launched outside NASA by planetary scientists and space activists. Now a
NASA supported Discovery Mission, this became "the little probe that could."
For very little money this small craft has in the past year added enormously to
our knowledge of the Moon's resources. That knowledge gives us more confidence
in the belief that a lunar operation could in time be largely self supporting
and help target areas of special advantage for placement of future outposts.
The U.S. has no presently "accepted" follow-up missions in the works. Carnegie
Mellon, and the Lunar Prospector team under Alan Binder, are both working on
proposals for landers to the polar ice areas - an absolute must. Japan and
Europe have lunar missions under discussion.
The availability of appreciable water ice reserves excites the rocket jockeys
who would use them up as cryogenic fuels. But ice is strategically more
important to support lunar frontier agriculture, biosphere cycles, and lunar
industry - all in closed recycling loops If the ice is of cometary origin,
there should be carbon and nitrogen oxide ices mixed in, and these will be of
equal importance.
The Moon is no longer "drier than concrete" and as this sinks into the public
consciousness, interest in the prospective lunar frontier may grow. But the
second half of the one two PR punch should be a mission now being brainstormed
by space activists in Oregon. They propose an armada of "flash-probes" which
would expose hidden lunar lavatubes beneath the surface to a wide array radar
network on Earth. The Lunar Lavatube Locator Mission has several years of work
ahead of it before it can become a candidate for a NASA Discovery Mission slot.
A Moon with "hidden valleys sheltered from the cosmic elements" will be a much
more attractive place for future colonization.
Just how would a lunar frontier of several settlements strive to become self-supporting? We know we can make a wide variety of building materials from elements common in the regolith soils: ceramics, concrete, glass, fiberglass, glass-glass composites, iron, aluminum, magnesium, and titanium alloys. With these, we can make expansion modules for shelter, furniture and furnishings, vehicle components, and more. And because of the Moon's shallow gravity well, anything the lunar pioneers succeed in making for themselves will be much cheaper than importing it from Earth. This means cheaper goods for supplying the space station, future hotels, and pioneer expeditions to Mars. Even food, constituted largely of lunar hydrogen and oxygen, will be cheaper to send to the space station than to shuttle up from the nearby surface.
Avoiding imports also means finding substitutes for the wood, paper, and plastics to which we have become addicted (the lunar frontier will be just that--a rough frontier. The genteel would be best advised to stay on Easy Earth). But avoiding imports can only go so far. The pioneers will need many things that they cannot manufacture or process on the Moon. To purchase them, the pioneers will need to produce things for export. In addition to the items mentioned above, consider the following: lunar building materials may make solar power satellites an affordable dream, supplying cheap and clean and inexhaustible energy to Earth. Or the same materials could be used to make a pair of giant solar arrays, one on each limb (Mare Smythii and Mare Veris) to beam power to Earth via relay satellites. And, if ever the fusion engineers achieve their holy grail, adsorbed to the fine grains of the regolith "topsoils" of the Moon is a thousand year supply of the ultimate clean fusion fuel - Helium-3.
Nuclear
fission too will have a big place on the space frontier. Only nuclear rockets
can open Mars as a frontier. Only nuclear ships can take explorers out to
the asteroids and to the great moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But if the
environmentalist fringe has its way, we might only be able to ship unfueled
nuclear engines through Earth's atmosphere--and not the fuel. However, Lunar
Prospector has found abundant thorium on the Moon, which can be reacted in a
fast breeder into fissionable uranium 233. The Moon might just yet play Joan of
Arc to the Mars Frontier.
I do not look for the government to get religion and go back to the Moon with a token outpost. If it happened, it could well cause more problems than it solved. Where are we on the "Antarctic Frontier" almost seventy years after Little America? Americans do pioneering quite well - their government does not. Perhaps an enlightened lunar legal and economic regime, under proper guidelines from a multi-national consortia of construction, manufacturing, mining companies and power utilities would do a much better job of opening the Moon.
Prospective employees could sign up with the various companies for short tours
of duty on the Moon. It would be to the companies' advantage, however, to
encourage people to reenlist--giving them major perks in lieu of the double
passage it would cost them for a replacement. After a set number of
reenlistments, one would become a "free agent" able to offer his or her services
on the open market to other companies doing business on the Moon. This provides
a mechanism for breaking out from "temps" into "settlers". Once hired by another
concern, the free agent would become a citizen of the Lunar Frontier, and be
allowed to establish a family. Maybe it won't happen exactly like that, but with
the proper legal regime in place, we may succeed in "converting" an outpost into
a settlement. That will be the real milestone.
Civil rule will be needed as soon as there is more than one company doing
business in a location. And indeed, the one company town is something to be
avoided at all costs. Good ones exist only in fiction and bad memory.
This is the dream. How do we get there from here? There has been some research
into producing useful building materials from lunar resources--but we need much
more. We need to take this research out of the lab. Upon finding profitable
terrestrial applications ("spin up"), we should now debug each of these
technologies, so that when we need them, we can hit the ground running.
Glass-glass composites, cast basalt, serviceable alloys that can be formulated
using only alloy ingredients that can be economically produced from the regolith
- all these need more work. The rocket scientists working on cheap access to
space may get us to the frontier. But it is the chemical engineers, figuring out
how we can "live of the land" in the various places we go, who will be the real
heroes of the frontier, giving us the tools to stay, and prosper.
Lunar Prospector has also put us forever beyond the naive simple time in which
one place on the Moon looked as good as any other. If we are going to have
resource using, self-reliant settlement, and not just a token science outpost at
the mercy of each congressional session's budget-cutting expediencies, then we
had best pick sites where our operations will be best
advantaged. Sites, yes, plural. If we are going to do the Moon, and make it into
another human world, we will need a multi-site beachhead.
We need to go to the poles to tap the ice reserves. Both poles are in highland
landscapes. The highland/mare coastal areas offer access to both major suites of
lunar materials, the aluminum-calcium-magnesium enriched highland regolith, and
the iron-titanium enriched mare basalt regolith. And happily, these are also in
"coast-hugging" areas of the maria where we find lavatubes--vast sheltered "lee"
vacuum areas, free from cosmic radiation, solar flares, micrometeorites, and the
extremes of hot and cold. Further, these areas are also free from the insidious
'everywhere' dust of the surface. These vast covered valleys will provide
abundant volume for industry, warehousing - even agriculture and settlement.
Polar cometary water-ice reserves can be refined into methane (CH4) and ammonia
(NH3), leaving the oxygen behind. Liquefied, these gases can be easily piped
where needed on the Moon, to be burned with oxygen processed locally - in fuel
cells at night to produce badly needed extra power - and to reconstitute water,
carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
In the
north, Mare Frigoris offers coastal areas less than half the distance from the
north pole than southern costal regions (Mare Australe, Mare Nubium, or Mare
Humorum) are from the south pole. Further, Mare Frigoris is in the "Imbrium
Fringe" area that Lunar Prospector has shown to be thorium-enriched.
Previously, this author had been partial to a settlement in Mare Crisium, simply
because it is the single most identifiable feature on the face of the Moon as
seen by the naked eye from Earth. But Mare Frigoris comes in a close second in
this
regard. Here, just north of the crater Plato and the Alpine Valley (providing
access to Mare Imbrium and the whole "chain" of nearside maria) might be an
especially propitious place to set up an initial settlement. A "first
settlement" will be followed by others, as the economic advantages of various
sites are pursued and as the lunar economy grows, diversifies, and becomes more
vigorous and resilient.
We have more to learn about the Moon--both about what it is made of, and about
what we can make out of it--before we can return with the confidence that we are
equipped to stay. So close to Earth, the lunar economy will be part of an
expanded Earth-Moon economy with the Moon acting as a veritable Eighth
Continent. But the Lunar Frontier will have its own distinctive character and
culture. It will be a place where one can start over, fresh, and make a
difference, getting in on the ground floor. It will be one of those places where
life is harder, but much more rewarding--just as on the frontiers of yesterday
in the American West and Australia.
And so the Epic of Life will continue: from ocean to land to sky, and now to
space. Each step seems so fragile, so tentative, so precarious. But the Epic of
Life has a certain destiny that will not be denied. Meet you there.
--Peter Kokh
[*Moon Miners' Manifesto is a 20 page monthly newsletter, published ten times a year, now in its thirteenth year of continuous publication. MMM's major theme is outlining how the lunar frontier might unfold with settlements replacing early outposts.]