The Pink Flamingo :: Back to the Moon & Then to Mars

Next Thursday, October 4, 2007 will be the 50th anniversary of Sputnik. Aside from one brief shining moment of glory, humanity’s evolution towards living in space has been a series of baby steps. Fortunately, because of the vision of President George W. Bush, we may reclaim that shining glory, not briefly, but permanently. Back during the Reagan years, when I was a lobbyist working with the space program, I had the good fortune to attend the very first conference on Lunar and Martian settlements. It was populated by such giants as the late Gerald K. O’Neill, father of the L-5 space stations; Dr. Edward Teller; and the late great Carl Sagan. http://www.carlsagan.com/ One morning, I was sitting there, trying to keep up with all the science that was thrown out fast and furious and looked down to discover sitting right in front of me, within kicking distance, on the row below were – get this – Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins!

The whole dream was to live permanently in space. I believed then, as I do now, that humanity’s only real hope for survival as a species is through the permanent exploration and settlement of space. The irony of that meeting was the fact that not long after both Aldrin and Collins spoke, I lead a break out panel on the popularization of space.

Popular Mechanics has one of those articles only a tech-head would love. I am salivating over this lunar vehicle.

From Popular Mechanics

“…The space agency announced its strategy to return to the moon last December. Instead of emulating the series of six Apollo landings, it chose as its initial goal the establishment of a single lunar outpost. Using the new crew exploration vehicle, Orion, NASA plans to send four astronauts to the moon as early as 2020 (“Mission: Moon,” March ’07). Eventually, four-man crews will rotate home every six months. Their goal will be to live off the land, extend scientific exploration and practice for an eventual leap to Mars….”

Where to land and to settle is quite polar.

“…At the poles, the sun’s slanting rays produce a moderate daylight range of minus 22 to minus 58 F, compared to the equatorial high of 270 F.

But the real advantage of the poles is access to resources. Near the south pole, for example, some high crater rims are bathed in nearly constant sunshine. Sun-tracking solar arrays placed there would provide steady power and charge storage batteries to supply electricity during the brief periods of darkness.

An even more valuable resource may lie in the craters’ depths. Spacecraft data suggest they could harbor hundreds of millions of metric tons of water ice, accumulated from billions of years of comet impacts. Using a simple electric heater, robot ice miners could free water for drinking and agriculture. Electrolysis could break it down further, supplying oxygen for breathing and hydrogen fuel for moon-to-Earth transportation.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, to be launched late next year, will search for ice just beneath the moon’s surface. Another mission, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, will crash a spacecraft into one of the lunar poles in early 2009 and analyze the debris plume for water and other chemical compounds.

If the moon proves to be dry, which ground-based radar suggests, oxygen can still be pried out of lunar volcanic rock. Combining hydrogen gas brought from Earth with the mineral ilmenite, then heating the mixture to 1652 F, produces iron, titanium dioxide and water. Other chemical processes can also release oxygen from rocks, given enough heat and electricity. Lawrence Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee, is developing a magnetic “vacuum” hose, designed to suck lunar dirt into a dumptruck or pipeline leading to an oxygen extraction plant.

At first, the power for these industrial processes would come from lightweight solar arrays. A compact nuclear reactor, tucked safely into a shallow crater away from living quarters, might be needed later. …”

I’ve been waiting for this for years.
How we will get back, and stay there!

“…By relying on existing technology, the design would allow for more efficient construction, narrowing the gap between the shuttle's retirement in 2010 and the next manned flight. But it also stirred a hot debate within the aerospace community. "NASA's attitude seems to be that Apollo worked, so let's just redo Apollo," says Charles Lurio, a Boston space consultant. Burt Rutan, the mastermind behind the rocket SpaceShipOne, likened the new CEV to an archeological dig. "To get to Mars and the moons of Saturn, we need breakthroughs. But the way NASA's doing it, we won't be learning anything new."

Scott Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for Exploration Systems, defends the agency's approach. "Sure, we'd love to have antimatter warp drive," he says. "But I suspect that would be kind of expensive. Unfortunately, we just don't have the money for huge technological breakthroughs. We've got to do the best we can within our constraints of performance, cost and schedule."

The result, as NASA boss Michael Griffin puts it, is "Apollo on steroids" — a new-and-improved version of what was, as even critics must acknowledge, mankind's greatest technological feat. Recently dubbed Orion, the CEV will share Apollo's conical form, but be one and a half times as wide (16.5 ft.) and have more than double the habitable internal volume (361 cu. ft.), allowing it to carry six astronauts to the space station and four to the moon….”

And then there is the permanent lunar base.

A MINI RANT
This is where NASA loses me. It is smart, fairly ‘cheap’, and easy to use existing technology to get back to the moon. By going this route we can push it by a parsimonious Congress who would rather dole out free medical care to everyone than secure our future. Granted we will make some fascinating technological advances, but we are going to be stuck in the same rut as we are with the shuttle and with the space station.

The reason we are stuck with the shuttle we have today is directly linked to the short-sighted mess that was the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. Not only did he kill the final Apollo missions, but he forced NASA do design and build the shuttle on the cheap. By the time it was ready for those first test missions some of the technology was already obsolete. We constantly pay for the short-sighted cheapness of our “leaders” who would rather pander for votes than deal with tomorrow. NASA has been a political football since JFK.

The worst example, in my mind, is what Algore forced upon NASA by going to a different, more environmentally friendly foam for the ET instead of the tried and true foam. The cost? Columbia and its crew paid the ultimate price to be eco-friendly.

Will we actually get back to the Moon? I will believe it when I see it. NASA is the most fragile of organizations within the government. If I were President, we would have a Department of Space and Technology. Unfortunately I am not. There are realities of the world and those realities include every free give-away politicians can invent to keep voters enslaved to them.

The real hope for the future in space is not NASA, but private endeavors like Virgin Galactic. http://www.virgingalactic.com/ When I was working as a lobbyist something as remarkable as the X-Prize was just a fantastical dream. http://www.xprize.org/ Today it is a reality.

We call it the Mikkelson Award. I am on the International Award Committee. The magnificent glass statue has already been created and is being held in trust to present to the first woman who steps foot on the surface of the moon.

And now there is the Lunar X Prize!

Me? I don’t care about going to the Moon. I want to go to Mars!

At the end of the panels I would host on popularizing and living in space, I would always get the question, “How do we make this happen”. My trite answer was simple.

The best way to have permanent settlements on the Moon, privatized is to discover huge deposits of precious minerals just waiting to be plucked from the ground. It will be like 1849 and the California Gold Rush all over again! Give it five years and you’ll be looking at Joe’s Bar, Grill & Cathouse right there on the Moon. Why? It’s just human nature, that’s why!

The Lunar Base: How to Settle the Moon (and Pay for Sleepovers)
A four-time Space Shuttle astronaut explains what life will be like on NASA's four-man outpost come 2020, when the anti-Apollo mission will cast off aboard a new rocket and send explorers to hazardous territory.

At about $25,000 per pound, lunar shipping costs force the outpost to mine and manufacture much of its own materials. In the crater basin, miners extract oxygen from ice crystals deposited by comets or asteroids. Strip-mined regolith yields nitrogen for farming, calcium for cement and hydrogen-free silicon to make glass and ceramics structurally superior to any made on Earth. The soil also holds titanium, iron and aluminum.

Separated from the base’s transmissions, and shielded from Earth’s radio noise, this site holds optical and radio telescopes used to search for extrasolar planets, as well as an ultraviolet telescope that uses the moon’s rotation to survey for planets like Earth.

Living quarters sit high on the crater rim so that power-generating solar cell arrays are in constant sunlight. Inflatable modules—light and easy to transport—could be coupled with a fabric that hardens in the area’s abundant UV light. Another option: Bury structures in regolith—the moon’s powdery rock surface—to protect pioneers from potentially deadly solar flares and to equalize internal and external pressure on walls.

To protect the outpost from dust kicked up during takeoffs and landings, the pad sits at a lower elevation. The lunar lander shuttles passengers to and from the orbiting transfer vehicle.