An ice rainbow seen in cirrus clouds on Earth. (UCSB Dept. Geography)

Five weeks ago a crater from the LCROSS impact formed on the Moon.  The pre-impact build-up had been sensational, but the actual event was largely invisible to observers on Earth. It was a different story on the Moon.  The slowly growing impact ejecta curtain threw water ice particles and vapor far out into space.  When the crater formed, flying ice particles could have refracted the glare of unfiltered sunlight into an “ice rainbow,” similar to those seen through very high altitude clouds on Earth.  For a very brief time, a rainbow might have been visible to an observer standing on the lunar surface.  And like its namesake, this rainbow is a promise – a promise that the Moon is habitable.  It is an invitation to humanity to extend man’s domain to our nearest planetary neighbor.

The LCROSS science team’s initial analysis of ejected impact plume data found evidence for water.  It appears that several other species, particularly some carbon substances also found in the cores of comets, may be present.  The new results suggest that some lunar polar volatiles may have their origins from outside the Moon, deposited there over millions of years by the impact of comets and asteroids.

Over the last 50 years, the idea of water ice at the lunar poles has generated as much angst as excitement within the scientific community.  Ice on the Moon was suggested by Watson, Murray and Brown in 1960.  They recognized that, regardless of the fate of such substances elsewhere on the Moon, the dark, cold floors of polar craters might retain volatile substances.  Rock and soil samples returned by the Apollo missions were not only bone-dry, but crystallized in a very reducing environment, suggesting that any indigenous lunar water, if present, must have been a very minor component.  Apollo scientist Jim Arnold resurrected the Watson et al. hypothesis forty years ago, concluding that their original proposal of water ice at the poles was still feasible and that a polar lunar orbiter was needed to search for such deposits.

We know that over geologic time, the Moon was bombarded by water-bearing objects.  Meteorites contain water, and just as they’ve landed on Earth, they’ve also hit the Moon.  Moreover, we’ve detected water vapor in the tails of comets with Earth-based telescopes.  But it was widely speculated that all this water must be lost from the Moon, which left the issue of polar ice unresolved.

Fifteen years ago, the 1994 Clementine orbiter mission revived our interest in the Moon’s polar regions.  When Clementine’s images of the Moon’s poles revealed large areas of shadowed terrain, it reminded Gene Shoemaker and the science team of the Watson and Arnold papers.  Large shadowed areas suggested that polar cold traps might really exist, so an experiment was improvised using the spacecraft transmitter to beam RF energy into the shadowed areas.  Analysis of the radio echoes suggested the presence of ice in shadowed areas near the south pole.  This result was questioned, largely because our team couldn’t repeat the passes using the improvised experiment.

In 1998, Lunar Prospector found evidence for excess hydrogen in the surface soils of both lunar poles.  These data could not show what form the hydrogen was in and had very low spatial resolution.  The issue, as to whether the observed polar hydrogen represented water ice in the dark cold traps or elemental hydrogen implanted by solar wind protons, was vigorously debated.  The preponderance of evidence in the years since Lunar Prospector, suggests that water ice is present in the polar areas, but its form, distribution and physical state are completely unknown.

The current flotilla of lunar orbiting spacecraft carry several advanced sensors, all designed to better characterize the environment and deposits of the polar regions of the Moon.  We have seen extremely low temperatures in the polar dark regions using the DIVINER instrument on the American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft.  The Japanese Kaguya mission mapped the topography and terrain of the polar areas and showed us the extent of the shadowed areas.  The Indian Chandryaan mission sent a probe into the south pole, mapped the extent of sunlight and carried two NASA instruments – the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) and Mini-SAR radar.  In September, the M3 instrument found significant amounts of water bound into mineral structures at high latitudes.  The Mini-SAR instrument has made maps showing the interior of dark polar craters.  These maps are being analyzed for scattering characteristics to determine whether water ice might be present there; our initial results will be announced soon.

Now, the LCROSS impactor – sent to kick up the dust of the polar dark regions – has shown us that water ice does exist there.  We still don’t know how much water ice in total may be present; from Clementine,  we estimated there are billions of metric tones of water ice present in the south polar area.  Complete analysis of all of the remote sensing information in the next couple of years will ultimately give us a good estimate of the total amount of water available.  Clementine also revealed peaks of near-permanent sunlight in proximity to regions of permanent darkness at the poles (where the sun’s circular rotation keeps temperatures benign).

If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.

The Moon has the resources needed to bootstrap a sustained, permanent human presence.  It is the place where we can learn how to live and work productively in space.  The Moon has put out a welcome mat.  What are we waiting for?

Collapse breccia near a lava tube entrance (Photo by Dr. Harmon Maher, Univ. Nebraska)

The science team of the Japanese Kaguya mission have just published a paper claiming to have found an opening to a cave on the Moon.  Such a discovery is a potentially important development for future lunar habitation.  Lava tubes are large caves created during the volcanic eruption of a very fluid, highly effusive lava.  They are common on Earth, especially in iron-rich basaltic lavas, such as those that make up most of the Hawaiian islands.

The idea that caves occur on the Moon has been around for a long time.  We have long known that the lunar maria (the dark, smooth, relatively uncratered plains of the Moon) are made up of old basaltic lava flows.  Looking at orbital photographs, we find many narrow, winding channels (or rilles) in the maria.  These channels cannot be the product of water erosion, as flowing liquid water cannot exist in the vacuum of the lunar surface.  So workers looked for another explanation.  They found it in lava channels and tubes.

On Earth, volcanic terrains often show small channels within young lava flows.  Lava tubes form when hot lava erupts, pouring out onto the surface.  The lava immediately begins to cool, with the outermost edges cooling first.  As the lava cools and hardens from the outside edges inward, the flow of still-molten lava becomes constricted to a central, narrow, interior conduit.  When the eruption stops, the still-liquid lava drains out, leaving behind an empty cave-like tube-shaped segment.  In some instances, the roof of the drained tube collapses, exposing the tube interior as a channel or, if less extensive, creating a “skylight” or a hole that allows access to the cave interior.  Lava caves are quite common on volcanoes made up of runny (low viscosity) lava, such as the shield volcanoes of Hawaii.

Caves found on the Moon would be very useful.  Because they form in dense basaltic lava, the space inside a tube is protected from both the hard radiation of the lunar surface and the constant micrometeorite bombardment the Moon experiences.  Moreover, the temperature of the subsurface of the Moon is very stable; below the zone which experiences the extreme temperatures of night and day, lunar temperatures are fairly constant at about -20° C.  On Earth, lava caves can be quite roomy, with diameters tens of meters across and hundreds of meters long.  On the Moon, these dimensions may be much larger – the low gravity of the Moon results in much bigger lunar lava tubes and channels than their terrestrial counterparts, being hundreds of meters across and many kilometers long.  Thus, they offer many potential advantages to future lunar inhabitants.

Before we pack our bags for the Marius Hills, we should take note of some other properties of lava tubes.  Many lava tubes partly or completely collapse immediately after their formation.  If the roofed segments are weakened by flowing lava, earthquakes, or are very thin, they cannot support their own weight and after the lava drains out, the roof falls into the void.  This is seen on both the Earth and Moon.  Hadley Rille, visited by the Apollo 15 astronauts in 1971, is a lava channel, parts of which were roofed over as a tube.  The crew landed near a channel portion, but a roofed segment is only about 12 km from the site.  High resolution images of that segment show no entrance to an underground cave there or elsewhere along the rille (channel).  That doesn’t mean that there is no cave portion of Hadley Rille, but it does suggest there is no entrance to a cave there.

Other candidates on the Moon look more promising.  Numerous lava tube “skylights” have been noted in association with many lava channels on the Moon.  These skylights are typically unconnected to each other or any nearby feature and are found as individual tube segments that appear to start and stop along the trend of a rille.  It is impossible to identify lava cave entrances because most of the images we have for these features are low resolution and have near-vertical viewing geometry.

The new Kaguya pictures show a circular, rimless pit on the floor of the projected segment of a rille.  Collapse pits are not uncommon on the Moon and many of them are not associated with lava channels or tubes.  So while the new Kaguya images are intriguing, they are not definitive evidence for a cave.

There are other issues in regard to the use of lunar lava tubes.  Many (if not most) terrestrial lava tubes are not void; they are either filled with late-stage lava, which plugs up the cave, or by collapse debris, which buries it.  Finding a new void lava tube is celebrated by the caving community simply because void tubes are rare.  But even if a void tube formed on the Moon, it may not remain that way for all time.  Lunar volcanism was active over 3 billion years ago.  Since then the Moon has been constantly bombarded by debris, initiating landslides, infilling craters, and generating seismic waves.  Such a bombardment could well act as a leveler to collapse and fill in void lava caves that might have existed on the Moon.

But the biggest problem with lunar caves is even more fundamental – they aren’t where we want them.  Sustained human presence on the Moon is enabled by the presence of the material and energy resources needed to support human life and operations around the Moon.  After over a decade of study and exploration, we now know that these locations are near the poles of the Moon.  Unfortunately, both poles are in the highlands and finding a lava tube in such non-volcanic terrain is highly unlikely, regardless of the imaginative ramblings of certain science-fiction authors.  If a lunar cave were present there, we would certainly consider using it.  But it makes no more sense to locate a lunar base near the caves, than it does to build a water-park in the Sahara desert.

The formation of lunar lava tubes and caves is an interesting scientific topic, but their utilitarian value is uncertain, at least until we have established a permanent presence on the Moon.  Ultimately, we may be able to use them to live on the Moon, but first, we need to follow the Willie Sutton principle and go where the money is.

New report - same old assumptions?

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince.

In his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn described two types of science: normal science, the everyday background work, where constant, steady but unspectacular advances occur in our knowledge, and revolutionary science, where fundamental assumptions and ways of conducting business are unalterably changed forever.  Kuhn called such a change a paradigm shift; a new paradigm (i.e., a framework of knowledge, including the assumptions, worldview, approaches and techniques to conduct business under a given set of circumstances) replaces the existing one and the new approaches and attitudes become the norm.

The paradigm model might also be applied to conducting business in other fields, in particular, the business of spaceflight.  Since it arose more than 50 years ago, the paradigm of spaceflight has largely remained unchanged.  In short, we conceive a mission (robotic or human), then design, build and launch a spacecraft to conduct that mission.  This satellite or spacecraft operates for a time in space—gathering information or providing a service—until it breaks down or becomes obsolete and is abandoned.  We then imagine the next mission—going back to the drawing board to design the next spacecraft—a process repeated continuously and a major cost of space exploration.

Is a paradigm shift – a “revolution” in space travel possible?  One would think that with 50 years of experience under our belts, we would have already exhausted all the possibilities.  Indeed, the imminent development of warp drive or “Cavorite” does not seem likely, but then, that’s the nature of truly revolutionary breakthroughs, isn’t it?  On the other hand, is there something missing – something that could be done right now using existing knowledge to change the rules of spaceflight and possibly spur additional breakthroughs?

As long as we’re chained to the existing spaceflight paradigm, we must continue hauling from Earth everything we need in space.  For human missions this includes all the air, water and other consumables needed for life support.  The cost to lift all this mass (which includes the weight of a massive amount of fuel needed to escape from Earth’s very deep gravity well) is budget busting.  So for “normal” space exploration, costs will never be lower except at the margins and we will always be mass-limited in space.  And when you are mass-limited, you are capability-limited as well.

I’ve argued here and elsewhere that there is a method that is already well understood in principle, but its practical application and viability is completely unknown.  If we could use what we find in space to create new capabilities, we would change the rules of spaceflight, thereby ushering in a true paradigm shift in space travel.

Such was the original intent of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).  The desire for fundamental change in perspective was behind the program’s specific direction to study and experiment with using the material and energy resources of the Moon.  From the moment it was announced, the true purpose of a lunar return was misunderstood, both inadvertently and deliberately.  Constellation is a rocket program; the VSE is not.

No one knows if using space resources is possible but we can find out by pursuing innovative technology.  In theory it works.  We’ve never attempted high-risk mining on the Moon and it may have significant practical difficulties but potentially, it could become a highly leveraging activity.

If we can extract and make rocket propellant on the Moon, we can create a completely reusable, refuelable transportation infrastructure in cislunar space.  If we can extract the oxygen and hydrogen, we can live in space.  Of course, such an outcome would change and transform the business model of space—something that fascinates and attracts many but repels others and hence, its mixed reception in aerospace circles.

This would truly be a revolution, a paradigm shift in the same sense as we understand it from Kuhn’s description of scientific progress; as a vast new expanse is opened to us and we are free to move about the universe, the world changes and things are never the same again.

In order to mitigate risk and to ensuring our economic and national security, government often steps in to develop technology that the private sector cannot or will not take on.  A government push to learn how to use the resources of space will break the cycle of launch and discard.  Instead of having a short “shelf-life,” our indispensable and unprotected systems in space become maintainable, reusable, extensible and affordable.

While reading the newly released Augustine report, keep in mind its background and its assumptions.  It is based solidly on the traditional models of conducting business in space – design, launch and abandon, along with the accompanying plea for more money to ensure a “robust” program of space exploration.

As long as such assumptions prevail, advances never will.

The LCROSS impact site seen from LRO

Early last Friday, the public and families of employees at Ames Research Center in California, where the LCROSS mission was conceived, built and operated, camped on the lawn in an all-night vigil.  NASA’s educational outreach and public relations push about the pending lunar impact event was very effective, having reached a wide audience in the weeks leading up to the much hyped event.  Alas, the promised giant plume of impact debris was invisible from Earth, leaving a receptive public feeling cheated and disappointed.

The understanding that a high-velocity impactor can yield important information about planetary composition and state is very old.  The first probes to the Moon (both Soviet and American) were impactors.  We know that when something strikes a planetary surface at high speed, target material is thrown up into space, some of it vaporized by heat generated in the energy of the impact.  By studying this impact ejecta, we learn about the composition of the target object.

I didn’t post on it earlier, but as the LCROSS mission has successfully concluded, I think it is a good time to examine this mission, how it came about, and the lessons that hopefully it has taught NASA about public appeal and its involvement with space.

LCROSS was not originally a part of the robotic precursor program for lunar return. Initially, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft was to be launched on a Delta II.  By the end of 2005 it had outgrown its booster and was forced onto the much larger Atlas V booster where it had surplus payload margin.  The Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) Scott Horowitz, decided to use this margin to fly an additional small spacecraft (called a secondary payload) that would address the raging debate about whether water ice exists at the poles of the Moon.  Horowitz looked to NASA’s field centers for a small payload that would provide data about this contentious and nagging issue.

Although a variety of small missions were proposed, including survivable hard landers and small “hoppers,” the idea of slamming the Centaur upper stage into the Moon and examining the resulting ejecta plume was selected as LCROSS in April 2006.  It was considered a low-risk, low-cost concept, as the used Centaur upper stage had no value and would have been steered into a solar orbit anyway.  A small satellite was built to track the Centaur impact, measure the properties of the ejected plume and with luck, would “settle” the issue of water on the Moon.

A serious defect in this mission concept was that it presupposed that we understood the Moon well enough to identify in advance the most likely site for ice on the Moon.  Lunar investigators knew from previous data that water ice, if present, was not present everywhere – it had a patchy, heterogeneous distribution because the permanent shadow around the poles (where the ice would be stable) is itself patchy.  Moreover, the remote sensing data of the time was ambiguous as to which shadowed locales contained ice, if any.

In March of 2006, because of these uncertainties, those who had worked on the robotic precursor program laid out a sequential, incremental strategy to first map the deposits from orbit and identify the best candidate sites for ice.  Following orbital mapping, we would soft-land with capable rovers and  map and test the surface composition at a minimum of about 20 different sites.  Although this strategy is more costly than a simple impactor mission, it would have provided us an unequivocal answer to the ice issue; we would know without doubt whether there is or is not water ice at the poles of the Moon.  Moreover, rovers would collect information on the possible presence, physical nature and setting of other volatile substances (such as ammonia and methane) that have resource value.  In other words, we would have collected the critical strategic information needed to locate, prospect, harvest and use lunar water.

Instead, the mission chosen and flown and heavily advertised by NASA as a citizen participation viewing event to find water on the Moon, could not answer key questions about polar water.  If LCROSS detects water, we still won’t know where all the ice deposits are located, what other species might be present, what its physical state might be, and how it is distributed laterally and vertically in the surface regolith.  If LCROSS detects nothing, it won’t prove that water doesn’t exist on the Moon, only that the wrong site was selected.  In other words, after this mission, we will still know next to nothing about the material that will enable and advance permanent, sustainable economic presence on the Moon.

An impact plume wasn’t the only thing missing.  Hopefully, NASA will recognize the real discovery of LCROSS – mission hype is a poor substitute for shortcomings in programmatic logic.

A cislunar transport system will revolutionize space travel (NASA artwork by Pat Rawlings)

Water is an extremely useful substance in space.  The recent finding of water on the Moon has generated considerable comment in the space community; a quick search on Google using the phrase “lunar water” returns over 7.66 million hits.  Lunar water’s significance lies not in its role as a medium for the presence of extraterrestrial life but rather in its potential to support terrestrial life—ours—as humanity moves beyond Earth.  The Moon is the port from where we will navigate—the safe harbor where we will learn how to live and work productively in space and from where we will set sail into our Solar System, thereby ensuring the survival of our species.

The three principal uses for this water are life support, energy storage, and rocket propellant.

We can easily imagine drinking water.  We need about 2 liters of water per day under ordinary circumstances.  Water is also a constituent of food, both unprepared and preserved, adding at least another liter to that total.  In addition to consumed water, we can also use water to make oxygen, replenishing the air we bring with us to create a breathable atmosphere.  Water is over 85% oxygen by weight and the liquid is easily broken into its constituent gases by passing an electrical current through it.

Another way that water supports life is by offering shielding and protection against solar and galactic cosmic radiation.  Water harvested from the Moon can fill the outer jackets of surface habitats, protecting not only human life and technology within it, but also the plants that we will want to grow there, both for food supply and carbon dioxide scrubbing of the habitat air.  Thus, water supports life on the Moon as both a consumable and as a building material.

A second main use of water is less often considered.  We can break down water into its component gases using electricity, but the process can also be reversed – hydrogen and oxygen gas can be combined to generate electricity in a device called a fuel cell.  When these gases combine, they generate electrical energy and make water as a by-product.  This technique was used in the Apollo spacecraft for power and water production.  When combined with another technique to generate electrical power (e.g., arrays of solar cells or a nuclear reactor), we make a completely reversible, self-sustaining power and water system.  Thus, the water becomes a medium of energy storage – during lunar night, we combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water and electrical power while during the daytime, we reverse the process by using electrical power generated by sunlight to disassociate the water back into its constituent gases.  Such a rechargeable fuel cell system enables permanent, sustainable human presence on the Moon.

The third important use for lunar water is for the production of rocket fuel.  Liquid hydrogen and oxygen are the most powerful chemical rocket propellants known.  By manufacturing rocket propellant from lunar water, we make the Moon a refueling station and logistics depot in space.  The critical value of this ability is that such rocket fuel not only permits our routine access to and from the Moon, but also enables access to any other point in cislunar space (the volume of space between Earth and Moon.)

All satellites reside in cislunar space.  Numerous remote-sensing satellites are found in low Earth orbit.  GPS elements reside in moderately high (few hundred kilometer) orbits.  Communication satellites are found at geosynchronous orbit, 35,000 km above the Earth.  Other specialized satellites occur at different altitudes.  At present, we cannot access these satellites with either human or robotic spacecraft.  So we design, build and fly these space assets, use them for a time then abandon them, replacing them as needed with new satellites—at great cost.  The ability to reach valuable space assets routinely with people and machines allows us to change the way we conduct business in space.  Instead of the current “fly and throw away” template, we can build extensible, maintainable and upgradeable systems.

Very large, distributed space systems will enable new capabilities, such as global communications using hand held cell phone-sized equipment, anywhere in the world at any time.  New remote-sensing platforms can be built to look at any corner of the globe at any wavelength in unprecedented detail.  Telescopes built on the Moon’s far side, where they will be shielded from Earth’s radio noise, can scan the universe in new areas of the spectrum. These and many more capabilities are enabled by a cislunar transportation system and will vastly improve life on Earth.

By understanding and using the resources of our Moon, we can push out to the stars.  An abundance of water on the Moon fundamentally allows us to change the rules of exploration and spaceflight to our advantage.  We stand at the threshold of a new understanding of how the Moon evolved and works—and works to humanity’s advantage.

Water-bearing minerals on the Moon (in blue). (Chandrayaan M3 Team and NASA)

The extreme dryness of the Moon is established scientific dogma. The study of Apollo rock and soil samples pretty much had convinced scientists that the Moon has no water.  Because its surface is in a vacuum and experiences extreme temperature swings at the equator (from -150° to 100° C), the Moon was believed to have a bone dry surface.  Moreover,  minerals that make up the lunar rocks not only have no water, but crystallized in a very reducing, waterless environment, indicating no significant water at depth.

Yet, some irritating facts suggested that the whole story was more complicated. Water is being added to the lunar surface.  We know the Moon is bombarded with comets (mostly water ice) and meteorites rich in water-bearing minerals.  Additionally, the solar wind (mostly hydrogen atoms or protons) constantly hits the surface, implanting itself into the dust grains and a possible source for the creation of water.  An experiment laid out on the surface by the Apollo astronauts observed water vapor after the crew left the Moon.  It was thought this vapor might be latent out-gassing from the Lunar Module descent stage, but scientists couldn’t be sure.

So what happens to all this water?  Most of it is thought lost to space by a variety of processes, including dissociation by sunlight, thermal loss from the extremely high daytime temperatures, and sputtering induced by the impact of high-energy particles from space.  Some areas near the poles of the Moon are permanently dark and cold, so if any of this stray water happened into them, they would be “trapped” forever in the dark areas.  And although an extremely slow process, over millions of years a considerable amount of water ice might accumulate.  But we don’t know how much water is made and how much might be present on the Moon.

Just published results from spectral mapping instruments on three different spacecraft indicate the presence of large amounts of either water or the OH molecule in the soils of the Moon.  This water is present at high latitudes at both poles and occurs in sunlit areas (these instruments rely on reflected sunlight).  Although the authors of these new results don’t understand the source of this water, they favor the creation of water by the interaction of solar wind with surface minerals.  Solar wind protons reduce metal oxides in the soil, creating free metal (usually pure iron, Fe⁰) and water.  The M3 Team suggested that this water might act as a source for the water believed to be trapped in the dark polar cold traps.

What’s surprising about this new data is not the presence of water, but its pervasiveness.  The published image (above) shows this water to be present from the poles down to about 60° latitude.  This area subtends over 10 million square kilometers, or about one-third the surface area of the entire Moon!  Although the water appears to be present only in the upper few millimeters of the surface, its total mass could be enormous, greatly exceeding the several hundred million tones estimated to be present as ice in the dark areas of the poles.

As always with good science, the new results raise many more questions than they answer.  In part, this is a “chicken or egg” issue – do the newly discovered deposits result from surface alteration by water derived from the polar ice, or do they serve as a source for such deposits?  How does water form, move, get destroyed or get cold-trapped on the Moon?  What are rates of water deposition and removal?  What and where are the ice deposits and how pure might they be?  Right now we can only dimly perceive the beginnings of a whole new sub-discipline of lunar studies: polar geoscience.

This exciting story isn’t over.  More developments in this field are on the horizon.  Results from other experiments carried aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, including my own Mini-SAR imaging radar, have yet to be fully reported.  The American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission is settled into its mapping orbit and will be examining the Moon in detail over the next couple of years.  Every time we get new data from the Moon or examine and map it with some new technique, we learn new and surprising facts.

In a future post, I’ll examine the implications of large amounts of lunar water for human return to the Moon and the possibilities for a permanent sustainable presence on our nearest planetary neighbor.

Stay tuned – things are getting very interesting.

The more things change....

Over the long holiday weekend, Turner Classic Movies regaled us with a really obscure one – the 1960 biopic, I Aim at the Stars, starring Curd Jürgens.  This movie is a biography of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who built the V-2 for Hitler and the Saturn V for America.  Although no landmark in cinematic history, it was an interesting and reasonably well told story, even if it glossed over a few inconvenient facts about von Braun, like his nominal membership in Himmler’s SS.

What fascinated me in this movie (which I had not seen) was not von Braun, but the character played by James Daly, Major William Taggert (an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army who, having lost his family to a V-2 hitting London, hated von Braun and all of the Peenemunde rocket group).  After the war, Taggert follows the Germans as they relocate, first to White Sands and finally to Huntsville to continue their research into rocket flight.  Taggert becomes a reporter (his civilian occupation) who beats his media pulpit about the irrelevancy of space flight.  “All the money spent on space could build schools and hospitals instead!” he angrily harangues via television, a philosophical counterpoint to von Braun’s plea for an American satellite program.

Watching the movie, I was struck that this debate has been ongoing for the last 50 years.  Something about space exploration or human forays into new realms sticks in the craw of some people.  Although the context of the von Braun-Taggart argument was Sputnik and a possible American response, much has remained the same over these last 50 years.  The public still falls into two camps – those who believe that our survival depends on continued reach beyond Earth versus those who think it’s a waste of money or that the money could be better spent.  NASA spends most of its outreach efforts trying to win the hearts and minds of this latter group.

Case in point:  a NASA “white paper,” clearly a rough draft, leaked to the press, describing the post-Augustine space program.  Omitting the use of our Moon as the logical next step, “Generation Mars” is billed as the necessary pathway to keep NASA relevant, the public engaged and the required pipeline for sustainable product and group input cycles.  No more idiotic fooling around with, or distractions from, lunar bases.  The “exciting” destination is Mars – in about thirty years or so.  In the mean time, keep flying Shuttle so as not to upset the applecart.  Oh, and imagine, “use” the ISS for something (Just pull one or two studies—from the hundreds gathering dust—off the shelf of unfunded programs).

A key assumption here is that NASA’s survival revolves around an excited and engaged public.  The authors of this piece apparently think this will happen with Mars because the public doesn’t care about the Moon; that the Mars Generation can become “emotionally engaged because they will become contributors to the Mars goal and part of the maturation process in achieving it.”  Great stuff that – “emotional engagement,” not reason or logic.  The system of taking incremental steps using lunar resources to make space faring routine is abandoned for a multi-decadal agency program to take an “excited” public to Mars, a program “owned” by its contributors.  That’s a lot of time and work needed to engage, excite and own something.  It sounds like the description of an entitlement program, not a mission statement.

After 50 years of obvious benefits of space flight, many still are, at best, indifferent to it.  But even more significantly, few feel the need to be emotionally engaged with it.  People understand that along with our vast interstate road network, we have other vital economic infrastructure, such as railroad transportation, air traffic and more recently, a network of telecommunication satellites orbiting Earth.  We depend upon this infrastructure on a daily basis, but except for buffs, we do not get emotionally engaged in their day to day operations.

As no significant additional money is likely to materialize, we must strive for achievable goals and a paced rate of advancement.  A program that promises accomplishment thirty years in the future is not a program at all, but rather, an excuse to “study” the problem indefinitely.  In other words, it means another thirty years like the previous thirty years – lots of swell viewgraphs, color artwork of astronauts climbing the walls of Valles Marineris, and bureaucratic blither about exciting students.  But no actual spaceflight infrastructure.

I’ve touched on this issue before; no one votes for a candidate based on their position on the space program.  The net effect of this environment of public indifference is that NASA’s budget (which comes from an ever shrinking slice of the tax-funded, discretionary spending pie) will remain at existing levels for the foreseeable future.  What does this mean for NASA’s Mad Men advertising campaign for “Generation Mars?”  Basically it means that a space agency dependent upon public excitement to enrich its budget is one that is not likely to prosper.   With budgets devoured by countless cycles of viewgraphs, white papers and consensus management missives in the coming decades, what remains is an agency with no sustainable space exploration system.

To add space to our other national transportation networks, the kind that we take for granted but that contribute in so many ways to our prosperity and security, NASA needs to lay the groundwork for private industry to follow.  NASA needs to be the driver of private sector technology as it explores.  Without logical steps, NASA becomes the devourer of resources and not a technology driver.

As the next frontier is scouted, business will follow, as it always does.  Business is eager to follow.  NASA needs to finish laying the groundwork before moving on.   The Moon is the next destination in space.  Will America lead and  have a stake in this new land or will we stay behind and watch the movie?

The path to Cone crater (LROC image, Ariz. State Univ.)

In 1961, Alan B. Shepard’s successful 15-minute sub-orbital hop gave President Kennedy the high cover needed to announce a reach for the Moon, “by the end of this decade.” America’s spirit was lifted and Alan Shepard became a national hero, getting ticker tape parades and White House receptions. Then, as in a Greek tragedy, he was struck from the flight list after developing Meniere’s syndrome (an imbalance of the inner ear). His flying days were over. Or were they?

Shepard, a smart, tough, no-nonsense aviator, took a job helping Deke Slayton (previously grounded by a heart murmur) run the Astronaut Office. Shepard and Slayton picked all flight crews for the Gemini and Apollo missions. Very early on, it became clear that you did not cross Al Shepard, lest your career come to a screeching halt. Shepard never stopped his Apollo training or flying in the T-38, even though he had to “backseat it” with another astronaut. His personality was memorably captured in Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff, as “The Icy Commander.”

After taking a chance on experimental surgery to correct his inner ear problem in 1969, he successfully returned to active flight status and looked ahead to an Apollo flight assignment.  Rejected for the Commander’s seat on the next available flight by NASA Headquarters (on the grounds that he needed more training time), he was named to command a subsequent flight, while Jim Lovell was named Commander of Apollo 13.

Geologists who worked on the Apollo training were ecstatic – Lovell was one of their favorite pilot astronauts, a smart, capable guy with a keen eye and an analytic mind. He was being sent to Fra Mauro, the first highland site to be visited on the Moon. This region was considered a key locale to decipher lunar geological history, being located on the ejecta blanket of the Imbrium basin, the largest impact crater on the near side.

Jim Lovell was considered the right man to study this site and collect the key samples scientists needed to help unlock the secrets of the Moon. Unfortunately, with the failure of Apollo 13, Jim Lovell didn’t land on the Moon. Still, the Fra Mauro site was considered so important, it became the designated landing site for Apollo 14, eighteen months later.

Uh-oh. Lunar scientists didn’t have Jim Lovell to explore with—they had drawn the “Icy Commander,” the guy who cheerfully admitted that, compared to aeronautics, he thought geology was a low-grade science. Nevertheless, Shepard assured the Apollo scientists he would try to do the best job he could for them.

While successful in almost every way, the Apollo 14 mission was not without controversy. Cone crater, a large young impact feature, had apparently dug up rocks from deep within the Fra Mauro Formation, including it was hoped, ejecta from the Imbrium basin. During their second moonwalk, Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell trudged up steep slopes leading to Cone, dragging along their Modularized Equipment Transporter (MET), a small pull-cart designed to carry tools and samples with them, getting more winded and disoriented with each step. Getting to the rim of Cone crater was considered critical to the scientific success of the mission.

At 47, Shepard was the oldest man to fly to the Moon and many felt that he was out of shape and not up to the rigors of lunar trekking (which didn’t explain why Ed Mitchell was also having problems.) Moreover, it seemed that Shepard was all too eager to abandon the trek and declare victory after he radioed to the ground that he thought they were already at the rim of Cone crater. (Enough with the hiking trip! We’re running out of time and consumables. Let’s sample this area and call it the rim of Cone crater.)

Scientists in the back room were aghast. Getting Cone crater samples was critical to mission success. And now this old, panting geezer was destroying their chance to unlock a deep secret about the Moon. Although they put on a good face, scientists were resentful; after all their work on geological training, the “Icy Commander” simply declares victory and turns for home. Adding insult to their perceived injury, back at the Lunar Module, Shepard pulled out a 6-iron and conducted a little sand trap practice. (He abandoned the quest for Cone crater – to play golf, no less!)

Now, thirty-eight years later, we’ve just received a magnificent picture of the Apollo 14 landing site from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). Its quality is so good we can see the path of the astronauts footprints and MET tracks on the Moon. It is even possible to follow their tracks all the way up to Cone crater—to the point where Al Shepard declared victory.

Oops. Al Shepard was right. He was at the rim of Cone crater. Terrain around the rim is so hilly that he and Ed Mitchell didn’t know they had reached the rim; the deep crater interior is just over a slight rise, a few tens of meters north of where they were. The samples that Shepard and Mitchell collected do represent the deepest ejecta from Cone crater, thereby fulfilling that goal geologists set many moons ago. For almost 40 years, the “Icy Commander” was right. Yet his name lived in infamy in lunar geologic circles.

If there is a moral to this story, it could be that scientists should never state something is absolutely known and settled.  It’s likely they’ll be proven wrong.

The White House had a different view of the Vision for Space Exploration than NASA

Last week, the Augustine Commission held another public meeting in Washington DC and Dr. John Marburger testified. For those just joining our story in progress, Marburger was President Bush’s Science Advisor and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House between 2001 and 2009. He was a key player in the development of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) and his comments on the intent and reality of the VSE were interesting and insightful.

Marburger described a split between NASA and the White House during formulation of the Vision. NASA (led by former Administrator Sean O’Keefe, Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld and an internal study group within the agency) wanted a manned Mars mission (as it has for the last 50 years) while the White House (led by Marburger, his OSTP colleagues and some members of the National Security Council) called for a new direction and orientation of the space program. They favored a return to the Moon with the “mission” of radically changing the rules of spaceflight.

This latter course involved learning how to use the material and energy resources of the Moon to produce life support consumables, electrical power and rocket fuel, thereby creating new spaceflight capabilities. The White House group was informed by an abundance of detailed studies done over the past decade that demonstrated how the resources of the Moon could be tapped and utilized. Given the unlikelihood of significant new money for NASA, they believed that some kind of “game-changer” was needed – a way to step beyond low Earth orbit by incorporating innovative ways of conducting space business. A sustainable path, if you will.

Marburger’s biggest concern was that by inserting Mars as a goal (not by any means an “ultimate goal”) or even a date for lunar return, the path forward would become “burdened by deadlines and difficult budget issues.” He believed that a program composed of small, incremental steps would gradually but continuously expand human “reach” into space beyond low Earth orbit—with economy provided by a template of bootstrapping. The key was to use robotic missions as pathfinders to understand, access and acquire products derived from lunar and space resources.

As these differing threads were woven into a policy statement, NASA viewed the VSE as the next “large space program” for the agency. NASA’s traditional template dominated public discussion of the Vision, where gaps, arbitrary time scales and the long-desired human Mars mission as the “ultimate goal” became familiar talking points – not surprising, considering that the agency had sole custody of the VSE after it was crafted. Lunar return by 2020 was not meant as a deadline, but it is widely interpreted as such. Although the VSE is careful to mention trips to “Mars and other destinations,” the latter part of that phrase seldom appears in NASA charts.

The subsequent Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) is pure NASA. In classic agency fashion, “Apollo-on-steroids” (big giant booster, mega-capsule and gargantuan lander) was rolled out. The programmatic significance of Ares V in the architecture should not be overlooked – delivering 150 metric tones to LEO, it is a rocket designed for human Mars mission done in the Apollo-style, with everything needed for Mars dragged up from the deep gravity well of the Earth. It is overkill for almost any other space job, including missions to the Moon. Overkill can work, if you have the money (although it isn’t good practice even if you do have the money). But even with the most optimistic assumptions, the ESAS doesn’t fit into NASA’s current or projected budget.

Marburger’s concern is exactly what has happened. NASA thinks that its principal mission on the Moon is to conduct Apollo-style local site exploration and serve as a test-bed for the Mars flags-and-footprints extravaganza. The idea of building a spaceflight infrastructure using lunar resources was swept aside. An Apollo-like architecture was developed but with no political backing to pay for it. Now the agency finds itself subject to a protracted and embarrassing “public audit” of its mission and methods of doing business. The country is not disposed to a significant increase in spending on space, not just because of the poor state of the economy (although that doesn’t help) but because they think we are already spending the right amount. The comfortable, old shoe cannot be resoled; you cannot conduct space business today using the Apollo model, whereby technical difficulties are bludgeoned into submission by cash and long hard (and expensive) man-hours of work.

The way forward involves approaching the problem differently. Marburger’s take on the VSE is adaptable to any budgetary level. It makes continuous progress, using small steps when times are tough and larger ones when things are flush. It sets no deadlines but it does set strategic directions – incrementally beyond low Earth orbit, using what we find along the way to create new capabilities and possibilities. It has intermediate milestones that map progress and provide societal payback. It brings commercial enterprise along, with the aim of expanding our space economy and high-technology industrial base. In other words, it is sustainable. It is the antithesis of the conventional form of space exploration.

Given the dwindling amount of money for discretionary spending in the federal budget, perhaps the idea of using lunar resources to build a sustainable infrastructure in space should be embraced.

Target and Distraction: Which is which?

The Moon versus Mars controversy has reared its ugly head yet again. For the newcomers, this is the perennial “debate” among space buffs about what the next destination in space should be. I do not mean to suggest that all possibilities are encompassed by these two options; it just seems that most advocates fall into one or the other of these two camps.

In part, this argument has arisen because the Augustine Commission, currently deliberating the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program, has resurrected the debate with an architectural option they call “Mars First” (a.k.a. Mars Direct, Direct to Mars, Apollo to Mars and Mars-in-MY-lifetime), beloved of the Mars Society and ex-astronauts everywhere. Briefly, this plan calls for sending people to Mars as soon as possible – no Moon, no asteroids, no L-points: do not pass “Go,” do not collect $200. In such a scenario, all pieces of the Mars mission are launched directly from the Earth; this roughly one-million-pound on-orbit mass includes all the propellant needed for the trip, which makes up about 85% of the mass of the spacecraft.

The Mars First option follows the “Apollo template.” In 1961, faced by the political necessity to get men to the Moon and back within a decade, Wernher von Braun designed the biggest rocket he could imagine – basically a scaled-up, clustered V-2 – to lift all of the parts he needed into space. This super heavy lift vehicle was actually a family of rockets (Saturn class), whose ultimate behemoth was the Nova, a vehicle with a lift-off weight exceeding 13 million pounds. Fortunately, the choice of lunar orbit rendezvous for the Apollo mission mode made Nova unnecessary and a self-contained mission was launched by a single, smaller (7 million pound) Saturn V.

The Apollo template makes use of maximum disposability. As the mission proceeds and each flight element is thrown away, unused and unusable, the vehicle gets smaller and lighter. For some items, such as fuel tanks and structural elements, this doesn’t introduce unwarranted penalties, but some parts of the vehicle are high in cost and value. Within the Apollo template, however, their loss is inevitable.

A significant part of the Apollo template is the lack of infrastructure legacy, i.e., the elements brought to a destination that are available for use by the next crew. We need to develop an architecture that leaves equipment in place for future use and expansion by subsequent visitors. This is one reason why sortie missions are inferior to establishing an outpost or a base; sortie missions spread surface assets over a large area where they cannot mutually support each other.

Much of the support for Mars First comes from the belief of its advocates that we will get “stuck” on the Moon or somewhere else, sort of like we have been “stuck” in low Earth orbit for the last 40 years. In their minds, Mars is THE destination. To hear the pitch, one might believe Mars has it all – atmosphere, water, a 24 hour day, and possible ancient fossil life. Adventure! Thrills! What else could a space cadet want?

Although the “Mars First” advocates vigorously present their position each and every time the direction of our space policy is debated, they have never won the argument. Why? Is it some evil conspiracy to keep them from their Mars dream? Is it just the stupidity of policy makers? Some simple facts suggest otherwise.

We do not now have the technology we need to support multi-month, self-sufficient human space travel. The International Space Station needs nearly constant servicing and re-supply from Earth. In fact, one of the missions of ISS is to learn how to live in space without such service and re-supply, closing the various life-support loops and thereby developing sustained human presence. This is experimental technology and not nearly mature enough upon which to rest the lives of a Mars mission crew. Regardless of claims, a Mars mission is at least one (and possibly two) order(s) of magnitude more costly than any alternative mission.

There isn’t the will in either the Congress or the Executive to significantly increase the amount of money allocated to our national space program. Spectacular claims about “exciting the public” with a human Mars mission, regardless of their veracity (which is doubtful), do not translate into higher budgets for NASA. To go to Mars using existing technology, with an Apollo-style business model, is both unachievable and unaffordable.

The Vision for Space Exploration makes Mars a goal – along with every other space destination – after we go to the Moon to learn how to live and work on another world. Moreover, the VSE implicitly states that such is to be accomplished under existing budgetary envelopes. In contrast to the Apollo template, time rather than money is to be the free variable. The Moon can be reached with existing launch assets; although NASA is currently bogged down in a debate about rocket development, the real issues are how you go back to the Moon and what you do there. The Moon offers the material and energy resources to develop the technology and skills necessary for sustained, long duration capability in space.

Mars First advocates worry about getting “stuck on the Moon.” In fact, it is their obsession for Mars that has kept us in low Earth orbit for the last 40 years. By relentlessly pushing for a space goal that is well out of our technical and fiscal reach, they have gotten an undesired (but not unexpected) result: stasis. There is no choice. You use the Moon or you get nothing. Right now, Mars is a bridge too far – we need the stepping-stone of our Moon to reach it.

A Moon rock on Mt. Everest: Not for keeps

Mr. Ian Sheffield of Edinburgh Scotland is miffed. He claims to have not one, but two dust samples of the Moon—one from the Apollo 11 mission and another from the Apollo 15 mission. He explains that he bought these lunar samples “from a dealer” about 3 years ago. The article does not indicate how much he paid for them, but he does allow that each is valued at “around £2000” (about $3300) each.

A problem arose when he planned to display his samples to the public. He apparently wrote to NASA asking if he could exhibit them. To his astonishment, NASA refused to give him permission and demanded the return of the samples, claiming that the lunar dust in his possession was property of the United States government.

Mr. Sheffield’s story of how the samples came into his possession is interesting. He states the dust came off a camera film pack to which a technician in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory was accidentally exposed. Because no one was sure the lunar samples would not contain some possible primitive (and pathogenic) organisms when the Apollo 11 crew first returned to Earth, they had to spend three weeks in quarantine. Anybody in the LRL exposed to lunar material was compelled to join the astronauts in their quarantine. The technician who was exposed went into isolation and (the story claims) upon his release, “was given the dust as a memento.”

My antennae went up at this point. No lunar samples are “given” to private individuals. Each piece of the Moon returned by the Apollo astronauts is carefully accounted for and resides in the Lunar Curatorial Facility in Houston, where they are kept in two separate hurricane-proof vaults. Many lunar samples are loaned to scientific institutions for study. The only lunar samples given away (of which I am aware) were to about a hundred national leaders during President Nixon’s 1969 world tour. The beautiful “Space Window” in the Washington National Cathedral, honoring man’s landing on the Moon, holds a 7.18-gram basalt from Mare Tranquillitatis, on loan to the Cathedral. Other moon rocks were presented to the Apollo astronauts (and Walter Cronkite) in 2004. However, each plaque came with a catch: the lunar samples can not be personally held by the recipients, and must be displayed at a local school or museum. Recently, Astronaut Scott Parazynski was loaned a sample of the Moon’s regolith that he carried to the summit of Mount Everest.

Some diplomatic gifts of lunar samples have found their way onto the black market. A notorious case is a sample presented to the people of Honduras back in 1969. This sample turned up during a NASA Inspector General “sting” which was designed to catch dealers of fake lunar samples. To the agents’ surprise, they were offered a genuine lunar rock: asking price, $5 million. A meeting was arranged and the rock (and presumably, the seller) was seized. Another lunar sample was stolen from a museum in Malta between 1990 and 1994; it was recovered in another sting operation in 1998.

The federal government forbids private ownership of any Apollo sample. Yet, such samples show up every now and then. The most common form they take is dust stuck to adhesive tape (an easy way to “clean” the surface of some exposed sample container, tool, or space suit used on the lunar surface). Mr. Sheffield’s sample is likely to be one of these pieces. Its status, I was surprised to find out, is legally uncertain. Although NASA has sued in court to recover any such bootleg sample, no prosecution has succeeded, except for those caught (literally) in the act of theft. In an embarrassing incident for NASA, a summer intern and two companions carried a safe full of lunar samples out of a building at Johnson Space Center (as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up). They were apprehended while trying to sell them at bargain basement prices and subsequently prosecuted.

It was rumored for years that several of the Apollo astronauts held samples from their respective missions. If they did, it was probably inadvertent—the lunar dust is extremely adhesive and it is possible that smudges of lunar dust clung to personal items returned from the Moon in their Personal Preference Kits. Alan Bean, who documents the Apollo experience through his oil paintings, is said to add ground-up patches retrieved from his lunar space suit to his works. His reasoning is that because his suit was dirty with lunar dust, some of that dust must find its way into his paintings, giving them a true “lunar” ambiance.

So Mr. Ian Sheffield of Edinburgh may be home free. I might suggest to him that given their quasi-legal status, he is probably better off not calling attention to his possession of these unique artifacts. In fact, although NASA frowns on owning stolen Apollo lunar samples, there are dozens of lunar samples available for sale on eBay. A number of meteorites recovered on Earth, came from the Moon. Although most of them belong to national governments that sponsor the recovery of meteorites from Antarctica, several are in private hands and can be bought and sold, just as any commodity. Right now, there is a very nice anorthositic breccia from the lunar highlands for sale. Better hurry though – the sale only lasts another day. Oh yes, the asking price: a mere $144,000.

By the way, over the years, I have been asked to look at a few “lunar” samples that were in fact, lunar fakes. Caveat Emptor!

Museum piece: 40 years ago, on its way to the Moon

“Your job is not to envision the future, but to enable it.” – Antoine de St. Exupery

Originally, I had not planned to write anything for the blog today; the web is already inundated with retrospective-, perspective-, nostalgia-laden, crying-in-my-beer pieces on today’s 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.  One shudders to think what’s coming in just a few days, on July 20, the actual anniversary of the lunar landing.  However, a news piece caught my eye because it casts the lunar landing in stark perspective (for me, at least) and makes me wonder whether some historical amnesia is at work within the space enthusiast community.

Ned Potter of ABC News has cast some cold water on the warm and rosy glow of the good old Apollo days.  In brief, he’s looked at some of the old polling data and finds that, lo and behold, the public was split on the value of going to the Moon.  In fact, a plurality of people polled back then opposed the lunar voyage, thinking that it cost too much money and delivered too little.  This actually jibes pretty well with my recollections.  As a young space enthusiast (I was 16 years old during the Apollo 11 mission), I can remember constantly defending spending money on the space program.  Mostly, I did this with my high school classmates but sometimes, I even argued with my parents about it!

The simple fact is, the public is now and has always been split on the value of a federal government space program.  It received its largest margin of support when viewed in the perspective of national security, but the lunar program was under fire as a waste of tax money from the beginning.  Even John F. Kennedy, widely credited today as a “visionary” President, desperately wanted to find some other arena in which we could compete with the Soviets and win.  At one point, he favored desalination of seawater as an appropriate scientific and technical challenge for America.

I have previously written on the nature of public support for space.  In my opinion, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.  People are at best lukewarm in their support and virtually no one casts a vote on the basis of whether or not a candidate supports the space program.  Yet there is amongst the space community a feeling that somehow, getting people enthused about a space goal is essential to accomplishing that goal (putting the cart before the horse).

If the ABC News story is even partly correct, such a belief is unwarranted, both then and now.  In retrospect, we remember the successes and the triumphs, but forget about the naysayers.  How many remember that on the day of the Apollo 11 launch, there was a “poor people’s march” on Kennedy Space Center, led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy?  He told reporters that he had came “not to protest the moon program, but to remind America of its unfulfilled promises.”  When the rocket actually launched, he too was swept up with the thrill and emotion of it all and cheered on the mission as loudly as anyone.  Imagine!  Success drawing in a doubting public!   When you accomplish exciting things in space, you capture the imagination—people begin to believe that they too can own a piece of this great adventure.

Others look on the issue of public support for space as improving or static.  Andy Chaikin asks whether anyone “still cares” about the Moon.  But the real issues are who supports a lunar return and for what reasons.  As a people, Americans tend not to support endless public spectacles.  Today, people who still follow NASA are asking, “Where’s the beef?”   They’re looking for more than a postcard from space or a PR extravaganza.  They want some legacy from their investment and they are right for doing so.

Just saying that you’re doing something exciting isn’t the same as doing something exciting.  And hearing about how exciting something is sure as hell isn’t the same as doing it.  To launch an enduring legacy built on the accomplishment of Apollo 11 and begin the return on our investment, NASA needs to enable the private sector’s ability to capitalize on space resources, starting by demonstrating this capability on the Moon.  Then the public can join in the construction of a road to space as opposed to being mere spectators in a museum to the past.

Start the countdown to true space exploration freedom—the one that brings all of humanity into the business and the adventure of advancing to the stars.  Put the horse in front of the cart and enable the future.  Humanity’s imagination and resourcefulness will expand in the process and the benefits will be many.

How much money should we spend on space?

How much should we spend on America’s space program?  Does NASA’s budget need an infusion of billions of dollars?  The way these questions are answered gives some indication of why one believes we have a space program, what it should be doing and whether money is the key needed to unlock the barriers hindering our access to space.

Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin recently opined that, “we’re going to have to spend what it takes.”  If we can’t pursue space goals “with sufficient robustness,” he hopes that the newly formed Augustine Commission recommends that “we just not do it.”  Additionally, Norm Augustine himself recently said that, despite our current technology and knowledge, ultimately, “It boils down to what we can afford.”

As we all know, spending money is easy.  Spending money wisely is something else entirely.  The Apollo era, when money supposedly flowed freely, is often cited as the glory days of NASA.  Early Apollo spending was high primarily for two reasons.

First, in its early days, NASA had little infrastructure – few field centers, test equipment, space vehicles and the people to design, build, test and fly the spacecraft.  A lot of NASA’s early funding went toward building up the facilities needed to go to the Moon:  the KSC Moonport (the VAB and Launch Complex 39), the Houston MSC (now JSC) campus, the Deep Space Network and the several other installations around the country.

Second, there was a perceived political imperative that required rapid progress in space and this urgency expressed itself as high rates of expenditure.  Apollo was not a journey to the Moon—it was a race and the Soviets were thought to be ahead of us.  They orbited the first satellite and the first human.  They did the first spacewalk and were the first to hit the Moon with a robotic probe.  Being behind was a jolt and a wakeup call for Americans who believed our country was and should remain the world’s leader in technology.

With the lunar landing accomplished, the urgency of space dissipated and NASA adjusted to being just another federal agency, seeking to retain what it already had while expanding its sphere of activities to the extent that it could.  However, institutionally, NASA never abandoned its business model of “racing to somewhere.”  This way of thinking is manifest as NASA again pins its hopes for a viable space program on getting more money.

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush (Bush 41) outlined what became known as the
Space Exploration Initiative (SEI).  It called for a permanent lunar base and a manned mission to Mars.  NASA’s response to the new mission directive was tepid; it produced a 90-Day Study that concluded we could do SEI if the agency budget was increased substantially.  In other words, the agency response to the Presidential directive was “Give us more money.”

Flash forward 15 years.  In an attempt to set a long term strategic direction for space and to assure that we maintain a productive, technological workforce, President George W. Bush (Bush 43) outlined the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).  It directed NASA to return humans to the Moon and learn to use lunar resources, followed by manned Mars missions, all the while integrating private industry into the architecture.

NASA’s response to the Vision was the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), which outlined an approach using Shuttle-derived hardware.  However, as work unfolded,  Shuttle heritage was diluted, costs rose rapidly, the date of lunar return receded, and the idea of incrementally developing a sustainable space infrastructure using lunar resources was abandoned.  The lunar surface mission was warped into a “touch and go” demonstration followed by an Apollo-style Mars mission, staged entirely from the Earth.  Once again the agency’s response to a new exploration challenge was to close ranks and follow the Apollo template, repeating the refrain, “Give us more money.”

Now NASA’s former administrator, Mike Griffin tells Norm Augustine to “do it right or don’t do it at all.”  In effect, Griffin is playing the “Washington Monument” game, a form of budgetary blackmail that threatens to terminate something believed to be strongly supported by Congress and the public (in this case, human spaceflight) unless some increased budgetary threshold is reached (in this case, more money to implement the ESAS.)  But this “game” only works when you’re holding the high cards, in this case that the public won’t stand for the termination of human spaceflight.

In a previous blog I discussed the issue of public support for space exploration.  While people don’t often think about space (and virtually no one casts their vote based on how the space program is funded), they still like the idea of having a space program.  The fact that we’ve had the same space budget for thirty years (in constant dollars, between 0.5 and 1.0% of federal spending, more or less) suggests that this level of funding is politically sustainable.

As celebrations for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 begin, the agency has been unable to create a sustainable architecture for lunar return, thereby bleeding the life out exploration efforts.  There is still no plan for lunar surface activities.  In their urgency to exit the Moon as rapidly as possible and get to Mars, NASA is side-stepping the principal reason they were to go to the Moon in the first place – to learn the skills needed to live and work productively on another world.   Is it any wonder that Congress and the public are uneasy about their space agency and its plea for more money?

The response to the questions I asked at the beginning should not be, “Give them more money.” The question we need to ask NASA is, “Given a constant level of funding over time, can you create a program that incrementally and cumulatively builds up a real space faring capability?”

If the answer to that question is “No,” then we need to ask, “Why not?”

A continent spanned: Is cislunar space next?

The new Augustine Commission met for the first time last week (June 17). The one-day agenda was filled with presentations on rocket-building, including reviews of NASA’s current efforts along those lines, followed by briefings on a number of possible alternatives. Suddenly, the space blogosphere was filled with speculation on the possible demise of the new Ares I launch vehicle and its replacement by either a commercial or some alternative Shuttle-derived rocket.

An early focus on rockets is perhaps inevitable, given the cost, schedule and technical issues that the Ares program has experienced. But in fact, all this rocket talk is quite beside the point. The real issue is, as it has always been, “What is the mission?” Why are we going to the Moon? Why should we send people into space? Can’t robotic missions explore the universe more cheaply and easily?

Such questions about the space program are answered repeatedly, but the discussion never advances. Recognizing that I am rushing in where space angels fear to tread, let me give it yet another go.

There are many motivations for a national space program. Scientific knowledge is an important objective, but it is not the only one and perhaps not even the most important one. The Vision for Space Exploration is being undertaken “to advance U.S. scientific, economic and security interests.” The Vision, proposed by the President and endorsed by two Congresses, was carefully crafted to give logical, long-term purpose and direction for expanded possibilities and opportunities in space. In a speech on the Vision given a couple of years after its announcement, Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger said, “Questions about the vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not.”

Here is the problem. Leaving Earth means escaping from a very deep gravity well. It is very costly to lift mass out of this well; current estimates vary widely, but $20,000 per pound to low-Earth orbit is a commonly cited cost for delivery by the Shuttle. As long as we must lift everything we need in space from the surface of the Earth, we are mass- and power-limited. Thus, we are also capability-limited. And under the existing rules of spaceflight, we always will be.

So, let’s change the rules. Rather than lifting all the water, air and propellant we need up from Earth, let’s find and make those commodities in space. Once we do that, our capabilities multiply many fold. We will be able to go anywhere we want, for as long as we want, to do any job or task we can imagine.

Why the Moon? Because the Moon is the closest, most easily accessible place beyond low Earth orbit that has the resources we need. Water is the currency of spacefaring – we need it for life support, energy storage and rocket propellant. The Moon has abundant supplies of both hydrogen and oxygen; no matter what form those two elements may take, we can extract and make these needed commodities from lunar materials.

Making propellant from lunar material allows us to access not only the Moon’s surface, but any other point in cislunar space (the volume of space between Earth and Moon) on a routine basis. This zone is where all our commercial and national strategic assets reside. Rather than building custom spacecraft, launching them on an expendable rockets, using them for a few years and then abandoning them in place, we would be able to create maintainable and extensible space systems. Spacecraft can be refueled in orbit instead of launched whole cloth from Earth. The VSE asks NASA to find and use what’s out there to create a wholly new, sustainable spacefaring capability.

This is our “mission” on the Moon: learn the skills and develop the technologies needed to live and work productively on another world. Creating a space transportation infrastructure is akin to building the first transcontinental railroad; it will open up the frontier of cislunar space. And a system that can access cislunar space will take us to the planets.

NASA’s task is to probe beyond low Earth orbit—opening the space frontier for sustained exploration. The agency’s job is not to industrialize the Moon, but to answer the question, “Can the Moon be industrialized?” This new direction is far removed from the geopolitically driven Apollo template of “flags and footprints.” The multinational fleet of probes scouting the Moon is testament to mankind’s boundless curiosity and a timely reminder that those who explore, excel.

A mission statement must be clear and simple. When the mission is understood, debate about rockets and architectures take place in an information-rich environment. The launchers used and the way mission elements are put together is optimized based on the requirements of the mission. Developing those requirements cannot begin until you know the mission.

One hundred and forty years ago, the mission was understood — to span the continent with a transportation system, opening up the frontier to development.  That mission created a modern industrial nation. We seek to do the same with cislunar space. And then, the planets.

Carnigie-Mellon's Scarab rover: Prospecting for resources

Last time, I outlined some of the basic principles of lunar resource utilization.  The Moon is our nearest source of material resources in space and learning how to extract what we need from the Moon is a key skill in our expansion into the Solar System.

All this is very well and good, but how do we go about using the resources of the Moon and of space in general?  Many people tend to think of huge industrial factories, similar to oil refineries, built on the Moon, with large mining communities similar to those depicted in the movie Outland.  In fact, the beauty of space resource utilization is that it’s possible to start very small and build up capability with time.  The “factory” needed to produce a metric tonne of oxygen on the Moon is the size of a typical office desk.

Mining is a very old and venerable field and has some simple precepts.  First, you must find and characterize the prospect.  Next, you need to understand the concentrations and physical states of the “ore body” that you wish to mine.  Then you must collect the feedstock, convey it for processing, extract the desired element or compound, discard the waste and store the product.  For lunar mining, we are now in the process of finding and characterizing the prospect through remote-sensing and mapping of compositions from space and analysis of returned samples.  This characterization has been going on for many years, giving us a first-order understanding of the compositions and physical states of lunar materials.

The Moon is rather ordinary in composition, having a crust (like the Earth) rich in oxides of aluminum, iron, and silicon.  The oxide portion is key: the Moon is over 40 % by weight oxygen.  This oxygen is tightly bound to its host metals and breaking these chemical bonds is one way to produce oxygen, which serves both human life support (air to breathe) and transportation (oxidizer for rocket propellant).  A variety of processes can accomplish these tasks, including electrolysis (melting the soil into a liquid and then passing an electrical current through it) and chemical reduction (using hydrogen or fluorine brought from Earth as a reducing agent).  None of these techniques are in any way “risky” in a technical sense – reduction as a chemical process dates from medieval times.  Abundant solar energy provides virtually unlimited power; some areas near the poles of the Moon are in near-constant sunlight.

The “long pole” in the tent is getting started.  Right now, the architecture for lunar return has no requirement or provision for resource utilization.  NASA’s efforts to date have focused on rocket-building and planning for scientific sortie missions.  Yet learning how to gather, process and use the resources of the Moon is major goal of the Vision for Space Exploration.  The idea is to use what we find in space to create new capabilities.  This goal has the promise of freeing us from the “tyranny of the rocket equation” – we would no longer be mass and power-limited in space.

The key to bootstrapping this capability is the judicious use of robotic precursor missions.  Robotic spacecraft are now orbiting the Moon, mapping the distribution of elements such as hydrogen and ascertaining the nature of the environment near the poles.  The next steps are to measure the composition and physical properties of the polar deposits from the surface; this requires soft-landers capable of landing payloads on the order of a few  to tens of kilograms.  Small surface rovers would be able to map out the elemental concentration of volatiles and determine the best places to mine.

After the prospects are mapped, we must experiment with different techniques for harvesting and processing.  Again, this work can be done by modestly sized robotic missions, landing small excavators and trucks (Mars rover-sized) and using laboratory bench-scale processing equipment.  Landing and experimentation with this equipment will allow us to find out which techniques are most effective, what processing methods use the least amounts of energy and have the highest yields, and determine where the choke-points are in the processing and production stream.

These small initial steps allow us to begin extracting and storing resources immediately.  Over time, we can increase these capabilities such that when people finally return to the Moon, they have at their disposal a cached accumulation of consumables, including air, water and rocket propellant.  In effect, we are creating the initial phases of self-sufficiency even before human arrival through the emplacement and use of automated, robotic infrastructure.

No one knows if lunar resources can be extracted and used in the manner described here.  But that’s why we’re going to the Moon in the first place – to answer these questions.  We are using the Moon as a laboratory to learn how to live and work productively on other worlds.  The skills and technologies developed here will serve us well wherever else we go in the Solar System.  And the sooner we get started on this path, the sooner we will develop a true spacefaring infrastructure.