Anthonares

Last week I wrote a rather critical entry about NASA spending more than a hundred billion on a Moon exploration plan of uncertain value. I’ve continued to read details of the mission and have relaxed my critical view a bit. For one, the number $100 billion is still at this point an estimate. Considering the fact that Apollo cost $135 billion in today’s dollars, it’s not grossly wasteful. However, my criticism about NASA not elucidating its plans for this new Lunar exploration still stands, and here I would like to insert my idea of what NASA should be doing:

1) Prepare for Mars exploration. A caveat to this discussion is that I think a Lunar test mission for Mars exploration is unnecessary, but is a significant bonus if NASA is intent upon returning to the moon. Test the components, technologies, and techniques needed for going to and exploring Mars. This is similar to what the Mars Society is doing in its analog research stations, except, of course, the Mars Society doesn’t have anywhere near $100 billion to spend. In particular, the lunar missions should demonstrate the capability of human explorers in finding and exploiting local water resources, and then manufacturing rocket fuel from those finds. Additionally, the nuclear power generators that will be needed for Martian exploration should be tested on the Moon.

2) Set up a true space settlement. Because the moon is several days away, it doesn’t present as many options for quick re-provisioning as does the ISS (though getting supplies to the ISS usually requires a few does of orbital maneuvering). Thus, NASA needs to accelerate the development of nearly closed-circuit life support systems for long term operation. Also, solar flares will be a new danger on the moon, and NASA needs to prepare for their impact on a manned settlement.

3) Begin space manufacturing. Start simple, break down found water ice into hydrogen and oxygen, and then manufacture methane using some carbon source. Also, NASA should use solar energy to break down lunar oxides into useful metals, and demonstrate that these metals can be used for manufacturing purposes. One of the potentially most transformative uses of space could be creating vast arrays of Lunar Solar Power generators. The energy collected could then be beamed to the Earth via microwaves and converted there to energy for terrestrial use. Such is the power of solar energy in space that only 2/10 of a percent of the lunar surface would need to be covered in solar arrays! Okay, that’s a lot. But, if technologies are developed by NASA at their first outposts, it may be possible to manufacture these arrays relatively cheaply using Lunar materials. The Earth will need to stop using fossil fuels sometime soon, and there are only three technologies which could provide us with the bulk of the energy we’d need: fission, fusion, or Space-based solar power. NASA can start that process now, and because they’d be doing something entirely new there will undoubtedly be all sorts of useful technological spinoffs of the endeavor.

Once these three objectives are met, there are a host of others that can be explored: far-side radio telescope installations and so forth. The problem lies in selling these objectives to a public not convinced, as I am, that sometime in the coming few centuries, far more people will live off of the Earth than on it. So maybe that’s why NASA has not really been telling us all what its plans are, because those plans require that you have the same kind of faith in the Spacefaring future of humans that they do.