One More Giant Leap
Filed under: Civil Space Flight, Commercial Space Flight
NASA announced late last week that they are seeking to buy data from commercial providers that, “reduces risks for future human and robotic lander designs by employing these missions as unique demonstration testbeds,” according to their Broad Agency Announcement. Through their Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) program, the agency will award $30.1M to private companies already vying for the Google Lunar X Prize, itself valued at an additional $30M. With this latest incentive, private companies now stand to make over $60M for successfully landing on the moon.
The lunar rover built by Astrobotic Technology is set to launch in late 2010 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 bound for the Apollo 11 landing site. The mission has been dubbed Tranquility Trek.
This is great news for lead contender Astrobotic Technology (see The Undiscovered Country, June 23, 2010 STN), a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off company devoted to robotic exploration of the Moon. They’re already well into the hardware testing phase of their lunar rover, set to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 late in 2012 bound for the Apollo 11 landing site. The mission, dubbed “Tranquility TrekTM,” will place a 160-lb, 5-foot-tall rover on the lunar surface for 10 to 12 days until lunar night fall. When the sun rises two Earth weeks later, the solar-powered robot will re-awaken to resume from its deep freeze hibernation after having experienced temperatures plummeting to -298 degrees Fahrenheit. This will be an important milestone for the technology since their plan is to follow on with additional robots to “prospect for the water ice and other volatiles at the Moon’s poles, which can be transformed into propellant to refuel spacecraft for return flights to Earth, doubling the productivity of human missions,” said Dr. William “Red” Whittaker, Astrobotic founder and director of CMU’s Field Robotics Center. There in the permanently-shadowed craters of the poles, robots must face the most bitter cold yet recorded in the solar system. This first demonstration flight will serve as a practice run for the deep freeze of the poles. And if these robots do well, they can serve as a first generation of a sort of space-based hunting dog to help in those tasks too dangerous for humans.
Design for a commercial lunar base. Could this be the shape of things to come and only just around the corner?: image courtesy Bigelow Aerospace
Still further, in an exclusive statement to SpaceTalkNOW, Dr. Whittaker said that his company also has plans to explore newly-discovered features on the Moon called “skylights,” (see A New Decade and Infinite Possibilities, January 11, 2010 STN; The Undiscovered Country, June 23, 2010 STN; and Lunar Scientists Need You, July 25, 2010 STN). These features are the collapsed ceilings of long-dead lava tubes, and they hold much promise as possible sources of lunar water as well as for natural shelter against the radiation environment.
This new NASA lunar program represents a giant leap forward in fostering lunar-based commerce around which the settlement of our nearest neighbor in space could arise. Like the COTS and CCDev commercial contracts before it, NASA will not use ILDD to take ownership of any flight or ground systems like was done during the Apollo program when the agency took full ownership of the Saturn rocket, Command Module and Lunar Lander and all their supporting technology. When Apollo died, those vehicles — so hard won — died with it. But this time, things are different. It’s a perfect example of NASA playing the role for which it is so well suited: that of macroeconomic enabler. The ILDD program’s money will spur innovation in the complimentary areas of human and robotic space flight, which is then reinvested to advance the state of the art still further. Private enterprise can then follow NASA to the moon and supply much of the agency’s needs for technology, materiel and logistical support. It’s a match made in heaven.
Once set in motion, lunar-based commerce can grow exponentially, making use of the nearly limitless, untapped natural resources to be found there not only for supplying the base there but for providing Earth with minerals such as Platinum (see Moonrush by Dennis Wingo, ISBN-13: 978-1894959100) which, though rare on Earth, is abundant on the Moon and could serve as a highly efficient catalyst for the first generation of hydrogen-powered, fuel cell automobiles.
Once a critical mass in space commerce is reached, it opens the door to the spread of space tourism, first from the short-duration, sub-orbital flights begun by Virgin Galactic to low earth orbit and then to the surface of the moon. The progression could be remarkably fast given the right set of circumstances. Already, Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace has plans for establishing the solar system’s first hotel on another planetary body. This can happen in our lifetime! All that is needed is the wise investment of both public and private funds. Uncle Sam and private industry can make great partners if they work together. Now the question is, do those in charge on either side recognize the potential? The NASA folks at the Constellation office from which ILDD will be funded obviously “get it.” But will Congress and the Administration pull the proverbial rug out from under them?
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Lunar Scientists Need You
Have you ever daydreamed of exploring space? Ever found yourself wandering off on an imaginary expedition of discovery across some vast, alien landscape? Of course, the regular guy and gal could never hope to make such a journey in person. That’s really only Hollywood stuff. Right? Wrong. In fact, you now have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts and be the next human to look across the moonscape and discover some of its many secrets as part of a serious and ongoing scientific program.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched on June 18, 2009, and since it arrived in orbit around the moon has been taking the highest resolution images of its surface in existence. Data is coming in from the spacecraft at such a phenomenal rate that scientists have difficulty sifting through it all, so they’ve asked for the help of folks just like you to help them identify high-value targets for further scientific study. And for this citizen science project they’ve set up a website where you can go to take part. After viewing videos and other help that will show you how to recognize features, you’ll peruse through images of the moon’s surface few others — if any — have seen, even among planetary scientists. In the process of becoming a lunar researcher, you will learn more about the surface or our nearest neighbor in space than you ever have before and perhaps discover something as yet unknown. It’s a voyage of discovery seldom available to those outside astrophysics.
Go to MoonZoo.org and register. From there, you’ll have tools at your disposal that allow you to mark interesting features like the more recent craters that have excavated light-colored material in an ejecta blanket all around the impact site. They call these fresh white craters, and the science team will count the number that you identify so they can calculate the current impact rate. The information you provide with help them to assess the risk to earth of asteroid strikes.
Fresh white craters are the youngest of the impacts, spreading their ejecta blankets hundreds of kilometers in some cases. Image courtesy NASA.
You may also discover elongated pits. These are areas where a subsurface lava tube has collapsed in on itself. Another, similar feature called a “skylight” has been discovered recently in which only a section of a lava tube’s ceiling has collapsed to reveal a cavernous expanse within. These features have scientists and lunar base planners alike excited. Such areas could serve humans as a natural shelter from the radiation environment. They may also be sources of water, trapping it in frozen form in their permanently dark recesses. In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), more popularly known as the concept of “living off the land,” is an important strategy for maintaining a permanent human presence on the moon. If we can obtain shelter from natural features and extract from them some of the resources and consumables we need, the cost of the venture is dramatically reduced. I becomes obtainable within our lifetimes. It becomes attainable by you!
Elongated pits are areas where subsurface lava tubes have collapsed. Image courtesy NASA.
Spacefaring nations have been launching probes and landers to the surface of the moon for decades. You may also run across the technology they left behind. When you find these pieces of space mission hardware, the positions that you mark will be used to build up a database that can be made available to the worldwide science community and used as positional landmarks for lunar cartographic mapping.
Apollo 17 Landing Site. Note the dark tracks of the lunar rover extending left and right. Image courtesy NASA
These and other features — many of which could only be described as just plain weird — are yours to discover. You’ll have a great deal of fun and adventure, and you can share what you find through the built-in Moon Zoo blog. And perhaps you’ll discover something that no one else has ever seen. If you have the heart of an explorer, this site is definitely for you.
Moon Zoo belongs to a larger community of citizen science projects called the Zooniverse. There you’ll also find Galaxy Zoo Hubble where you can help astronomers figure out how galaxies form and evolve by classifying their shape using Hubble images. There’s Solar Stormwatch where you can help spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Then there’s Galaxy Zoo Mergers and Galaxy Zoo Supernovae. But if you’re interested in helping build a knowledge base of our moon, and in so doing help usher in the age of lunar settlement, Moon Zoo is your best bet.
So log on and plug in to a universe of discovery. You can make a difference, and you’ll satisfy that innate urge to explore that we all have. And maybe, just maybe, the day when you can board a rocket bound for a moon base to see the sights in person will get even closer.
The Undiscovered Country
What we know today of the moon’s fundamental nature is light years ahead of what it was only a year ago, thanks to a spacecraft named LCROSS, or Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite. It’s mission was to look for evidence of water by slamming a large mass into a permanently shadowed crater at the lunar south pole then directly sample the impact plume by flying through it. A painstakingly meticulous post-impact examination of the telemetry revealed that they had indeed found what they were looking for. Over night, the cries of “bombing the moon” and “mission failure” were replaced with the infinitely more rational realization that we were witnessing one of those moments in history when knowledge takes a huge leap forward. Scientists, engineers and just plain enthusiasts of the moon immediately recognized the discovery as a “game changer,” because in one fell swoop, it meant that the cost of establishing and maintaining a human presence there, be it an outpost or a colony, was profoundly reduced.
NASA’s Project Constellation to permanently return humans to the moon would seem to have gotten a shot in the arm from the revelation that it would no longer need to transport tens of tons of water from earth at enormous cost in fuel. Water for drinking, mixing with lunar-derived concrete with which to build shelters, deriving oxygen for breathing and a myriad other necessities for the wet substance can now be extracted on site. But before the ink is even dry on the scientific papers that proclaim this most fantastic of discoveries, the political powers that be, in their most boundless wisdom, propose to scrap the entire program.
The debate over the fate of the moon program is still building, and it remains to be seen where it all leads. A defiant Congress intent on saving Constellation has dug in its heels, only last week demanding that NASA produce all documents used in reaching its decision to end the program. But whether the politicians succumb to the Not Invented Here syndrome (remember, Constellation was the Vision of another president), the fact that we now know the moon to be immanently obtainable as a destination and a new source of natural resources, wealth and prosperity remains.
So where do we go from here? As I see it, there are two courses for returning to the moon possible within the current environment.
Course 1: Constellation is saved, but is redefined and reworked. The expensive Ares rocket for transporting civil service and commercial astronauts to low earth orbit is deemed unsustainable and ended in favor of privately-developed rockets. Though it could survive from a purely technical standpoint, it is unlikely Ares could ever reach a flight rate that would make it economically viable. Leave that mission to the private sector, who despite all the hype to the contrary, are quite capable of fulfilling that role and are well on their way to proving their own designs and vehicles for both cargo and human transport.
The Orion capsule for transporting astronauts between earth, the moon and other deep space destinations and for returning them to earth, deserves further scrutiny. The private sector may be able to build and fly it – or a similar, capsule-based design – at far less expense than NASA. But either way, we need a vehicle with its capabilities, and unlike Ares, there is no vehicle currently in the private sector pipeline that can take on the mission of Orion.
Finally, the third – and to my mind most important – vehicle component to Constellation is Altair, which will take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface. This part of the program, if no other, must continue. It is the heart and soul of Constellation. We must have a vehicle capable of transporting crew and cargo to the lunar surface, even if ultimately they become two roles slated for two, different vehicles. The same development program could produce both.
Course 2: Constellation and the billions already spent on it are added to the ash heap of NASA programs started in good faith throughout its history only to be scrapped later by political forces. In this case, it falls to the private sector to completely design and fund the venture.
Investors like Elon Musk of SpaceX, Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace and Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic are pumping tens of millions into private space ventures, but the overall number of investors is still insufficient to take on a program as massive as the settlement of the moon. But history has shown us that competition serves as a powerful mechanism through which this shortfall may be addressed. Take for example airline transportation. In the early part of the 20th century, there was neither enough pilots and airplanes nor was there the operations know-how to profit from transporting passengers, so the Orteig Prize was offered to jump start an industry that was as yet only the stuff of dreams. It was that $25,000 prize that spurred Charles Lindbergh to make his now famous flight from New York to Paris in May of 1927, forever altering the course or aviation history.
Fast forward to the latter part of that century when a visionary named Peter Diamandis realized that the time had come to offer up a prize for jump starting yet another industry that existed only in the minds of a few dreamers. It was called the X Prize, and it offered $10M to the first team to fly into space twice within two weeks and do it without any government money. Again, it was a prize that offered the best hope of encouraging research and development for
By 2003 when the competition was in full swing, it was anybody’s guess which of the 26 competitors would win, but I knew it would be Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites. No, I didn’t have a crystal ball and I’m not clairvoyant. Neither were necessary for picking the winner, because even a cursory assessment of the contenders revealed one very telling fact: that Scaled was the only group building and testing hardware. The remainder fielded nothing more than impressive, computer-generated pictures of concepts but not one, tangible thing on which you could place your hands; just so much vapor ware.
So today when I look to pick the winner of the newest X Prize offering $30M to the first team to place a robot on the moon, drive it 500 meters over the lunar surface and send back pictures, I once again look for who’s building and testing hardware. After all, computer models, no matter how impressive, can’t move a single inch much less fly to the moon and drive over it’s surface.
The Astrobotics team is one of the 21 teams now registered in the competition. Led by Dr. William “Red” Whittaker of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, they bring to bear an impressive knowledge base and practical experience gained from building robots to carry out missions too dangerous for humans on earth. There were Dante I and II deployed to the interior of volcanoes in Alaska and Antarctica as well as Pioneer, which went to the Sarcophagus at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor following the disaster in 1999. This team already has an impressive track record and a man at the helm with a practical, business approach to tackling new challenges.
Now the team is building Red Rover prototype robots designed to take on the harsh environment of the moon, which presents them with a few challenges not faced by the famous Mars rovers, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity.
Rover Currently Under Testing. Courtesy Astrobotics and Carnegie Melon University
To begin with, lunar regolith, or dirt, is quite different from its counterpart on earth, because the geological processes it undergoes are so different. On earth, soil is exposed to constant weathering, which acts something like a tumbler, rounding off the edges of the individual grains. On the moon, however, this process is absent, so the grains resemble tiny shards of glass. And these shards are very abrasive to technology like robots and their inner workings, even more so than Martian regolith. And that’s to say nothing of the deleterious effects on human lungs.
Then there are the extremely cold temperatures to be found on the moon and the long periods over which those temperatures must be endured. Unlike the Earth and Mars, which have days and nights measured in hours, a single lunar night lasts for two earth weeks. During those two weeks, temperatures at the surface drop to minus 173 degrees Celsius (minus 279 degrees fahrenheit). That’s a long, deep freeze. Still worse are the temperatures found within the polar craters. Within the Cabeus crater at the south pole where water was discovered, temperatures plummet to an almost unimaginable minus 370 degrees fahrenheit! We’ve only recently learned that permanently shadowed areas such as Cabeus are the coldest places yet detected in our solar system.
The moon presents challenges, but Astrobotics has faced serious challenges before, and they have very interesting ideas on how to win the Google Lunar X Prize. The plan is to launch their robot late in 2012 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 heavy lifter. Red Rover will land on the lunar surface attached to its Artemis lander, and once there, they’ll set about meeting the objectives of the competition, which are to drive roughly about three tenths of a mile or roughly twice the distance Wilbur Wright flew he and his brother’s airplane during their first powered flights in December 1903. They’ll also send back video, but instead of grainy images likes those sent back to earth by Apollo 11, we’ll be seeing the surface of the moon in high-resolution 3-D!
Their expedition to capture the Google Lunar X Prize will not be a flash in the pan. Already they are drawing up plans for follow-on missions where the intent is to go after what I would call “targets of opportunity.” The opportunity was provided by yet another recent and unexpected discovery, this one made by the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya launched to the moon in 2007. By the end of 2009, it was discovered that images it had taken over the Marius Hills region on the earth-facing side revealed a curious feature, the existence of which lunar scientist have long suspected but until now had not been directly imaged.
The feature is called a “skylight.” Billions of years ago when vulcanism was active on the moon, lava flowed through tubes, some of which ran near the surface. Today, with that activity long dead, and where the roof of such a tube has collapsed, it forms an opening called a skylight. The Marius Hills Hole, as it has come to be called, presents a gaping maw of some 60 meters (197 feet) – big enough to swallow several houses. And within its recesses may lie still more water trapped by the same process that caused it to collect in the polar craters. We’ve known that there are places of permanent shadow in craters at the poles. There, where the light of day can never reach, temperatures plummet to roughly minus 370 degrees fahrenheit. In such frigid conditions, water becomes trapped. It stands to reason that within the darkness of the Marius Hills Hole, there too we will find water as well as a natural shelter against a harsh space environment.
Marius Hills Hole: 13.92 deg N latitude, 303.21 deg E longitude. Courtesy NASA
The logic is not lost on the Astrobotics team. “Yes, [the] skylight is an Astrobotics destination, and it is an early option, since that has advantages of being equatorial, favorable lat[itude] and lon[gitude] and for comm[unication], passive, and interesting to exploration,” says Dr. Whittaker. He realizes that the, “real payoffs of dwelling in or on a skylight wall will be protection from radiation, meteorite strike and extreme thermal gradients.” And though robots should never supplant humans for explorations, they can and should be our hunting dogs, at our sides every step of the way. These Astrobotics ‘hunters’ already have a well established pedigree, which places them at the head of the pack when it comes to taking on the tough terrain in and around these skylights. Dr. Whittaker points out that they are, “experienced practitioners of robot repelling.” And though the intent of the Google Lunar X Prize is not to take on this kind of exploration, follow-on missions are in the planning stages that will.
Though Red Rover will enjoy a degree of on-board autonomy, the bulk of their operations will make use of supervised teleoperation. From their command center on earth, an operator will direct the movements of the rover, driving it from place to place, or as Dr. Whittaker puts it, “safeguard and waypoint driving with visualization, oversight and intervention (when necessary) by human[s].” This is possible, because the moon is so close. The time it takes for 3-D video provided by onboard vision sensors to be beamed from the robot resting on the surface of the moon to the operator on earth and then for that operator to respond with control inputs that are then beamed back to the robot is short enough to allow real time operation: about 6 seconds for turnaround, not including the operator’s human response time. This was not possible with the Mars rovers. The time it takes for the signal to travel just one way from the red planet is roughly 18 minutes. That means that if either Spirit or Opportunity were to have approached a hazard, it would require – at a minimum – 36 minutes for that hazard to be conveyed to an earth-based operator and then commands to arrive back in time to save the rover; a design concept that would have presented far too much risk. In their case, what was required was a design that incorporated a great deal of autonomy and at a vast increase in expense over a moon rover needing only modest onboard autonomy.
But for any of this to work, there must be a reliable power source for running onboard systems, keeping them cool when exposed to sunlight and warm when exposed to darkness. And for this, there are two options. The first is called a radioisotope thermal generator, or RTG. This device has been used very successfully for decades on deep space missions where there is too little sunlight for generating electricity from solar cells. This ingenious design works, because of something called the thermoelectric effect. When two, dissimilar metal plates are brought very close together and a large temperature difference is applied between them, something very curious begins to happen. Electricity flows from one plate to the other. It’s very easy to chill one plate, because space itself is very cold. But what about the hot side? That’s where the “radioisotope” part of “RTG” comes in. A small pellet of plutonium provides all the heat necessary and is, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited supply. Spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 launched back in the 1970‘s and that have now left our solar system for interstellar space, are still provided with plenty of power by their RTGs even after three and a half decades of sustained space flight. Sadly, however, there is so much of a stigma attached to the “P” word that most missions opt not to use it unless there is no alternative. RTGs have been blown up, dropped from great heights, and suffered every conceivable type of destructive testing and in each case, passed. Still, the stigma remains, which brings us to option number two: solar cells.
The moon basks in the same, plentiful sunlight that we enjoy here on earth. But remember there are its two-week nights. And if you’re still trying to wrap your brain around that one, picture the moon as it orbits earth. It takes 28 days to complete just one of those rotations and with one side always facing the earth. It spends half that journey in darkness.
Having chosen solar cells as their power source, Astrobotics faces engineering challenges that must be overcome to use them. For the Google Lunar X Prize, it will not be necessary to survive longer than the short time it takes to complete their objectives. But successors will need to survive for extended periods. Those surface robots must bear freezing temperatures never faced by any of their predecessors and continue to function and make discoveries. And true to form, Dr. Whittaker and his team have come up with an answer: night hibernation.
“We’ve demonstrated recovery of key components like battery, computing, memory and some sensors. Our motor controllers are likely to succeed [and] our next step is to combine these into a system mockup, then to recover and operate that after sequential cryo-freezing.” The robot will land near the dawn, making use of as much of the 14 days of light as possible, and when nights comes, it will role to a stop and hunker down. Already the team has made progress with cold tolerance. Their Scarab Drillbot concept is designed for ice exploration.
One other area in which robotic precursor missions to the moon will need to concentrate is something called In-Situ Resource Utilization. The more familiar term is “living off the land.” Every pound of material brought up from earth costs money in fuel spent to transport it there, so the more material that can be extracted from the surrounding lunar environment, the less it will cost for us to live there. Here again, the Astrobotics team has been thinking ahead, stating that, “ISRU is strategic for Astrobotic and CMU.” Perhaps they could begin with something like making a single ice cube from water extracted from the Marius Hills Hole. It sounds so simple, but it will represent a monumental achievement.
In his recent novel titled Platinum Moon, Bill White shows us a world where NASA has abandoned the moon and it’s left to private enterprise to return mankind to its surface to stay. The plot sounds eerily like what we’re seeing play out in the headlines today. But whether we go back to the moon under a national flag, flying the colors of commercial logos or a bit of both, it will happen. It must happen. Without the hardship and difficulties, the failures and the triumphs of new frontiers to conquer, a society falls into stagnation. Such will be our fate if we fail to express our innate need to explore and to embrace the undiscovered country – the eighth continent, if you will – that hangs right above our heads.
New Space Policy Cedes Moon To China, Space Station To Russia, And Liberty To The Ages
by Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut
The Administration finally has announced its formal retreat on American Space Policy after a year of morale destroying clouds of uncertainty. The lengthy delay, the abandonment of human exploration, and the wimpy, un-American thrust of the proposed budget indicates that the Administration does not understand, or want to acknowledge, the essential role space plays in the future of the United States and liberty. This continuation of other apologies and retreats in the global arena would cede the Moon to China, the American Space Station to Russia, and assign liberty to the ages.
The repeated hypocrisy of this President continues to astound. His campaign promises endorsed what he now proposes to cancel. His July celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the first Moon landing now turns out to be just a photo op with the Apollo 11 crew. With one wave of a budget wand, the Congress, the NASA family, and the American people are asked to throw their sacrifices and achievements in space on the ash heap of history.
Expenditures of taxpayer provided funds on space related activities find constitutional justification in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, that gives Congress broad power to ”promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts.” In addition, the Article I power and obligation to “provide for the Common Defence” relates directly to the geopolitical importance of space exploration at this frontier of human endeavor. A space program not only builds wealth, economic vitality, and educational momentum through technology and discovery, but it also sets the modern geopolitical tone for the United States to engage friends and adversaries in the world. For example, in the 1980s, the dangerous leadership of the former Soviet Union believed America would be successful in creating a missile defense system because we succeeded in landing on the Moon and they had not. Dominance in space was one of the major factors leading to the end of the Cold War.
With a new Cold War looming before us, involving the global ambitions and geopolitical challenge of the national socialist regime in China, President George W. Bush put America back on a course to maintain space dominance. What became the Constellation Program comprised his January 14, 2004 vision of returning Americans and their partners to deep space by putting astronauts back on the Moon, going on to Mars, and ultimately venturing beyond. Unfortunately, like all Administrations since Eisenhower and Kennedy, the Bush Administration lost perspective about space. Inadequate budget proposals and lack of Congressional leadership and funding during Constellation’s formative years undercut Administrator Michael Griffin’s effort to implement the Program after 2004. Delays due to this under-funding have rippled through national space capabilities until we must retire the Space Shuttle without replacement access to space. Now, we must pay at least $50 million per seat for the Russians to ferry Americans and others to the International Space Station. How the mighty have fallen.
Not only did Constellation never receive the Administration’s promised funding, but the Bush Administration and Congress required NASA 1) to continue the construction of the International Space Station (badly under-budgeted by former NASA Administrator O’Keefe, the OMB, and ultimately by the Congress), 2) to accommodate numerous major over-runs in the science programs (largely protected from major revision or cancellation by narrow Congressional interests), 3) to manage the Agency without hire and fire authority (particularly devastating to the essential hiring of young engineers), and 4) to assimilate, through added delays, the redirection and inflation-related costs of several Continuing Resolutions. Instead of fixing this situation, the current Administration let go Administrator Griffin, the best engineering Administrator in NASA’s history, and now has cancelled Constellation. As a consequence, long-term access of American astronauts to space rests on the untested success of a plan for the “commercial” space launch sector to meet the increasingly risk adverse demands of space flight.
Histories of nations tell us that an aggressive program to return Americans permanently to deep space must form an essential component of national policy. Americans would find it unacceptable, as well as devastating to liberty, if we abandon leadership in space to the Chinese, Europe, or any other nation or group of nations. Potentially equally devastating to billions of people would be loss of freedom’s access to the energy resources of the Moon as fossil fuels diminish and populations and demand increase.
In that harsh light of history, it is frightening to contemplate the long-term, totally adverse consequences to the standing of the United States in modern civilization if the current Administration’s decision to abandon deep space holds. Even a commitment to maintain the International Space Station using commercial launch assets constitutes a dead-end for Americans in space. At some point, now set at the end of this decade, the $150 billion Station becomes a dead-end and would be abandoned to the Russians or just destroyed, ending America’s human space activities entirely.
What, then, should be the focus of national space policy in order to maintain leadership in deep space? Some propose that we concentrate only on Mars. Without the experience of returning to the Moon, however, we will not have the engineering, operational, or physiological insight for many decades to either fly to Mars or land there. Others suggest going to an asteroid. As important as diversion of an asteroid from collision with the Earth someday may be, just going there hardly stimulates “Science and the useful Arts” anything like a permanent American settlement on the Moon! Other means exist, robots and meteorites, for example, to obtain most or all of the scientific value from a human mission to an asteroid. In any event, returning to the Moon inherently creates capabilities for reaching asteroids to study or divert them, as the case may be.
Returning to the Moon and to deep space constitutes the right and continuing space policy choice for the Congress of the United States. It compares in significance to Jefferson’s dispatch of Lewis and Clark to explore the Louisiana Purchase. The lasting significance to American growth and survival of Jefferson’s decision cannot be questioned. Human exploration of space embodies the same basic instincts as the exploration of the West – the exercise of freedom, betterment of one’s conditions, and curiosity about nature. Such instincts lie at the very core of America’s unique and special society of immigrants.
Over the last 150,000 years or more, human exploration of Earth has yielded new homes, livelihoods, know how, and resources as well as improved standards of living and increased family security. Government has directly and indirectly played a role in encouraging exploration efforts. Private groups and individuals take additional initiatives to explore newly discovered or newly accessible lands and seas. Based on their specific historical experience, Americans can expect benefits comparable to those sought and won in the past also will flow from their return to the Moon, future exploration of Mars, and the long reach beyond. To realize such benefits, however, Americans must continue as the leader of human activities in space. No one else will hand them to us. Other than buying our national debt, China does not believe in welfare for the U.S.
With a permanent resumption of the exploration of deep space, one thing is certain: our efforts will be as significant as those of our ancestors as they migrated out of Africa and into a global habitat. Further, a permanent human presence away from Earth provides another opportunity for the expansion of free institutions, with all their attendant rewards, as humans face new situations and new individual and societal challenges.
Returning to the Moon first and as soon as possible meets the requirements for an American space policy that maintains deep space leadership, as well as providing major new scientific returns. Properly conceived and implemented, returning to the Moon prepares the way to go to and land on Mars. This also can provide a policy in which freedom-loving peoples throughout the world can participate as active partners.
The Congressionally approved Constellation Program, properly funded, contains most of the technical elements necessary to implement a policy of deep space leadership, particularly because it includes development of a heavy lift launch vehicle, the Ares V. In addition, Constellation includes a large upper stage for transfer to the Moon and other destinations, two well conceived spacecraft for transport and landing of crews on the lunar surface, strong concepts for exploration and lunar surface systems, and enthusiastic engineers and managers to make it happen if adequately supported. The one major missing component of a coherent and sustaining deep space systems architecture may be a well-developed concept for in-space refueling of spacecraft and upper rockets stages. The experience base for developing in-space refueling capabilities clearly exists.
Again, if we abandon leadership in deep space to any other nation or group of nations, particularly a non-democratic regime, the ability for the United States and its allies to protect themselves and liberty will be at great risk and potentially impossible. To others would accrue the benefits – psychological, political, economic, and scientific – that the United States harvested as a consequence of Apollo’s success 40 years ago. This lesson has not been lost on our ideological and economic competitors.
American leadership absent from space? Is this the future we wish for our progeny? I think not. Again, the 2010 elections offer the way to get back on the right track.
A New Decade and Infinite Possibilities
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The outset of the last decade was met by a mixed sense of hope and dread. Some of us were convinced that the world as we knew it, our transportation, our communication, our energy, the bulk of our infrastructure then (as it is now) controlled by computers, would fall victim to the ever-publicized Y2K bug and come crashing down around our ears. The Dot-Com bubble was at its peak as venture capital continued to pour into and feed an explosion of commercial growth in the Internet. That bubble would burst by March, however, with an estimated loss of $5 Trillion in market value. Still, things stabilized after a time of adjustments.
Before the close of 2000, the Human Genome Project produces the first available assembly of the genome, promising quantum leaps in medicine; Expedition 1 moves in as the first resident crew of the International Space Station, a US-lead, international effort in new space-based research and promising advances in medical and materials technology and serving as a beach head for all other points in the solar system; And as California suffers the first of two years of rolling blackouts and the notorious ILOVEYOU computer worm tears its way through millions of computers worldwide, NASA prepares for another series of Mars launches including Mars Odyssey, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Phoenix Mars Lander. Clearly, the emphasis at this point is Mars. Among the policy makers at the agency, it’s taken for granted that our nearest neighbor in space, the moon, is nothing more than a celestial backwater, a dead end not worthy of any serious consideration or funding for human exploration, and lunar robotic space flight is all but completely stymied by a mars-centric culture. In the decade of the aughts, missions to the moon flown by non-US entities outnumber NASA’s by 2 to 1. Within NASA, missions to Mars outnumber those to the moon by 3 to 1. During that entire ten-year period, NASA sent only 2 spacecraft – arguably but a single mission since they flew literally on the same rocket and shared many objectives.
But oh what a difference a single decade makes. The day we entered Y2K America’s only space transportation system was a space shuttle that had proven itself far less capable and safe than the capsule-based system it replaced, leaving humans stranded in the purgatory of low earth orbit; the idea of commercial human spaceflight – the vehicle through which we would finally realize the painfully elusive goal of affordable access to orbit – was barely a dream; and we still operated under the delusive notion that water – critical for making any manned, off-earth venture affordable – found in the lunar rock samples gathered by Apollo astronauts was mere contamination from earth. On that day the machines, infrastructure and vision for establishing a permanent human presence on another world were no nearer our grasp than they were at the outset of the space age four decades earlier. The wheels of progress in space had gotten hopelessly bogged down. But today? Today is a very different day.
We enter this new decade vastly better equipped than the last. The dust of ignorance has been wiped from our eyes, and we can clearly see a fact that, in one fell swoop, brings within our reach the permanent human settlement in space that once evaded us: the moon is not the barren wasteland it was once believed to be. We can indeed live off the land, as it were, because we now know it to harbor the raw materials we need. The lunar surface contains ample amounts of water for drinking and for conversion into air for breathing. This singular and very recent discovery was a game-changing event! It meant that the round-trip travel time between earth and our first outpost could be placed at 6 days rather than the year it would be for Mars; a fact that, in turn, enabled the commercial sector to participate. And it is the commercial sector that is key to sustaining human space flight, because it reduces the cost so dramatically.
Space travel is no longer the one-dimensional construct it was. The emergence of commercial human space flight brings with it the financial and technological agility so desperately needed for the advancement of human exploration as a whole. The civil and commercial human space flight sectors work increasingly in concert to achieve, together, our new goals in space.
And with new goals have come a change in the technology we’ll use to carry them out. In an ironic turn of events, the space shuttle is being supplanted by a much-advanced version of its predecessor, the capsule. Even neglecting the glaring deficiencies in safety suffered by the shuttle, it’s a change that had to occur since the shuttle is unable to travel to the moon or any place else in the solar system. It was never designed for such a flight.
Both NASA and the private sector now have their own designs for a capsule. And despite what you may have read, they are not mutually exclusive nor will they compete with one another. Each has a distinct and important mission.
NASA is building the Orion and Altair spacecraft. Similar in concept to the Apollo Command Module but with greatly advanced systems and double the crew capacity, Orion is designed as an interplanetary transport. It will carry astronauts from earth orbit to the moon and beyond. Once it reaches its destination, the crew will transfer to and descend to the lunar surface via Altair, itself conceptually similar to the Apollo Lunar Module but also with pronounced advancements over its predecessor. Together these vehicles comprise the next-generation deep space exploration system. Their point of departure is earth orbit, but how do they get from the surface to orbit? That’s where the commercial sector comes in.
A company based in Hawthorne, California named SpaceX is taking up the task of producing the vehicle that can carry both cargo and crew to orbit. Its Founder and CEO Elon Musk, who also co-founded Paypal, has long carried a deep passion for human space flight and realized the importance of reducing its cost. Using his own money, he began developing the Falcon series of rockets as well as a companion spacecraft called Dragon. After several successful flights of the smaller Falcon 1 rocket, SpaceX is now preparing for the maiden launch of its Falcon 9, which will go on to regularly deliver cargo to the International Space Station and has the ability to carry crew as well when NASA gives its approval to begin development of the additional systems for Dragon necessary to support humans, such as the crew escape system.
Here for the first time we see civil and commercial space working together, providing different but complimentary systems that support the overarching goal of putting people on another world. The private sector provides transport to earth orbit and the logistical support surrounding that leg, and the civil sector provides the advanced systems needed for crew transport to the final planetary destination. It’s a beautiful symmetry.
So now that we’ve turned our sights to the moon, now what? Exactly what regions of the moon are we to explore first? And what will be the basic needs to be met for such an outpost?
Recent discoveries have uncovered water in prodigious amounts both in and around the Cabeus crater at the lunar south pole. Extraction of that water from within the interior of Cabeus and surrounding craters presents technological challenges we’ve not yet faced. First is the simple matter of descending into a crater. It’s never been done, so it will be necessary to develop new — or modify currently-existing, earth-based — technology to perform that task. Second is the extremely cold temperatures to be found inside the craters. At approximately -370 degrees fahrenheit (-223 degrees Celsius), they are the coldest regions we have yet to encounter in the solar system. Fortunately, however, we can get our feet wet (pun intended) on the simpler task of extracting water from the much more accessible and warmer areas near the crater rims.
But there may be an alternative — or additional, depending on how you look at it — source of lunar water. Less than three months ago, the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft took the first picture of what’s been termed a “skylight.” Having long been suspected by lunar scientists as a fairly common structure on the moon, a skylight is an opening to a lava tube. Vulcanism on the moon died out billions of years ago, so these tubes have spent the intervening eons vacant and hollow. In places, their roofs have collapsed, exposing the interior, and it may be possible that the same mechanism that deposits water into the cold traps within craters in the lunar polar regions has also left water here. Possible advantages provided by skylights are that they can be found at much lower latitudes, lending to better line-of-sight communications with earth, and that they could serve as natural shelters against solar storms, which can deliver intense doses of radiation.
As important as water and oxygen to the outpost will be power. Given that a single lunar night lasts for two weeks, solar cells are clearly not a viable source of energy; therefore, nuclear power is a must. Already NASA is working on the development of such a system, along with new building construction techniques, lunar surface vehicles for transporting astronauts between them, and many other technologies that will be necessary for sustaining a lunar outpost leading to a settlement. And here again, the commercial sector will be capable of providing logistical support, thereby reducing cost in much the same way it does with arctic bases on earth. As that commercial presence in space increases, so does the demand for jobs. Speaking in relative terms, we’re headed for a population explosion in space, made possible by a hand full of dreamers, of bold entrepreneurs willing to put their hard-earned fortunes at risk to realize the dream of a multi-world civilization all of us have imagined for so many decades.
As with previous decades, we enter this one with the same mixture of hope and dread. We’ll have our times of difficulties and adjustments, but we also have one thing that previous times failed to produce: a real shot at the final frontier — not just for an elite few, but for the common man. Recent discoveries, unparalleled relationships forming between public and private sectors and a change of destinations would all seem to signal the next chapter in history. We’ve opened a new decade, plotted a new course, and the possibilities are infinite.
The Quest To Find Water On The Moon
Filed under: Civil Space Flight, Commercial Space Flight
On July 31, 1999 the NASA-built Lunar Prospector spacecraft crashed into a crater near the south pole of the moon.
Just over 7 years later on September 3, 2006 the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 crashed into Lacus Excellentiae (Latin for Lake of Excellence) in the moon’s southern region.
On November 14, 2008 an Indian-built spacecraft called Chandraayan 1 dropped a piece of itself, which impacted near Shackleton crater (named after Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, noted Antarctic explorer of the early 20th century) at the lunar south pole.
This past June 10th, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) crashed its Selene spacecraft (nicknamed Kaguya) into the moon.
Are you beginning to detect a rather disturbing trend, here?
And last week, two more NASA probes, the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), were dispatched to the moon, also to be crashed into it… intentionally!
Either the world’s space scientists have a really warped sense of humor, or there’s a sane, rational reason for all these perfectly good, multi-million-dollar space probes being slammed into the lunar surface. And as it turns out, there is a good reason after all.
President Bush united the country (arguably, setting the tone for the rest of the world) under a single, unified goal in space for the first time since the 1960’s: the Vision for Space Exploration. Under VSE we’ll first return to the moon then go on to Mars — with all due respect to some of my colleagues who would prefer it in the reverse order. Though I hold them in very high regard, even share their love of Mars and the idea of establishing a colony there, the moon is a far better choice at this point in time. Over and above the more publicized reasons for going back to the moon such as for natural resources and using it as a staging area for Mars flights, missions to our nearest neighbor in space will more readily and rapidly aid in establishing space commerce, which I deeply believe is the more exigent.
Our first colony on another world will be a feat of engineering and logistics, rivaling the great westward push through the US of the 1800’s, and not only for the courage that will be required of the people who make the journey but the extreme economic hurtles that must be made. In the old west, settlers took the tools they needed to work the land, a few livestock if they were fortunate and not much else. They lived off the land, bodies of water and the wildlife they discovered. Space settlers, on the other hand, must take everything, even the air they breathe, and the cost of transporting every extra pound of cargo adds up quickly in added fuel spent. For this reason, such a settlement must be self-sustaining to the greatest extent possible. But the moon is a harsh homestead, providing only for the more industrious individual. If we could find water there, we would in one fell swoop solve some of the more daunting problems of space habitation.
Not only does water provide for drinking, bathing, cooking and cleaning, but it is an ideal solvent, a catalyst for building materials like concrete, and when you apply to that good ole H2O the process of electrolysis, can be split into its basic components: hydrogen and — yes, you guessed it — oxygen for breathing.
And so it is that we’ve embarked on a quest to find water on the moon. But wait. What does that have to do with crashing spacecraft?
There are two choices available to us for finding that clear, and so far painfully elusive, substance. Either we send people en masse to hack away at the surface with an assortment of machines dedicated to the task or we try an intelligent and far more cost-effective approach. It turns out that when you slam an object into the moon at the kinds of speeds one must achieve for space flight, the resultant release of energy is quite impressive; more than enough to kick up a very sizable plume of material from the impact site. And if you have an instrument capable of detecting water (ice or vapor) in that plume… vuala! You have your detection method. In the past, instruments have been trained on such a plume from a distance, a method called remote sensing. But LCROSS launched last week will be employing another, ingenious technique. It’s called an in situ (Latin for “in the place”) measurement. Here’s how it will work.
Two spacecraft, a rocket called a Centaur and a “shepherding spacecraft”, fly connected to the moon. Actually, the LRO spacecraft is also connected, but it will not meet the same fate. The Centaur is aimed at the moon (and we’ll get to how we pick the impact site in a minute), guided by the shepherding spacecraft. Before impact, the two separate. The Centaur traveling at 5600 miles per hour reaches the impact site first, selected for this task because of its high mass, weighing in at approximately 34,000 pounds — heavier than a bus. On impact, it excavates material from the resulting 100-foot-diameter crater and ejects it 30 miles up! Meanwhile, the shepherd, descending along the same path, is flying through the plume, continuously taking measurements and sending them back to earth until its own demise. If there is any water in any form on that spot, it will be detected.
OK, so you have your method for detection. Though it’s true the moon is much smaller than the earth, it’s still a prodigious expanse and wilderness. How do you narrow your search area? One fact that helps with this task is that the moon has no atmosphere.
On earth, our atmosphere protects us from the sun’s immense heat. It acts as a filter, allowing no more energy to reach the service than we need. Were it not for this filter, the sun would boil off our oceans. Back on the moon, this is precisely what happens to any water ice exposed to the sun’s rays. With no atmosphere there to reduce solar radiation, the ice heats up and boils away into space.
Knowing this, you might be tempted to throw in the towel, thinking that the whole of the moon is exposed to the sun and therefore couldn’t possibly contain any water ice. Luckily, there are some regions that lie in permanent shadow. At no point throughout the lunar year does the sun penetrate. Where might these places be, you ask? Well, I imagine you’ve already gleaned part of the answer from the fact that all the probes mentioned at the top of this article were being crashed into the moon’s southern regions.
It is estimated that both the north and south polar regions contain craters that lie in permanent shadow, so it is there where we will target impacting missions. Finding water on the moon will be like discovering a lush oasis in the middle of the desert. That one resource could sustain a permanent lunar colony from which commerce could grow, bringing about a new and prosperous economy. A bit much to expect, you say? Perhaps, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion it may not take that long to find out.
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