Why Get Dorsum to the Moon?
01.14.08
"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan
President Bush's 2004 proposal to return to the Moon, this time "to stay" with a lunar outpost, has stimulated vigorous debate. A Los Angeles Times editorial (Dec.10, 2006), for example, argued forcefully that robots can practice anything necessary on the Moon, and that human participation is not actually needed. Given the stunning performance of American robots on Mars, this point of view is worth serious give-and-take. Why should we send humans dorsum to the Moon? After all, nosotros've already washed it, six times, in the 20th century.
Image right: This is an artist's concept of a small lunar outpost. Someday, larger lunar outposts may serve as a backup for civilisation in instance of a global catastrophe, similar an asteroid impact or a pandemic. Credit: NASA Print-resolution copy
Taking the Los Angeles Times championship, "Don't colonize the Moon," at face value, I will first betoken out that the Vision for Space Exploration proposes an "outpost" on the Moon. This is inappreciably colonization in the sense that Europeans colonized North America. Current NASA plans are in a preliminary phase, but envisage something comparable to Niggling America, or the Amundsen-Scott South Pole base. These terrestrial examples – operated by humans, incidentally – have proven their scientific value over and over, helping to produce valuable evidence nearly the ozone pigsty and global warming.
The Times editorial echoes identical arguments advanced in the early on 1960s, that robotic missions could produce as much as manned ones. The The states did in fact have a large robotic lunar program, including 3 Rangers, 5 Surveyors, 5 Lunar Orbiters, and ii Radio Astronomy Explorers, non counting the few unsuccessful missions. So NASA did utilize robots in our offset lunar program. Merely every bit argued at the time, homo abilities on the surface later proved far superior to robotic ones.
Neil Armstrong and his colleagues demonstrated that humans on the spot provide instant interpretation of their environment, guided past color, 3D, loftier resolution human being vision that is just now being approached past robotic systems. Even encumbered past space suits, they could instantly recognize and collect invaluable samples such every bit the "Genesis Rock" of Apollo 15, an anorthosite that has proven essential to understanding the geologic history of the Moon. When the Apollo 17 rover lost a fender – which might take terminated a robotic rover's mission – astronauts Cernan and Schmitt managed a field repair and kept driving. All the Apollo astronauts emplaced complex geophysical instrument stations, most operating for years until upkeep cuts forced them to be turned off.
The Soviet Union carried out several brilliant robotic surface missions, starting with the very start soft landing, Luna 9. The USSR operated two robotic rovers on the Moon for months, and carried out three robotic sample return missions, both accomplishments never matched past the US or any other state. All the same no i would seriously argue that these missions produced annihilation shut to the results of, for example, the Apollo fifteen mission. The Apollo 15 astronauts Scott and Irwin returned tens of pounds of rock and soil (including the "Genesis Rock"), drove their rover miles along the front end of the lunar Apennines, drilled holes for and emplaced probes for heat menstruation measurements, and took hundreds of loftier-resolution photos of their surround.
Returning to the 21st century: Given these fantabulous accomplishments by astronauts on the Moon, why carp to go back? Should we non "declare victory" and stay on (or near) Earth? Hither are some reasons go back, although not necessarily to "colonize" the Moon.
First, and most fundamental: the last few decades of space exploration and astronomy have shown that the universe is tearing and dangerous, at least with respect to human life. To give a pertinent case: in 1908 an object of unknown nature – probably a comet – hit Siberia with a forcefulness equivalent to a hydrogen bomb. Had this impact happened a few hours later, assuasive for the Earth's rotation, this object would have destroyed Saint petersburg and probably much else. Going dorsum some 65 million years, it is now essentially proven that an fifty-fifty greater touch wiped out non only the dinosaurs just most species living on Earth at the fourth dimension. The importance of catastrophic impacts has simply been demonstrated in recent decades, and space exploration has played a primal role.
The bleak conclusion to which these facts point is that humanity is vulnerable as long as we are confined to one planet. Plain, we must increment our efforts to preserve this planet and its biosphere, an attempt in which NASA satellites have played a vital office for many years. But uncontrollable external events may destroy our civilization, mayhap our species. We tin can increase our chances of long-term survival by dispersal to other sites in the solar system.
Where can nosotros go? At the moment, human being life exists only on the Earth. Merely with modern technology, there are several other possibilities, starting with the Moon itself. Men have lived on the Moon for every bit long as 3 days, admittedly in cramped quarters, but they establish the lunar surface easy to deal with and the Moon's gravity comfortable and helpful. (Dropped tools, for case, didn't float away into infinite as they practise occasionally in Earth orbit.) To be sure, it would be an enormous and probably incommunicable task to transform the Moon into some other Earth. All the same, it is articulate that a lunar outpost comparable to, for instance, the Little America of the 1930s, is quite feasible.
But what could such an outpost attain? Commencement, it could continue the exploration of the Moon, whose surface area is roughly that of North and South America combined. Six "landings" in North America would have given us only a superficial cognition of this continent, and essentially none about its natural resource such every bit minerals, oil, water power, and soil. The Moon is a whole planet, then to speak, whose value is just starting time to be appreciated.
The Moon is not only an interesting object of written report, just a valuable base for written report of the unabridged Universe, by providing a site for astronomy at all wavelengths from gamma rays to extremely long radio waves. This statement would take been unquestioned xxx years ago. But the succeeding decades of spectacular discoveries by space-based instruments, such every bit the Hubble Space Telescope, have led many astronomers such as Nobel Laureate John Mather to fence that the Moon can be by-passed, and that instruments in deep space at relatively stable places called Lagrangian points are more effective.
A coming together was held at the Space Telescope Science Plant in Baltimore, in November 2006, on "Astrophysics Enabled by the Return to the Moon." This institute runs the Hubble Space Telescope program. However, the consensus emerging from the Baltimore meeting was that there are yet valuable astronomical uses for instruments on the lunar surface. For instance, depression-frequency radio astronomy tin only be constructive from the far side of the Moon, where static from the Globe'due south aurora is shielded. Some other instance of Moon-based astronomy can be the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), past radio telescopes that on the far side would be shielded from terrestrial interference. Pocket-size telescopes on the Moon's solid surface could be linked to form interferometer arrays with enormous resolving power. Astronomy in a express sense has already been done from the Moon, namely the Apollo xvi Ultraviolet telescope emplaced by Apollo astronauts and before that, the simple Goggle box observations of Earth-based lasers by the Surveyor spacecraft. The much-feared lunar dust had no effect on these pioneering instruments.
The Moon may offer mineral resources, and so to speak, of cracking value on Globe. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, working with the Fusion Technology Institute of the University of Wisconsin, has shown that helium three, an isotope extremely rare on World, exists in quantity in the lunar soil, implanted by the solar wind. If – a very big if – thermonuclear fusion for energy is produced on Earth, helium 3 would exist extremely valuable for fusion reactors considering information technology does non make the reactor radioactive. A more than practicable use of helium 3, being tested at the University of Wisconsin, is the production of short-lived medical isotopes. Such isotopes must now exist manufactured in cyclotrons and rapidly delivered earlier they disuse. Simply Dr. Schmitt suggests that modest helium three reactors could produce such isotopes at the infirmary. In any event, research on the use of helium iii would clearly benefit if large quantities could exist exported to the Earth.
Returning to the almost important reason for a new lunar programme, dispersal of the human being species, the most promising site for such dispersal is obviously Mars, at present known to have an atmosphere and water. Mars itself is obviously a fascinating object for exploration. But it may even now exist marginally habitable for astronaut visits, and in the very long view, might be "terraformed," or engineered to have a more Earth-like atmosphere and climate. This was described in Kim Stanley Robinson'southward trilogy, Red Mars and its successors Greenish and Bluish Mars. A second Earth, so to speak, would profoundly amend our chances of surviving cosmic catastrophes.
Where does the Moon fit into this possibility? Start, it would continue to requite the states feel with curt interplanetary trips, which is what the Apollo missions were. These would demonstrably be relatively short and safe compared to Mars voyages, only would provide invaluable test flights, so to speak. More important, shelters, vehicles, and other equipment built for the Moon could be over-designed, and with modification could exist used on Mars after existence demonstrated at a lunar outpost.
Where could humanity expand to beyond Mars and the Moon? At this point, still early in the history of space exploration, it is impossible to say. The Galilean satellites of Jupiter, in item Ganymede, might be habitable, but we venture here far into the field of scientific discipline fiction. Notwithstanding, an outpost on the Moon is clearly possible, and would provide an invaluable stepping-rock to Mars. A species living on iii planets would be far more likely to have a long history than i living just on the Earth.
To put the arguments for a return to the Moon, and a lunar outpost, in the most general terms: the Moon is essentially a whole planet, i that has so far been barely touched. Simply this new planet is merely a few days travel away and we have already camped on information technology. To turn our backs on the Moon would exist equivalent to European exploration stopping subsequently Columbus's few landings, or China's devastation of its giant ships to concentrate on domestic bug in the 15th century.
Paul D. Lowman Jr.
14 Jan 2008
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