by Michio Kaku
Mahoney and I talked over a meal at the Voyager Restaurant, on the grounds of the spaceport. The Voyager looks like Mel’s Diner, from the TV show Alice. (A lot about lunar exploration reminded me of old television shows, especially Bonanza.) I had a grilled-cheese sandwich—spaceport food. Mahoney said, “There’s the PBS version of space, which is beautiful. And that is real. But, also, space—well, you’ve heard of the military-industrial complex? Space is an offshoot of that.” Something shiny and fleet was taking off in the distance, and the windows shook. Mahoney pointed out a tumbleweed blowing across the lot. “I’m a business guy by background, not a space guy, so I had to learn all of this,” he said. Mahoney believes that, because the space industry was a government-sanctioned monopoly for decades, there was no room for risk, or for competition; the fear of failure dominated. “Lockheed Martin and Boeing could charge exorbitant prices,” he said. “As a businessperson, when you see a fat margin—when you see a service that can be provided much more cheaply—you see value.”
We walked through strong winds to the hangars where Masten does its manufacturing. There were none of the vacuum chambers and clean white rooms that one associates with rocket science. Instead, there were trailer beds loaded with rocket parts for testing; there were purple-and-yellow long-sleeved T-shirts for launch days. There were tanks of helium, wrenches of every size. A young man wearing an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University sweatshirt and a welding mask was making an engine casing.
Mahoney pointed out an engine without its casing, next to a small computer. “Some of these rocket models are literally operated by Raspberry Pi,” he said.
“Raspberry pie?”
“That’s a very basic computer. A thirty-five-dollar computer. My point being, some of our parts we can buy at Home Depot.”
Masten was founded, in 2004, by David Masten, a former software-and-systems engineer, who remains the chief technical officer. “When I was a kid, I was going to be an astronaut,” Masten told me. “But, by the 1980s, space was getting boring—it wasn’t going anywhere—and there was this new thing called computers.” He became an IT consultant, and eventually worked at a series of startups. Throughout, Masten’s hobby remained rockets. “My thought was that, maybe, instead of doing the heavy analysis traditional of the aerospace industry, you do something more like I was used to,” he said. “You write some code, you compile it, you test it, and you iterate over and over in a tight, rapid fashion. I wanted to apply that method to rocketry.”
When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns, seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at that moment, the rocket seems sentient, intentional.
In one demonstration, the Xodiac performed a deceptively mundane task: it carried a “planetvac”—an invention intended to vacuum dust from the lunar surface—up and over one meter, deployed the vacuum, then scooted up and over another meter, hopping like a lunar janitor. The rockets are self-guided, unless overridden by a human; they are doing their own thing. “We believe computers can fly rockets better than people can,” Masten told me.
Many scientists see little need for humans on the moon, since robots would do the work more safely and inexpensively.
* * *
“Now, you will ask me what in the world we went up on the Moon for,” Qfwfq, the narrator of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, says. “We went to collect the milk, with a big spoon and a bucket.” In our world, we are going for water. “Water is the oil of space,” George Sowers, a professor of space resources at the Colorado School of Mines, in Golden, told me. On the windowsill of Sowers’s office is a bumper sticker that reads MY OTHER VEHICLE EXPLORED PLUTO. This is because his other vehicle did explore Pluto. Sowers served as the chief systems engineer of the rocket that, in 2006, launched NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which has flown by Pluto and continued on to Ultima Thule, a snowman-shaped, 19-mile-long rock that is the most distant object a spacecraft has ever reached. “I only got into space resources in the past two years,” he said. His laboratory at the School of Mines designs, among other things, small vehicles that could one day be controlled by artificial intelligence and used to mine lunar water.
Water in space is valuable for drinking, of course, and as a source of oxygen. Sowers told me that it can also be transformed into rocket fuel. “The moon could be a gas station,” he said. That sounded terrible to me, but not to most of the scientists I spoke to. “It could be used to refuel rockets on the way to Mars”—a trip that would take about nine months—“or considerably beyond, at a fraction of the cost of launching them from Earth,” Sowers said. He explained that launching fuel from the moon rather than from Earth is like climbing the Empire State Building rather than Mount Everest. Fuel accounts for around 90 percent of the weight of a rocket, and every kilogram of weight brought from Earth to the moon costs roughly $35,000; if you don’t have to bring fuel from Earth, it becomes much cheaper to send a probe to Jupiter.
Down the hall, in the Center for Space Resources’ laboratory, near buckets of lunar and asteroid simulants, was a small 3-D printer. Four graduate students were assembled there with Angel Abbud-Madrid, the center’s director. I asked them how difficult it would be to 3-D-print, say, an electrolyzer—the machine needed to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water to make rocket fuel. They laughed.
“Here, let me show you something very fancy,” Hunter Williams, who was wearing sapphire-colored earrings, said. He poured some Morton sea salt into a plastic cup and added water. He stuck two silver thumbtacks through the bottom of the plastic cup, then held a battery up to them. Small bubbles began forming on the thumbtacks. The oxygen was separating from the hydrogen. You probably did this experiment in middle school, without knowing that you were doing rocket science. “The idea is for whatever goes up to the moon to be that simple,” Williams said. “To be that basic.”
“It would be like living off the land,” Ben Thrift, another graduate student, added. Thrift studied theater as an undergraduate, and later ran a bakery, before earning a degree in engineering and enrolling in the space-resources program. “I decided to grow up and do something real,” he said.
“By ‘real,’ he means go to the moon,” Abbud-Madrid said.
* * *
“Transportation is not an end in itself,” Sowers told me. He is excited about solar power, which already runs many satellites in space, where there is no night, or clouds. He speculates that, if we had a base on the moon, we could use 3-D printers to make giant solar panels, as large as two kilometers, which could be launched into orbit; the resulting power could be beamed back to Earth via microwave radiation. “Space solar would be an unlimited, inexhaustible source of green energy,” Sowers said. “It requires no magic, and much of the technology is ready. I think we could do it by 2030, if we wanted to.” Another bumper sticker in Sowers’s office reads PHYSICISTS HAVE STRANGE QUARKS.
Other specialists have a different view of the resources available in space. Asteroids contain precious metals, such as platinum, palladium, and gold. A number of asteroid-mining companies have come and gone since 2015, when Neil deGrasse Tyson remarked that “the first trillionaire there’ll ever be is the person who mines asteroids for their natural resources.” But asteroid hunting is like whaling, in the length of its missions and the speculative nature of its success; the moon is only three days away, and its movements are extremely well known to us. NASA recently named ten companies as potential contractors for equipment to gather and analyze soil in space.
One of them was Honeybee Robotics. I visited its exploration-technology division, in Pasadena, which, from the outside, looks as dull as fro-yo, a collection of beige concrete buildings. Insi
de were lunar-rock samplers, the planetvac that was tested on a Masten rocket, some Nerf guns, and WINE (which stands for “World Is Not Enough”), a steam-powered spacecraft designed to find water in lunar dirt (or on asteroids), convert it to energy, then hop to the next site, to pull up samples and more water for fuel.
Kris Zacny, a vice president of Honeybee Robotics, was expecting his third child in the next few days. “So much has to do with where you’re born,” he said, explaining how he came to the field of space mining. Zacny is originally from Poland, the son of a musician father, who wanted him to be a musician as well. “What a disappointment I must have been,” Zacny said. “I spent my time thinking about the moon.” When he was seventeen, his family moved to South Africa. Zacny went to college on a scholarship from De Beers, and worked in the diamond mines while in school. “I graduated top of my class, with a degree in mechanical engineering, and next thing I knew I was twelve thousand feet underground,” he said. He spent two years in a coal mine, and a month in a gold mine that at the time was the deepest mine in the world. “I always dreamed of space, but it wasn’t an option for me,” he said.
In 2000, he landed a one-year position as a research assistant for a professor in Berkeley’s Materials Science and Engineering Department. “I knew it was too late for me to be a space guy, I accepted that. But I had the mining expertise. I said to the professor, ‘Don’t laugh at me, but I’d like to do extraterrestrial mining.’” What can be found on the moon remains for the most part unknown, though there is reasoned speculation. Honeybee is one of a growing number of companies that are developing standardized lunar rovers. Small countries with no national space agency, as well as private entities, could soon have their own robotic resource hunters roving around the moon, with little honeycomb emblems on their sides.
* * *
Buzz Aldrin had hoped, and briefly expected, that it would be he, and not Neil Armstrong, who would take the first human step on the moon. The astronaut Michael Collins, who manned the control module that orbited the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked below, has said of Aldrin that he “resents not being first on the moon more than he appreciates being second.” On the moon, Armstrong took photos of Aldrin posing, but Aldrin took none of Armstrong doing the same. One of the few photos that shows Neil Armstrong on the moon was taken by Armstrong himself—of his reflection in Aldrin’s helmet, as Aldrin salutes the flag. We are petty and misbehave on Earth; we will be petty and misbehave in space.
The guiding laws of space are defined by the Outer Space Treaty, from 1967, which has been signed by 108 countries, including all those with substantial space programs. “Laws that govern outer space are similar to the laws for the high seas,” Alain Berinstain, the vice president of global development at the lunar-exploration company Moon Express, explained. “If you are two hundred miles away from the continental shelf, those waters don’t belong to anybody—they belong to everybody.” Moon Express describes the moon as the eighth continent. The company, which is based in Florida, is hoping to deliver its first lander to the moon in 2020; on board will be telescopes and the Celestis cremains. “If you look down at the waters from your ship and see fish, those fish belong to everybody,” Berinstain continued. “But, if you put a net down and pull those fish onto the deck of the ship, they’re yours. This could change, but right now that is how the U.S. is interpreting the Outer Space Treaty.”
Individual countries have their own interpretations of the treaty, and set up their own regulatory frameworks. Luxembourg promotes itself as “a unique legal, regulatory and business environment” for companies devoted to space resources, and is the first European country to pass legislation similar to that of the U.S., deeming resources collected in space to be ownable by private entities.
It’s not difficult to imagine moon development, like all development, proceeding less than peacefully, and less than equitably. (At least, unlike with colonization on Earth, there are no natives whose land we’re taking, or so we assume.) Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, said, “I’m really glad that all these countries, all these companies, are going to the moon. But there will be problems.” Any country can withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty by giving a year’s notice. “If any country feels it has a sufficient lead in space, that is a motivation to withdraw from the treaty,” he said.
So there is a tacit space race already. On the one hand, every national space agency applauded the success of the Chang’e-4 lander. The mission had science partnerships with Germany, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden. NASA collaborates with many countries in space, sharing data, communications networks, and expertise. Russian rockets bring American astronauts to the International Space Station. When, in response to economic sanctions, the head of the Russian space agency said that maybe the American astronauts could get to the ISS by trampoline, the comment was dismissed as posturing. Still, NASA has contracted with Boeing and SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, to begin taking astronauts to the ISS this year—which means the U.S. will no longer rely on Russia for that. Russia and China say they will work together on a moon base. NASA used to collaborate with the China National Space Administration; in 2011, six months after members of NASA visited the CNSA, Congress passed a bill that effectively prohibited collaboration.
It’s natural to want to leave the moon undisturbed; it’s also clear that humanity will disturb it. But do we need to live there? Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, envisages zoning the moon for heavy industry, and Earth for light industry and residential purposes. Bezos’s company Blue Origin is developing reusable rockets intended to bring humans reliably back and forth from space, with the long-term goal of creating manufacturing plants there, in zero gravity. Earth would be eased of its industrial burden, and the lower-gravity conditions would be beneficial for making certain goods, such as fiber-optic cables.
“There’s the argument that we’ve destroyed the Earth and now we’re going to destroy the moon. But I don’t see it that way,” Metzger said. “The resources in space are billions of times greater than on Earth. Space pretty much erases everything we do. If you crush an asteroid to dust, the solar wind will blow it away. We can’t really mess up the solar system.”
* * *
The most likely origin story for the moon is that it was formed four and a half billion years ago, after a Mars-size planet called Theia crashed into Earth. Theia broke into thousands of pieces, which orbited Earth. Slowly—or quickly, depending on your time scale—the shards coalesced and formed the moon we know today, the one that is drifting away from us, at a rate of four centimeters or so per year. If we had two moons, like Mars does, or sixty-two, like Saturn, we wouldn’t feel the same way about our moon.
Zou Xiaoduan, a scientist who worked on all phases of the Chang’e project, was born in 1983 in Guizhou province, in southwest China—“a very poor place back then,” she told me. As a child, she said, she “was stunned to learn that the moon was not a weird monster following me around.” She remembers hearing her family chatting about the Apollo missions. That men had been on the moon seemed unfathomable to her. She asked every adult to confirm it. She wanted to become an astronaut—a goal she attributes to there not being any Disney movies for her to watch. She began work on China’s lunar program in 2006. “I still recall the first lunar image from Chang’e-1 being shown to me,” she said, of the images sent home in 2007, during China’s first lunar orbital mission. “And the first time Chang’e-2 flew by an asteroid, 4179 Toutatis,” three years later. “No one had ever seen that asteroid.” Zou came to the U.S. in 2015, and now works for the Planetary Science Institute, in Tucson. She is part of a NASA mission studying the asteroid Bennu, which NASA describes as “an ancient relic of the solar system’s early days.” Like everyone else I spoke to who studies the moon, she loves her job. Of her work on the Chang’e missions, she said that every image has been “thrilling, every moment is a ‘wow.’” She continued, “I’m ju
st so excited and super happy that I picked this career.”
The twelve men who walked on the moon, who saw Earth as a distant object—did they lose their illusions? A couple had alcohol problems, one cofounded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and one became an evangelical preacher. One became a one-term Republican senator who has denied that humans are responsible for climate change; another became a painter, of the moon. Neil Armstrong was one of the few who had a mostly steady, unremarkable post-moon-walk life. He moved to a dairy farm and became a professor at the University of Cincinnati. Nearly a decade after his trip to the moon, he wrote a short poem for a syndicated children’s page that ran in many newspapers. The eight-line verse was titled “My Vacation.” It begins with the gentle, familiar cadence of a nursery rhyme, describing his mission as checking on whether the moon was made of green cheese. Though no cheese was found, he specifies, and also no bees and no trees, he does mention the remarkable view of Earth, and concludes of the alien moon:
It’s a nice place to visit, and I’m certain that you
Will enjoy it when you get to go.
BAHAR GHOLIPOUR
The Tumultuous History of a Mysterious Brain Signal That Questioned Free Will
from The Atlantic
The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit.