by John Lasker
The answer to what resource man will be tragically dying for long after current generations are gone, might lie in the current race for the Moon. A race many people aren't aware even started. But at the moment, nearly a dozen nations and corporations are planning to invade our nearest celestial neighbor – either with humans or robots – an invasion that could take twenty years or longer. And if mankind does make it back, we may potentially stay for years to come, and possibly as long as the Earth is around.
Some of these future invaders have already landed research vehicles; such as India, which launched its Chandrayaan (“Moon vehicle”) spacecraft late in 2008. A week after entering the Moon’s orbit, Chandrayaan, as it soared over the South Pole, released its Moon Impact Probe. It plunged into Shackleton Crater, named after the explorer Ernest Shackleton of Antarctic fame. The crater is 2,000 feet across and could someday be the backyard to one of mankind’s future lunar bases. The Moon does not tilt like the Earth, causing the interior of some craters, such as the Shackleton, to be in a perpetual blackout because of nearby peaks situated at the rim of Shackleton crater. Opposite the crater, these “Peaks of Eternal Light” are bathed in constant sun light – thus a good site for continuous solar power. There’s more life-sustaining evidence in the neighborhood. Late in the 1990s, NASA’s Lunar Prospector, an orbiter, recorded high-levels of hydrogen within the crater, an indicator for water ice.
NASA confirmed the existence of water late in 2009 when it sent its LCROSS or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite plummeting into a permanently shadowed region of the Cabeus crater, also near the Moon’s south pole. A plume exploded out of the impact, and the LCROSS's Centaur upper-stage rocket – circling in orbit – flew through the debris recording data. Spectrometers on the Centaur, which in this case examined light emitted by the Moon debris, measured literal gallons of the liquid. “I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit; we found a significant amount” – about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, said project scientist Anthony Colaprete.
Meanwhile, Japan has three satellites in lunar orbit, while China has one. China put the Chang’e-1 in lunar orbit late in 2007; a year later the satellite had mapped the Moon. The Chang’e-1 is analyzing the surface, hoping to find new elements NASA's Lunar Prospector did not see. The NASA satellite ceased working in 1999. China is hoping to launch Chang’e-2 – equipped with a soft-lander lunar probe – before the end of 2011. A third Chinese lunar satellite will also have a soft-lander that will hopefully collect rock samples and bring them back to Earth, a potentially significant event. In 2005 and 2006, the European Space Agency’s Smart-1 also mapped the moon, completing extensive analysis of the “Peaks of Eternal Light.” Smart-1 ended its mission in 2006 when it was deliberately crashed into the lunar surface.
Then there are the corporations, such as Google, which is currently running a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel about a quarter of a mile once there, and transmit video, images and data back to Earth. The competition, sponsored heavily by missile-defense contractor Northrop Grumman, has drawn eight or more teams. In 2008, lifting-off your homemade lunar lander from Earth and moving it several hundred feet to the left, and finally landing it at a second launching pad won you $350,000. Why so interested in the Moon, Google? In a promotional video, Google calls the Moon, “Earth’s off-shore island. (And) that the Moon could become our greatest asset.”
The one nation missing from this early-21st century effort to research the Moon from orbit or its surface is the nation that got there first. In 1959, the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 was the first satellite to plunge into the Moon’s cold, dry surface of fine gray dust and regolith. The USSR is in the dust-bin of history, as President Reagan predicted. But now that Russia has regained its economy, it’s also re-ignited its space ambitions. Russia’s federal space agency, Roskosmos, has one Moon mapping project in the making. The “Luna-Glob” was first scheduled for launch in 2011, but the time has been moved up. Reportedly, China is assisting Russia with the program; and now Russia is planning a manned Moon base by 2025.
In 2004, President Bush declared the US is going back to the Moon and will establish a lunar outpost there by 2024. Preliminary plans from NASA stated the Moon base might be established on the South Pole, near Shackleton’s crater. The $100 billion mission – dubbed the Constellation Plan – calls for an Apollo-like craft (a massive rocket, with booster and space capsule at the tip) to bring Americans back. “Think of it as Apollo on steroids,” said then-NASA chief Mike Griffin at the time. Bush and NASA claimed the mission to the Moon was a precursor – a test-run if you will – for a trip to Mars. The Moon will become a “stepping stone” to the Red Planet, they said.
Some analysts ask why go to the Moon? Why not just go straight to Mars? Find water on the Red Planet, or bring it, and begin the terraformation of Mars. The human race will probably need the new land and food. Land that hopefully gives back to its inhabitants considering 100 to 200 years from now the Earth’s population is predicted to triple. But there is an ominous storm moving in on any US mission to Mars or the Moon – affordability. Two wars with no end in sight, the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s, and the Bush and Obama administration's ineptitude, have come together to nearly bankrupt the US during the decade and beyond. Indeed, at the start of 2010, Obama was making plans to scrap the Moon base by 2024, and simply never go. Which is causing many NASA employees to boil in anger.
Because of US’s financial sickness and Obama’s stance, many analysts believe NASA is now losing this second race to the Moon. The leader is China, which hasn’t officially declared a manned mission yet, but has seriously suggested one might happen. And if their robust economy, gleefully supported by US consumption and debt, continues to pump millions into their space efforts, the first communist flag may be raised on another world. Even NASA has admitted China might beat America to the Moon. An implication that could turn the US into a literal subservient to the Chinese.
For all those involved in the second great Moon race, a curious story in 2008 went out on a well-known international newswire. The chief of Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, was dismayed the US had turned down their request to go to Moon together. “We are ready to cooperate, but for some reasons the United States has announced that it will carry out the program itself,” said Perminov on Russian television.
Within minutes NASA was aware of Perminov’s claims and released its own statements. Saying they were unaware of any Russian proposal for a cooperative Moon mission, and perplexed by his comments. Honesty has never come easy between the US and Russia or the former Soviet Union. But then again, Perminov made his claim during the Bush years, a time when the White House, the Pentagon, and just about any federal agency out there, thought lying and deception was not just the best diplomacy, but the only diplomacy. It’s quite possible the White House, or the CIA, ordered NASA to tell the Russians go there yourselves.
Some believe it’s another key to the mystery that surrounds the US’s Earthly motives for their Moon designs. A mystery that doesn’t point an accusatory finger just at the US. China, India, Japan and Russia, are also suspected of having similar Moon desires – money, power, and control. Desires generated by what could be the energy that replaces fossil fuels. Forever.
In 1985, a small team of fusion researchers from the University of Wisconsin made a “rediscovery” so potentially momentous it might someday literally shatter the surface of the Moon. The holidays were nearing, and the UW fusion research team was brainstorming: They wondered where they could find large quantities of Helium-3, or He3, an isotope of ordinary helium. Helium-3 is a proven fuel for nuclear fusion when you add Helium-3 to deuterium at a high temperature. One kg of Helium-3 burned with 67 kg of deuterium gives us nearly 20 megawatt-years of energy. Just two hundred pounds, they figured, could power a city of one million inhabitants for one year. Their calculation was based on dozens of
incredibly small-scale fusion reactions they had carried out in a basketball-sized fusion device. Proving proof of principle, but at an extremely small rate.
“It was around Christmas. That’s when we made what I like to call our rediscovery,” said Dr. Gerald Kulcinski, part of the UW team since the beginning and now the director of the Fusion Technology Institute at UW. Apollo astronauts, they remembered, had found quantities of Helium-3 on the Moon, Kulcinski said. So they sought out NASA and inquired about their lunar soil samples.
“Apollo records showed that every sample of lunar material had Helium-3 in it,” Kulcinski said. Now, nestled among NASA’s 200-point mission goals for lunar base plans is a proposal to mine the moon for this fuel. Even though so far there are no viable power plants that exist for it or efficient ways to bring it back to Earth.
Nevertheless, UW fusion researchers believe their plan could get civilization off fossil fuels. That’s if large crews and heavy equipment could go to the Moon to mine for Helium-3, super-heat it out of a lunar ore called ilmenite, process the gas, and return it to the Earth. Also, this incredible plan depends on whether large numbers of commercial fusion reactors could be built.
Their theory initially didn’t shear off the tops of Moon mountains. But scientists and investors have taken notice. Now, China, India, the European Space Agency and Russia are also planning on a manned lunar base. There is increasing talk of a race to control this fuel, of which one Space Shuttle load could theoretically power the United States for a year.
Back on Earth, the UW fusion research inspired someone to become an unparalleled lobbyist. He began seeking funds from private investors and Washington. A person who has a very personal connection with the lunar surface.
Apollo 17 astronaut Harris Hagan “Jack” Schmitt shares the distance record for driving a NASA rover across the lunar surface – 22 miles through the Taurus-Littrow valley. He’s also a former U.S. Senator of New Mexico. But long before being the last human to touch the Moon, he was a geologist. And for the better part of the last two decades, the visiting UW professor has tried to persuade powerful people about the potential of Helium-3. He told a Senate committee in 2003 a return to the moon to stay would be comparable “to the movement of our species out of Africa.”
The best way to pay for it? Lunar Helium-3 and its emerging potential as a fuel for fusion, Schmitt testified. Schmitt also said that he doesn't have confidence the U.S. government can complete the job. He’s calling upon private and corporate investors to make a commitment.
But the nation now determined to gamble on the Moon’s Helium-3 is not the United States, but China. Among all the nations and private investors interested in the potential of the Moon’s fuel, it is China that is steadfast on winning what it apparently feels is the Helium-3 race – one that could already be far past its starting point, and if Obama goes through with his plan of nixing the US Moon mission, China is way, way ahead. Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China’s lunar program, has told the international press, “We will provide the most reliable report on Helium-3 to mankind,” and, “Whoever first conquers the moon will benefit first.” Adding, “Each year three space shuttle missions could bring enough fuel for all human beings across the world.”
Another Chinese scientist, Luan Enjie, who worked in national defense, said in 2003 human beings must “learn to leave the Earth homeland...establish permanent study stations, develop products and industries in the space outside the earth, and set up self-sufficient extraterrestrial homeland.”
“We would like to know what they're doing, but we don't know,” Kulcinski said, alluding to the wall of secrecy that surrounds most of China’s geopolitical, and in this case, astropolitcal motives. They have, however, completed some heavy labor towards Helium-3 research. Chang’e-1, which is still in orbit, has this as one of its official missions: “To measure the thickness of lunar regolith. Previous exploration data and study results show that the abundance of noble gas in lunar regolith is very high. One important task of our mission is to study and evaluate the resource of Helium-3 and other noble gases in lunar regolith based on the distribution of thickness of soil on the lunar surface.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. government is generally, at least publicly, not interested in the idea. The Department of Energy is not conducting or funding any Helium-3 fusion research, DOE spokesman Jeff Sherwood said.
“There are obvious challenges there,” he said of producing energy from the fuel. “It doesn't exist on the Earth.” Instead, the United States and dozens of other nations are spending billions on the construction of a new international tokomak reactor that will research fusion’s first-generation fuel combination: deuterium, which can be extracted from seawater, and tritium. The massive project, dubbed ITER, is now up-and-running in the south of France. Kulcinski said he and his UW team are not bitter about ITER’s disregard, or the DOE’s disinterest. Because one US bureaucratic giant, he said, finally may be taking some action.
NASA has started its own preliminary research into Helium-3, or at the very least, considering it, said Kulcinski. After announcing plans for a lunar base by 2024, NASA stated that a research component of this future moon mission may be the study of lunar Helium-3 for “fusion reactors on Earth” to “reduce Earth's reliance on fossil fuels.”
Some experts, however, speculate the United States has secretly been researching Helium-3 for some time, and has intentions on its monopolization.
Not long after President Bush in 2004 declared the United States was headed back to the moon, Russian academic Erik Galimov told the Izvestia newspaper the US is deliberately not offering its true lunar intentions. Galimov added the United States’ moon colonization plan is going to “enable the U.S. to establish its control of the global energy market 20 years from now and put the rest of the world on its knees as hydrocarbons run out.” His theory is controversial, no doubt about it. But he doesn't offer much evidence to back it up. His focus may have been distorted by the Bush administration, but this White House’s major rationale for a lunar base was to establish a stepping stone for a mission to Mars. And while the Obama White House has not ordered NASA to back-off from the Moon completely, this administration doesn't seem too keen on going back. Instead, it suggests we should go directly to the land of red sand. NASA’s Moon-return research continues, nevertheless.
Again, research many Russians say NASA is keeping mostly a secret. Here is what Russian cosmonaut, Valentin Lebedev, told a Russian broadcast news show, one that is respected and widely watched. “When the Americans return to the Moon, they will build a base of global control for all launches of missiles from Earth,” he said. “The US was also surreptitiously trying to undermine Russia’s space program,” he added. As for the Moon itself, “They will not allow on the Moon anyone who wants it.”
Galimov and Lebedev’s conjecture was partially based on who currently sits on NASA’s Advisory Council, its pre-eminent civilian consultative arm. Leading the council is Schmitt. Fellow Helium-3 advocate Kulcinski is also on the council. Schmitt declined to comment for this book. But Kulcinski said their lunar Helium-3 research is separate from their NASA duties. “The NAC is purely an advisory council to Dr. Griffin,” said Kulcinski. “Our appointments to this advisory committee have nothing to do with our specific research interests.”
But Bruce Gagnon said naming Schmitt and Kulcinski to the Advisory Council gives credence to Galimov's theory. Gagnon said lunar Helium-3 overtures by other countries have convinced Schmitt, Kulcinski, the White House and NASA to take action. “These guys have been working for years to set this up, and now they are moving quickly because they fear that other countries will get to these resources first,” Gagnon said.
“One metric ton of Helium-3 can provide the same amount of energy as $2.5 billion worth of crude oil, according to Schmitt,” writes Gagnon on his web site. “Researchers estimate that some one million tons of Helium-3 could be obtained from the top layer of the moon. Used as a fuel for fusion reactors, es
timates are that one metric ton of Helium-3 could be worth nearly $1.5 billion – about $46,500 per troy ounce, more than 120 times the value of gold.”
Stephen Aftergood, who directs the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, says those who wish to return to the Moon need a new rationale. Lunar Helium-3 offers an economic one, even if its potential as a super fuel is far from proven, he says. Aftergood doesn't believe a super race with China for lunar Helium-3 has begun. What’s ironic, a race to the moon against China – whether real or superficial – may be in NASA’s best interest, he said. “There are some who wish this would be the case – this race with China. They believe it would recapture the dynamic of the United States and Russia’s race to the moon,” he said.
Fifteen years ago, Kulcinski said that he and the UW fusion research team sought out federal funding for Helium-3 research. They were twice rejected with the same reasoning. “Each agency didn't think the other could do their job,” he said. “The Department of Energy told us, ‘We’re never going back to the Moon. We can't afford to.’ NASA told us, they didn't trust us – or anyone else – to make a fusion reactor.”