These, too, are feelings that have a home in science fiction. But look for them in the interior catastrophes of J. G. Ballard, not the cosmic crashes of Niven and Pournelle.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD PICTURE THAT HEIDEGGER DEPLORED was one in which the orphans of Apollo revelled, and its expansion became the most rehearsed of their reasons for getting back to space, and the Moon: industry and private enterprise.
The first influential outline of a space programme driven by the fulfilment of an economic and global need rather than reasons of state or destiny came from Gerard K. O’Neill, an idealistic Princeton physics professor. Having seen Apollo fall back to Earth, he argued that long-term expansion into space needed to provide continuous benefits, year in year out, rather than a big rush of pride. This led to a scheme which offered to solve what, in the mid-1970s, seemed one of America’s, and the world’s, biggest problems: the energy crisis.
O’Neill imagined vast arrays of solar panels in geosynchronous orbits, immune to night and cloud, soaking up the harsh unfiltered 192-proof sunlight of space 24/7. They would turn the electricity into microwaves and send it down to receivers on the surface of the Earth using wavelengths that the atmosphere would not absorb. From there, the power would flow into national grids. These solar power satellites would provide the world’s energy needs without air pollution, without nuclear meltdowns, without dependency on OPEC, without—though they were, at that point, hardly an issue—fossil fuel emissions.*
Launching such huge structures from the Earth was not remotely feasible. O’Neill reckoned that a power satellite in geosynchronous orbit capable of providing a gigawatt of electricity—a thousand megawatts, the output of a large conventional power station—might have a mass of 16,000 tonnes. The then-not-yet-built space shuttle was to have a cargo capacity of less than 30 tonnes, and even that mite would be lifted only to low orbit. The only way to build things as big as power satellites was to get most of the material from the Moon.
O’Neill’s plans were to use bulldozers to strip-mine the regolith, processing the dust and rubble for metals and silicates of the sort that solar panels can be made from. These raw materials would be flung into space using a “mass driver” not unlike the “maglev” trains which are both supported and accelerated by electromagnetic fields, floating frictionless over their tracks. Such a railway, laid out in a straight line across the lunar surface, could accelerate its cargoes to orbital speeds.
The trajectories these materials were thrown onto would take them to the Earth-Moon system’s L5 point, 60° behind the Moon in its orbit. There a workforce much larger than that required for the Moon-mining operation would use them to manufacture solar power satellites. That workforce would live in “Islands” of their own creation, also built from lunar raw materials. O’Neill imagined one such structure—he called it “Island Three”—as a hollow cylinder kilometres long, spinning on its axis so that the workers living within would enjoy a centrifugal force that emulated gravity.* Sunlight would be let in through long windows; the neighbours would live overhead.
This vision, published under the title “The High Frontier” (1976), proved to have a wide and eclectic appeal. Tech-heads liked it; hippies liked it, too; so did the ecology minded. Stewart Brand, a magnificent Californian impresario of ideas who had campaigned for NASA to release pictures of the whole Earth from space when they were not available, took up the cause in his publications Whole Earth Catalog and its spin-off CoEvolution Quarterly. The same publications had also, not coincidentally, been the venue for some of the first serious discussions of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Gaia was part of the anti-Copernican shift back to the Earth driven by how lifeless everywhere else looked; it celebrated the specialness of such a living system. O’Neill’s spin on this was to suggest that the way to correct the deficit of worlds like the Earth in the sky was to build them from scratch in inside-out miniature.
Rick Delanty, the frustrated astronaut in “Lucifer’s Hammer”, harangued guests at his Houston barbeques about O’Neill’s ideas. Jerry Brown, the governor of California, was interested in them, too. California is a land of dreamers, of environmentalists and of aerospace companies; something which appealed to all of the above was worth looking into. O’Neill inspired the first new grass-roots activist community devoted to space since the 1930s of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the British Interplanetary Society and the American Rocket Society.* At the movement’s centre was a new organisation called the L5 Society supported by Heinlein himself.
Part of the appeal of the O’Neill programme was its unified response to the two environmental concerns that were coming together in the 1970s, most famously in “The Limits to Growth” (1972), a report by the self-appointed “Club of Rome”, and at the first UN environment conference, held in Stockholm the same year. Holding the post-Apollo icon of the whole Earth to its heart, this new environmentalism combined the fear that humans were now damaging the environment on a global scale with the fear that they would deplete the whole world of the raw materials that they needed. In a doom-laden decade, it provided a soft apocalypse hardly any less scary, and infinitely more widely worried about, than the sudden sharp impact of an asteroid.
The era’s most gloomy environmental concerns were summed up in an identity formulated by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, academics at Stanford:
Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology
The more the world had of any of the three things on the right-hand side of this “IPAT” formula, the argument went, the more adverse the impact on the environment. But O’Neill and his followers felt that, like a reflection, or a pocket turned inside out, or a world in an unworld’s sky, space technology could invert this counsel of despair by replacing technologies that had an impact on the Earth and drained its resources with technologies that did not. The IPAT assumption was that technology multiplied the impact of population and affluence. The L5-ers claimed that space-based technology decreased it. I = PA/T. If this denominating T is big enough, impacts can shrink even as more people get more affluent.
Believers in this inversion promised endless spacey cake and endless Earthly eating. They saw all sorts of heavy industry migrating to orbit, taking advantage of the unlimited energy, freely available vacuum and sophisticated manufacturing techniques only possible in the microgravity available in freefall. They talked of foamed metals lighter than candyfloss and tougher than steel; single-crystal whiskers stronger than hawsers; composites that mixed substances immiscible on Earth. This orbital industry would feed on raw materials from farther away, not just from the Moon but also from mines among the asteroids, where vast mirrors would smelt metals for the factories in orbit around the Earth below. Any pollution would be swept away by the solar wind, blowing every vapour and residue in its path out to the edge of interstellar space even more effectively than tides cleanse an estuary. Space as workshop; space as foundry; space as provider of sanitation: James Nasmyth would have loved it.
And this High Frontier would never close. It would just get higher and higher. Boosters like Pournelle argued that it would allow humans not just to survive but also to “survive with style”. Cosmism as capitalist self-improvement. More and more Moonshots: ever fewer have-nots.
Not that the Moon was, in itself, the point. True to its modern nature, the Moon was somewhat peripheral to such plans—just a source of raw materials. The would-be settlers of the High Frontier were by and large not that interested in the Moon, per se, with its already-visited deserts and close, confining horizons. The action would be at L5 and its purpose-built Islands.* It was they which best embodied America’s love of starting over, they which made concrete the potential Thomas Paine spoke of when he said, “We have the power to begin the world over again”, they which offered the possibility of a second creation. The Moon was just the debris of the first.
Ideology aside, the O’Neill scheme had a practical disadvantage. It wasn’t. Not practical at all. Even if energy prices had stayed at their
1970s crisis level, and even supposing, as O’Neill did, that tens of tonnes of equipment on the Moon could send thousands of tonnes of raw material to L5, just getting tens of tonnes of equipment to the Moon on a regular basis was far beyond the capacity of the space-shuttle fleet. The enthusiasts claimed that a much more efficient launch was possible. But the very existence of the shuttle fleet showed that government was not going to develop it. The enthusiasts claimed that lunar mines and solar power satellites would pay off almost as quickly as the multi-decade investments made in Earthly mines and nuclear power plants. Private capital remained spectacularly uninterested.
IN THE 1980S A WAY AROUND THIS IMPASSE WAS SUGGESTED. What if the Moon could be mined not for bulk materials used in far-out space colonies but for something of great value right here on Earth. If the Moon produced something worth tens of millions of dollars a tonne, it might be worth industrialising for that alone. The candidate wonder substance was helium-3.
Not all the solar wind that blows out from the Sun gets to interstellar space; some hits the surfaces of planets, moons and asteroids that lack the magnetic fields needed to deflect it. Some is thus absorbed by the lunar regolith. That wind contains helium-3, an isotope which is in some ways an ideal fuel for fusion reactors and is vanishingly rare on Earth.
Nuclear fusion produces energy by melding very light atomic nuclei into slightly heavier ones. In space it powers the stars. On Earth it powers hydrogen bombs. In theory—and it is a theory that has now enchanted several generations of physicists—fusion also offers an appealing alternative to nuclear fission as an almost limitless source of electricity which neither requires an infrastructure which can also enable nuclear weapons nor produces nuclear waste. There is a huge international programme aimed at building such a reactor in the South of France.
That reactor, ITER, will react deuterium, a stable isotope of hydrogen easily separated out of seawater, with tritium, a short-lived isotope of hydrogen that would have to be manufactured for the purpose. There are practical reasons for this fuel mix, but it is not ideal. As well as being radioactive, tritium is also widely used, if not strictly speaking necessary, in nuclear weaponry. And tritium-fuelled reactors would give off enough neutrons to turn some of a reactor’s parts into low-level radioactive waste in need of eventual disposal.
Burning deuterium with helium-3 instead of tritium would avoid both those problems. Helium-3 is neither radioactive nor bomb-relevant. And fusing it with deuterium produces protons, not neutrons. Those protons, which carry an electric charge, can be used and disposed of without making anything else radioactive. The promise of helium-3 is thus the same as the promise of solar-power satellites: clean energy. But if you have the right reactor, you would need just 100kg of helium-3 a year to provide the same gigawatt of power as one of O’Neill’s 16,000-tonne solar power satellites. It would take only a few hundred tonnes of the stuff a year to provide all the Earth’s current electricity needs.
The idea of helium-3 mining was, understandably, taken up enthusiastically by L5-ers and science fiction writers. It is the basis of, among other things, Ian McDonald’s “New Moon” (2016) and “Wolf Moon” (2018), and Duncan Jones’s film “Moon” (2012). Harrison Schmitt, the geologist who went to the Moon in Challenger, Apollo 17’s LM, is quite the devotee.* But like O’Neill’s L5ism—indeed, rather more so—this idea, too, is profoundly impractical.
You would have to process tens of millions of tonnes of lunar regolith to get that 100kg of helium-3, an undertaking not that much more manageable than flinging thousands of tonnes of the stuff out into space to be smelted and turned into satellites. And the drawbacks that helium-3 seeks to remedy are not the problems that are delaying the development of fusion power. The problems people actually working on fusion worry about are those involved in getting the technology to the stage where it can plausibly generate power at all. They have been working on this for decades; they foresee decades more work to come.
And that is for a tritium reactor. Burning helium-3 is far harder. But it is not all that much better. It is absurd to think that if tritium reactors become a reality, people will look at their relatively minor drawbacks and promptly decide to start work on much more challenging reactors that require moondust mines for their raw materials. The Earth very much needs many forms of non-fossil-fuel energy. But helium-3 only looks like a useful part of that portfolio if you start from the position of requiring an answer to make use of the Moon. That is not most people’s starting point.
What is more, even if you do take the Moon as your clean-energy starting point, you might not light on helium-3 as your answer, or on solar power satellites, either. Dennis Wingo, an entrepreneurial orphan of Apollo who left the software business to work on space technologies, points out that the Moon could be a rich source of platinum-group metals. This is because about 3% of the asteroids that have pummelled it for the past four billion years are made of metal, not rock. Even smallish fragments left by such impacts would be worth billions, if not trillions, on the Earth’s metal markets.
Mr Wingo is not ignorant of the law of supply and demand. He knows that if a lunar-mining concern were to offer the realistic prospect of huge new supplies of platinum, prices would plummet accordingly. But he also understands that cheap things can be more valuable than expensive ones. As an example, he cites aluminium, which when first produced in the early 19th century was more expensive than gold and mostly used simply as a way of showing off; Napoleon III had a set of aluminium cutlery which was set at the place of honoured dinner guests. In the following decades the metal’s engineering possibilities became clearer, but its price remained a problem. Witness the discussion which follows Barbicane’s suggestion that it be used to fashion the space capsule in Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”:
“Aluminium?” cried his three colleagues in chorus.
“Unquestionably, my friends. This valuable metal possesses the whiteness of silver, the indestructibility of gold, the tenacity of iron, the fusibility of copper, the lightness of glass. It is easily wrought, is very widely distributed, forming the base of most of the rocks, is three times lighter than iron, and seems to have been created for the express purpose of furnishing us with the material for our projectile.”
“But, my dear president,” said the major, “is not the cost price of aluminium extremely high?”
“It was so at its first discovery, but it has fallen now to nine dollars a pound.”
“But still, nine dollars a pound!” replied the major, who was not willing readily to give in; “even that is an enormous price.”
“Undoubtedly, my dear major; but not beyond our reach.”
The price was to fall a fair bit further;* by the time Apollo’s spacecraft were made of aluminium, as Barbicane had, in effect, advised, so was a great deal of the rest of the modern world. The metal had become cheap; indispensable to various industries, it was also very valuable. Wingo imagines that a similar fall in prices for platinum and related metals would allow it to become similarly valuable, specifically because it would make hydrogen fuel cells far cheaper, thus—again—providing a cleaner, more affordable energy infrastructure. I somewhat doubt this. But it still feels more plausible than the helium-3 tarradiddle.
MOST OF TODAY’S MOON-MINING ADVOCATES, THOUGH, CONCENTRATE neither on metals nor on helium but on the ice and other volatiles in the permanent shadows at the poles. Their exploitation might provide settlers with a reasonably plentiful local source of water as well as some of the carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that life needs in moderate abundance but of which moonrocks offer more or less none.
By raising the possibility that a settlement might have the wherewithal to provide its own water, volatiles on the Moon reduce the practical burden that any other reasons for returning to it might need to bear. And they might also provide a way to defray some of the costs. Getting a tonne of payload from the Moon to low Earth orbit takes a lot less fuel than getting it there from the Earth. So, if people d
oing things in low Earth orbit need fuel and water, it might be cheaper to send it to them from the Moon than from the Earth.
Like the platinum-group-metals story, though, this highlights another issue about lunar resources. They may have competition. The helium-3, Mr Wingo’s metals and the polar volatiles all come from elsewhere; the helium, true to its name, from the Sun, the metals and volatiles from asteroids, comets and some water-rich inbetweenies. Why not go directly to the source? An icy carbon-rich asteroid might be a more amenable source of fuel for satellites orbiting the Earth than the grubby ice caplets at the Moon’s poles. In terms of delta-v, if not travel time, it could also be closer. And though one asteroid could not compete with all the Moon’s ice, there are many asteroids. Similarly, a metal-rich asteroid might be a better source of platinum-group minerals—though the Moon, having accumulated the debris from such asteroids for billions of years, may have some particularly choice nuggets secreted about its person.
For some space enthusiasts this doesn’t matter at all: if asteroids deliver the goods and the Moon doesn’t, then go mine the asteroids. For those imprinted on the Moon itself, for those who look up at its face and know that it is that world in reflection, not space in general, that they want, asteroid mining carries the threat of lunar marginalization, even irrelevance.
It is not the only such threat. To many for whom an interest in, even devotion to, space is mainly driven by a love of science, the Moon is not all that appealing, at least, not compared with Mars. The same also applies to those who see space as a way to signal something through a grand and unprecedented achievement.
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