The Moon

by Oliver Morton

  Going to Mars is a far greater engineering challenge than the Return to the Moon. The trips out and back take months, not days, and can only be made at all when the two planets are appropriately aligned; this means plausible mission architectures either last for years or provide very little time on the surface. A life-support system that can keep working for years with no resupply flights is a challenge no one has yet taken on. And the longer a mission is away from Earth, the more likely it becomes for chains of independent, rare events to lead to unforeseen problems and dangers.

  At the same time, Mars is the only planetary surface other than the Moon’s and the Earth’s that is plausibly accessible using today’s technology. The delta-v needed for Mercury or the moons of Jupiter is far too high, even before you start to worry about the savage sunlight bombarding the former or the vicious radiation belts around the latter. Venus is like the depths of the ocean would be if the pressure were greater and the water hot enough to melt lead.

  And Mars is fascinating in ways the Moon is not. It has an atmosphere that moves its sand and dust round; in the past it had flows of ice and water capable of similar erosional and sedimentary services, as well as vast volcanoes. It thus has a rich geological history, beautifully revealed in recent years by the rovers on its surface. It may have a biological history, too. It could well have been the abode of life in the past; it might conceivably have some simple organisms deep within its crust today. In the intermingled worlds of science fiction and scientific speculation it is accepted as easily the best target for the intentional, directed climate change known as terraforming. Its atmosphere could be thickened, its climate warmed; it could support surface water, even plants. The red planet could have its own red edge.

  This worldliness-in-waiting gives Mars a mystique. Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who in 1998 founded the Mars Society, sees the settlement that the society advocates as a way—perhaps the only way—to regain a cultural vigour he thinks was lost with the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and, as I write, probably the world’s most talked-about entrepreneur, sees Mars as a hedge against existential all-eggs-in-the-same-basket disasters. In a messy mix of cosmic compassion and messianic self-belief, Mr Musk is set on making humanity a multiplanetary species, and Mars—eventually, a terraformed Mars—is the first step on that road.

  Its mixture of mystique, new challenges and science has ensured that whenever the US government sets out long-term space plans, human feet on the sands of Mars are always in the mix. They were there in the Space Exploration Initiative proposed by George H. W. Bush in 1989, and in the Vision for Space Exploration his son promulgated in 2004. So, too, was the Moon. But as a long-term goal, Mars has tended to overshadow it. In many minds, the two goals have become, to some extent, competitors. Some see it as a friendly fight; some treat it as a fierce one.

  Like many competitions, it is easily understood by those who live it, yet hard to grasp from the outside. To set Mars against the Moon is, to various people, and to various extents, setting science against commerce; new beginnings against continued growth; symbolism against action; arcadia against industry; later against sooner; establishment against underdog; pointy-heads against working stiffs. It is thus to some extent, like so much in America, left against right. Each opposition can be questioned, and none is fundamental. But in general Mars appeals to dreamers, to those with a deep commitment to that as yet undone, to seekers after deep but impractical scientific knowledge, specifically the astrobiological knowledge of life beyond the Earth.

  Though the Moon has astrobiological charms, too, in its early Earth rocks and records of bombardment, they are for most purposes less inspiring. But it is better placed to satisfy the desire that there should be a continued presence beyond the Earth. Moon boosters stress far-fetched economic returns such as those dependent on helium-3 because they see them as providing a strong foundation for permanent expansion; if space becomes a place to make money, it will not again be abandoned. In this, they are true heirs of Harriman. And what’s wrong with making money? There are quite a few space activists who have become entrepreneurs, and though they are seeking an impact beyond financial returns, such returns would still be welcome, not just as a way of encouraging further investment but also because what good capitalist doesn’t want more money rather than less?

  Mars makes the orphans of Apollo on the lunocentric side of the argument worry that their childhood trauma will be repeated—flags and footsteps will be duly left in the red dust, the astronauts will come home and nothing else will change. There is, after all, no commercial reason to go to Mars.* They also worry, with reason and experience on their side, that nothing suits a political system better than a feel-good goal beyond the terms of office of all concerned. If you don’t really want to do much in space, then saying that what you want is to go to Mars sometime in the late 2030s is a pretty good tactic; it keeps NASA and its associated contractors ticking over but doesn’t require it to get more money. Nor does it expose you to association with failure. Nixon’s worry that NASA might goof off has surely been shared by some of his successors.

  THE ORPHANS’ LAST REASON FOR SPACE IS BOTH THE MOST TRIVIAL and the deepest: tourism. They all want people to go to space. Many of them want to go to space themselves. So, going to space just in order to go to space might be a business in itself. By the 1990s, millionaires were getting interested in the possibility of trips to Mir, the once-Soviet, then Russian space station. “Orphans of Apollo” (2008), a documentary by Michael Potter which first brought that phrase to an audience, tells the story of a failed attempt to take Mir into private ownership in part as a way of making this service available. That did not happen—but from 2001 to 2009 various rich men paid to be taken up to the International Space Station in Russian capsules.*

  In the next couple of years suborbital space tourism—flights that get higher than 80km, but without anything like the delta-v needed for orbit—look likely to begin. It seems there are hundreds of people, maybe thousands, willing to pay $200,000 or so for flights which will reveal the Earth in its planetary pomp, the curvature of its horizon clear, the sky above it black, the clouds far, far below, with a few minutes of weightlessness thrown in. There are plans afoot for private journeys into orbit and new hotel facilities on the space station to welcome them.

  To some, this might look a little unseemly. If the sustained expansion of a human presence into space is the inauguration of a new phase of history, or the discharging of a sacred trust, or an imperative for the survival of the species, is it not a little tawdry to reduce it to thrill-seeking by the rich? Gagarin challenged the cosmos; Apollo dealt in nobility and the coordination of the world’s greatest economy; what is noble about just buying a ticket, having an experience and coming home?

  Against this distaste, though, are a few other considerations. The first is practicality. To get back to the Moon, you need money. Rich people who want to come along seem a promising source. What is more, the rich people in question are excited by the same thing as you. In a way, the space tourist is the purest enthusiast, needing no justification in terms of species survival or economic resources or national pride or astrobiological insight, just the experience and memory of being and doing something in space, of seeing its sights and feeling its feelings.

  And the commercialism of the enterprise offers an ideological bonus of its own. When I first started to mix with American space enthusiasts, in the early 1990s, I quickly learned that many resented the government for not having followed through on Apollo, and they were convinced that private industry must take up the challenge in order to produce a permanent presence. Some, though, went further. They argued that the purpose of private spaceflight was not merely to displace government but to undermine its raison d’être. Landing a man on the Moon had come to be seen—as Kennedy had intended it to be seen—as the ultimate symbol of what a government could do to achieve a stated national goal: hence the dou
ble-edged importance of “If we can put a man on the Moon…”, stressing simultaneously what can be done and what the country chooses not to do. But what if there were no such “we”?

  Private spaceflight was important to some on the libertarian right, I learned, specifically because it would remove that singular governmental source of prestige, disproving the claim that there were achievements which, by their nature, were for governments alone: natural monopolies of prestige. If the private sector could land a man on the Moon—if, better still, private individuals could—government’s claim to making people bigger and nobler together than they could be on their own and in freely chosen associations would be revealed as fiction.

  You do not have to subscribe to such Randian nonsense to want to be a space tourist or to want to profit from the capabilities such tourism provides. You just have to have been there for Apollo and to have believed, as Jim Muncy, a long-term advocate, puts it in the documentary “Orphans of Apollo”, that “because this is America, that eventually it was going to be about us.” That people would be able to go to space for their own reasons.

  NOW PERHAPS THEY WILL. IN 2019, FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE Apollo, it is quite plausible that humans will walk on the Moon again within the next decade, and quite hard to believe they will not do so in the next two. There are many more people on Earth today who will walk on the Moon than who have walked on the Moon. Technology and the lure of lunar resources are part of the story of this Return, but so are politics and personalities.

  The People’s Republic of China has mounted a serious programme of robotic lunar exploration. It intends to follow Chang’e 4’s landing in South Pole-Aitken with the first lunar sample-return mission since the 1970s. Its next stated human spaceflight goal is a permanent space station, but it has talked about following that with Moon missions. The Long March 9 rocket it is designing is the sort of Saturn-V-class booster needed for such things. As an opportunity for signalling Earthly power, the Return offers China more than it has any other country since America undertook Apollo. And it offers it cheaper. Technology is better. The risks are lower.

  This in itself is enough to spur American politicians to thoughts of the Return. Though it might be intellectually defensible for a country that went to the Moon in the 1960s to treat Chinese lunar expeditions in the 2030s with a been-there-done-that insouciance, it would probably not be good politics. The desire not to seem outmatched by China is one of the reasons that, under President Donald Trump, NASA has taken on a far more explicitly Moon-focused strategy, with an overt intention to return on a permanent and eventually moneymaking basis.*

  But China is not the whole story. Billionaires matter too—particularly, though not exclusively, billionaires with Silicon Valley in their background. The path down which computer technology and software have travelled since the 1970s has concentrated a great deal of wealth into the hands of men now entering—Mark Zuckerberg, 35 in May 2019—enjoying—Jeff Bezos, 55 in January 2019—or leaving—Bill Gates, 64 in October 2019—middle age. A fair few of them still cherish the dream of spaceflight that Apollo, “Star Trek” or both lit in their hearts. Following that dream offers a way to spend money amassed from technologies closer to home on self-gratification, inspiration, ego jousting, the denting of the universe, preserving and enhancing the future of humankind, having fun, showing off and experiencing the sublime.

  What more reason do you need to fly? (Tick all the boxes that apply.)

  * “Lucifer’s Hammer” ascribes this line in a slightly different form to Heinlein.

  * In Stanslaw Lem’s “Peace on Earth” the idea of the Earth’s battles spreading inexorably to the Moon is taken to its logical—which is to say, absurd—conclusion: robots on the Moon fight proxy wars so that the Earth can live in peace.

  * It is interesting that these remarks pre-date the Apollo 8 “Earthrise” picture by two years. Unless Heidegger was hallucinating, this means that he was one of the few to see, and realize the significance of, an earlier and grainier picture of the Earth over the Moon sent back by one of the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. Perhaps someone made sure that, as the person who had introduced the term “world picture” to philosophy, Heidegger should get to see it.

  * In Harriman’s search for reasons for spaceflight Heinlein had of course included energy—but rather than safe, clean energy, he had imagined space as a place to put dangerous energy, in the form of nuclear power plants permanently on the brink of explosion.

  * Anyone disturbed by this use of language is referred to xkcd.com/123.

  * The ARS had by this stage been rolled into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a thoroughly professionalized institution; the BIS continued in its quirky, part-time way, as it does to this day and will, I hope, continue to do for centuries to come.

  * As the science fiction author Ben Bova pointed out in his novel “Colony” (1978), a sequel to the rather better “Millennium” discussed above, the L5 movement turned its back on the Moon with its very name. If you cared about the Moon, you would put your colonies at L4, a point with all the same gravitational advantages but which also offers a particularly beautiful view of the Moon dominated by the great bull’s-eye basin of Mare Orientale.

  * Though given that Mr Schmitt also has form as a climate-change denier, I am not quite sure what he thinks the pressing need for fusion power actually is.

  * This morning aluminium costs less than $1 per pound on the London Metals Exchange. Accounting for inflation, that makes it about 140 times cheaper than it was in Barbicane’s day.

  * In his novel “The Secret of Life” (2001), Paul McAuley does manage to imagine something both Martian and economically important, but it is not the sort of thing one could reasonably set out in search of.

  * The Russians also charge their partners from NASA and ESA for these transport services.

  * There are other reasons. The private-enterprise possibilities stressed by Moon advocates always appeal to Republicans. And President Barack Obama’s administration was particularly Mars-oriented. On the basis that Mr Trump neuralgically shies away from any policy associated with his predecessor, a shift to the Moon under his administration would have been a sure thing even had there been no other reason for it.

  VISITS

  BETWEEN 1968 AND 1972, NINE APOLLO MISSIONS TOOK 24 men there and back, with three of the men making the journey twice. Eight of the missions orbited it, six of them landed. Twelve of the men walked on the surface of the Moon, and 12 men didn’t.

  There have been many more visits by robot spacecraft, before and since. The first attempt was on August 17th 1958. Its wreckage is on the bottom of the Atlantic about 20km from Cape Canaveral. The following nine attempts also failed, American and Russian alike; though one American mission, Pioneer 4, did actually make it out of Earth orbit, it missed the Moon. The first successful Moon missions were Luna 2 and Luna 3, the Soviet Union’s sixth and seventh attempts. One hit the Moon, as it was meant to, in late 1959. The other flew past it, also as planned. America did not manage a successful mission until Ranger 7 in 1964, six years after its first attempt.

  All in all, 36 crewless spacecraft designed to study the Moon have been destroyed or sent astray by the rockets they relied on for launch and 18 have failed in space. But 58 have made it to their destination as planned.

  After the Apollo missions, America sent a last robot orbiter in 1973. The Soviet Union sent a last rover in 1976. For the following 14 years, the Moon was visited only by NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3), which was not studying it but simply using its gravity to change its trajectory; the cunningly contrived path which sent it to Comet Giacobini-Zinner involved five separate encounters with the Moon.

  In the decades of lunar neglect, missions flew past Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; asteroids and comets were seen close up for the first time. Mars, after a lull from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, was visited frequently, Venus and Mercury considerably less so. As these missions sp
read across the solar system, a picture of the Earth and the Moon in the same frame became a rite of passage for the teams controlling their cameras—a way to calibrate their equipment, to provide a startling image to the media and to renew, or deepen, the participants’ sense of wonder at the endeavours they had embarked on.

  The first real post-Apollo, post-Soviet Moon mission was Japanese. Despite setbacks along the way, Hiten entered orbit round the Moon in October 1991. America went back in 1994 with a military mission called Clementine which sought to use lunar science as a test for instruments developed for the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars”. NASA returned in 1997 with a small mission called Lunar Prospector. The names of both probes—Clementine, the inamorata of “My Darling Clementine”, was a miner’s daughter—reflected a new interest in exploitable lunar resources.

  NASA has sent five further missions. The European Space Agency sent its first mission to the Moon in 2003. Japan returned with a three-spacecraft orbital mission in 2007. India launched a successful double header, an orbiter and an impactor, in 2009. It plans to launch a more ambitious lander in 2019.

  The most concerted Moon programme since Apollo has been China’s. Its first Moon mission, an orbiter called Chang’e 1, was launched in 2007. In 2013 Chang’e 3 landed a small rover, Yuku (“Jade Rabbit”), on the surface of Mare Imbrium. Chang’e 4 has now done the same on the farside. Of the six spacecraft operating in orbit around or near the Moon at the end of 2018, three were Chinese, three American.

  Mars, at that time, boasted six working orbiters, one rover rolling across it, another rover out of contact but not yet given up for dead and a recently arrived stationary lander. Six of these nine spacecraft were American, two European and one Indian. In the decade to come, though, it is a safe bet that the Moon will once again become the solar system’s most popular destination.