The Moon

by Oliver Morton

  One source of extra Moon missions will be the private sector. As of the end of 2018, no private missions have made it to lunar orbit, let alone the surface. A company called LuxSpace, though, launched a memorial to Manfred Fuchs, the founder of its German parent company, on the booster that took China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission round the Moon in 2014.

  It was the Moon’s third memorial to the dead. In 1971 Dave Scott left a small memorial to fallen astronauts and cosmonauts at the Apollo 15 landing site. And in 1999 a small portion of the ashes of Gene Shoemaker were delivered to the crater that bears his name near the Moon’s South Pole by Lunar Prospector, which was deliberately crashed there at the end of its mission.

  Representatives of the Navajo nation objected to this desecration of the Moon, which they consider a sacred place.

  - VI -

  THE RETURN

  THE FIRST TICKETS FOR THE RETURN HAVE BEEN BOOKED. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, has purchased a trip to the Moon for sometime in 2023, though he realises that the flight may be delayed, what with the relevant spaceship not yet having been built or tested. The down payment was significant.

  The trip—known as #dearMoon—is to be the simplest sort of Moon journey there is: a “free return” trajectory. The vehicle heads out to the Moon but instead of going into orbit simply swings round it and heads back to the Earth. It is the sort of trajectory that Luna 3, the Soviet probe which first saw the far side, used in 1959, and which the Apollo 13 mission resorted to after damage caused by an explosion in its service module precluded its planned orbit of the Moon.

  But if the trajectory is nothing new, the rest of the trip is unprecedented. It is being paid for by a private individual. It is being purchased from a private company. It will be undertaken on a spacecraft which could, in principle, make the journey again at a later date, a number of times. It is slated to carry nine people, not three. They will not all be men. They will not all be American. And they will be artists.

  Mr Maezawa—a fashion designer—has not yet said who his companions will be or what arts they will practice: musical performance and composition, poetry and dance all seem likely; maybe painting and sculpture; maybe someone whose practice is normally conceptual, or performance based. Ideally, for me, at least one outsider: someone beyond the world of the paid and the professional, the stage and the page and the gallery, one with a shunned practice all their own, demotic or hermetic. It is hard not to see something missing in a lunar art party with no unsettling touch of lunacy.

  Whatever their first callings, though, all eight, and Mr Maezawa too, will have a second: acting. As Robert Lewis Shayon reflected in the Saturday Review after the flight of Apollo 11:

  Wherever explorers go in the future accompanied by television cameras, they will be actors, making their nebulous exits and entrances for the benefit of multi-planetary audiences. Nowhere will there ever be pure events (if ever there were); everything hereafter will be stage-managed for cosmic Nielsens.

  As they look at the Moon, the Earth will look at them. Unless Mr Maezawa goes radically against the spirit of the age, there will be high-definition live feeds, social media posts, multiple angles on everything which both create and divide the common context. Unrepentant Apollo-was-a-hoaxers will troll and be trolled. On your second screen your friends will tell you what other aspect you might be watching, should be watching, have to watch again, what music you should be streaming. In 1969 Apollo’s Mission Control was the first multi-screen environment that most people watching on their single screen at home had ever seen. Now all experiences can be fragmented thus.

  The singular Moon will pass on beneath it all, regardless. Aucune rancune.

  Some will be dissatisfied. The term Media Circus will trend. Marx’s line about history repeated as farce will be dragged out. The mismatch between the “Earthrise” that surprised Apollo 8

  —Oh my God! Look at that picture over there!

  and the one that #dearMoon will capture with eager well-scheduled anticipation will be much remarked on. It seems certain that some, at least, of the art will be underwhelming and that some people will delight in pointing that out.

  But there should be no nostalgia for the authenticity of the past. It, too, was utterly mediated, as those lines from the Saturday Review remind us; just in a different way. Apollo 11 was the quintessential media event of the mass-media age, with all the attributes such events must have, many of them in space: it was planned (but not by the broadcasters), ceremonial, unique but in principle repeatable, costly, dramatic, spectacular, moving, unifying. People needed to be its witnesses to be the people they wanted to be; the media created that experience for them.

  The difference with #dearMoon will be that its crew will be chosen, in part, for what the Moon can do to them and for what they might then do for those of us watching, listening, consuming, both in the moment and in the years that follow. The idea of taking artists into space is not new. After putting Yuri Gagarin into orbit on Vostok 1, Sergei Korolev is said to have said, “We should have sent a poet, not a pilot.” The sentiment has since been echoed repeatedly. It seems ill founded to me—a confusion between poetry and the poetic. Gagarin’s flight was not just a great adventure, a startling technological achievement and a propaganda coup. It was a work of art in itself—one defined more by its expansion of human possibilities than of a particular human’s experiences. Would it have been improved by a deeper insight into how it had affected just one man? Eight years later, nothing became Neil Armstrong more than the modest and private life he returned to, leaving only that which he had done for the public.

  For the Return, though, with the possibility already established, those objections fade. And who should lead the human Return to the Moon if not artists? The people who put in the highest bids? Space-struck volunteers chosen by lottery? Officers of the state, uniformed or otherwise? Scientists? Kardashians? Something has to happen next, and a ship of artists from around the world is no worse an idea than any other, and better than quite a few.

  MR MAEZAWA’S TRIP IS TO BE PROVIDED BY ELON MUSK. MR Musk has, in the past, been somewhat sniffy about space tourism. When he founded his company SpaceX in 2003 it was to do real things: to launch satellites, to sell services, to reinvent the human condition by making Homo sapiens a multiplanetary species. Package holidays for plutocrats were not part of the plan.

  As a provider of practical services to industry and government, SpaceX has succeeded beyond almost all expectation. In the ten years since September 2008, when, at its fourth attempt, SpaceX finally launched its first satellite, the company has gone from triumph to triumph. It has more than 50 successful launches under its belt. The Falcon 9 that it was already investing almost everything in before the original, thrice-failed Falcon 1 finally flew—such faith!—now dominates the commercial-launch business. Unlike any of its competitors, it boasts fully reusable first stages that fly to the edge of space, come back down to a landing pad—or sometimes, a ship at sea—and get ready to do it again. The Falcon Heavy launcher, powered by three of those first stages yoked together, is the most powerful commercially developed booster ever; it may also be, in terms of dollars-charged-per-kilo-delivered-to-orbit, the cheapest. Since 2012 a growing squadron of crewless Falcon-9-launched space capsules, called Dragons, has been taking supplies up to the International Space Station on a regular basis. In early 2019 a reusable version of the Dragon capable of carrying seven astronauts on the same journey made its debut. In a decade the company has developed capabilities which were previously the preserve of superpowers.

  This is a triumph of private enterprise; an upstart disruptor with new ambitions, new technology and new agility, developing its know-how in-house at breakneck speed, takes on the incumbents and beats them hollow. SpaceX used the best technologies it could find or imagine rather than the ones others had made do with before; it tried to continuously improve what it was doing; it brought the best of what Silicon Valley does to space technology.

&n
bsp; But it is not a triumph of private enterprise alone. After the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the United States no longer had a way of getting cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station and back. And it had been decided that rather than develop a new government spacecraft for the purpose, the agency would encourage the development of commercial crew-transport services which it would then be able to buy. SpaceX was one beneficiary of this approach; another was Orbital Sciences, now part of Northrop Grumman, which developed a spacecraft called Cygnus for the purpose. The Cygnus, though, unlike the Dragon, is not reusable, and there will never be a crewed version of it.

  This buying-services-from-industry approach—a new departure for NASA—was a tremendous success. NASA invested a bit under $400m in the Falcon 9 and Dragon, paid out in increments as SpaceX crossed 40 separate “milestones”. According to an internal estimate, for NASA to have developed the rocket itself in the way it has in the past would have cost it $4bn. The same approach is now being applied to the agency’s resurgent Moon programme. Small American companies such as Moon Express, Astrobotic and Marston Aerospace, with plans to take payloads to the lunar surface for paying customers, as well as for their own purposes, are competing for grants from NASA that will help them develop their lunar landers. In 2019 they will be bidding for contracts to deliver payloads to the Moon for the agency. The promise of steady cash from this anchor tenancy has already put them on a firmer footing.

  If Washington wanted to procure human missions to the Moon in the same way, SpaceX could, in principle, provide surface-to-surface service in a few years with relatively little extra hardware. An architecture sketched by Robert Zubrin requires just two new vehicles. The first is a cargo carrier that you might see as being a bit like a flatbed truck. It would combine, more or less, the roles of the third stage of a Saturn V—the stage that put the command module and LM on their trajectory to the Moon—and the LM. Launched on a Falcon Heavy, this flatbed would be capable of lifting eight tonnes of cargo from low Earth orbit to the surface of the Moon.

  The second new spacecraft is something like the ascent stage of the Apollo LM, but with a bigger propulsion system. Empty, this NewLM weighs two tonnes; full, it weighs about eight. Those six tonnes of propellant would give the NewLM enough delta-v to get itself up off the Moon and back into a low Earth orbit.

  A bare-bones mission using Mr Zubrin’s architecture—which he calls Moon Direct—starts with a crewless but fully fuelled NewLM being put on one of the flatbeds and lifted to low Earth orbit by a Falcon Heavy. A Falcon 9 then launches a Dragon with a couple of people on board. The Dragon docks with the NewLM on the flatbed, and the astronauts cross over from one spacecraft to the other. The flatbed takes the now-crewed NewLM off to the Moon; the empty Dragon stays behind in orbit.

  A few days later the flatbed touches down on a grey lunar plain. The astronauts get out and do their stuff. When they are done, they blast off back to low Earth orbit in the NewLM. There they dock again with their Dragon capsule, get back into it and head home. The crowd goes wild.

  A two-tonne NewLM would not provide the astronauts with much by way of comfort, equipment and provisions. But an eight-tonne habitation module, or “hab”, would. If you want the mission to be more ambitious, send out an empty eight-tonne hab first on a flatbed of its own and have your astronauts land their one next to it. Send out a couple more and you have yourself a little moonbase.

  Such Falcon-Heavy-enabled missions sound quite doable, quite cheap, potentially quite productive and possibly quite popular. But they fit neither Mr Musk’s agenda nor NASA’s.

  Having developed a commercially viable system for reaching low Earth orbit, Mr Musk is on the road to Mars. SpaceX plans no further upgrades to its Falcon 9s or Dragons; the Falcon Heavy may fly only a couple of times. Instead, the company is concentrating on something which was until late 2018 known with a mix of foul-mouthed fancy and technical accuracy as the BFR.* The BFR is now officially called the Starship, but I suspect that many will continue to think of it as the BFR for quite some time.

  Developing this new rocket is much more challenging than developing a lunar flatbed or a NewLM. It is a fully reusable two-stage system more powerful than the Saturn V, and one that needs a life support system capable of providing more astronaut-days of life in space without resupply than the International Space Station ever has.

  In the end-2018 version of the design, the booster stage can lift a 100-tonne second-stage spaceship into low Earth orbit. The tanks on that spaceship will be more or less empty when it gets there. Four more such launches, using second stages kitted out as tankers, will be needed to fill up the orbiting spaceship with the methane and liquid oxygen it needs to take a fairly large crew to Mars. When it gets to Mars, the spaceship will land next to a chemical plant sent there in advance to turn Martian carbon dioxide and water into the methane and oxygen the spaceship needs to get back to Earth.

  The Moon would obviously be much easier. With just a single refuelling after launch, Mr Musk’s spaceship could land 100 tonnes on the Moon and still have enough propellant in its tanks to get back to Earth.

  You might think that NASA, mandated as it is to go forth and exploit the Moon, increasingly happy as it is to procure services from private industry, would be a source of judicious risk-sharing assistance to the development of this magnificent beast, as it was to the Falcon 9.

  But NASA is building a big rocket of its own: the Space Launch System, or SLS. It is descended from something originally conceived of, under President George W. Bush, as a way of launching both Moon missions and the components of Mars missions. Fourteen years of development have cost, to date, something like $20bn. By the time the SLS can take to the skies routinely, if it ever does, that $20bn is expected to have grown to $30bn. It is an abomination.

  When the mooncalf SLS first takes off, it will be powered by space-shuttle engines. Not engines of the same design as the space shuttle’s. Used engines taken out of the three retired space-shuttle orbiters and refurbished. The thrust provided by four of those engines will be augmented by stretched versions of the strap-on boosters that were also part of the space shuttle’s design. In an upgraded version, these strap-ons could be replaced by a new design using engines that are basically Saturn F-1s. The second stage will, at first, use an evolved version of the first oxygen-hydrogen engine the United States ever developed. On top of the stack will be a space capsule, Orion, of genuinely new design. That said, it is quite like an Apollo command module with more room for the crew, more capabilities in its service module and solar power—or, to put it another way, like the crewed version of the Dragon, but more expensive.

  There is nothing wrong with using tried-and-true technology to get to orbit. But building a non-reusable system that will cost about $1bn a launch to do so in the age of the Falcon Heavy, let alone the BFR, is perverse. Orbit, though, is not the sole, or even the primary, purpose of the SLS. The $2bn or so spent on it every year keeps von Braun’s heirs at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, gainfully occupied, along with a large number of private-sector contractors there and elsewhere. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama and various of his colleagues find this congenial. When President Barack Obama’s administration tried to stop NASA from building big rockets, the Senate would not let it. Though it is not strictly necessary, the senators would like the SLS eventually to have something to do; even Mr Shelby would baulk at simply lining the things up on the bluffs above the Tennessee River like Easter Island statues. So, they have assured it a role. For the time being, NASA’s plans for returning people to the Moon are centred on the SLS.

  If the government were to give up on the SLS, the BFR would be perfectly positioned to mop up NASA contracts for future Moon-taxi services, just as the Falcon 9 and Dragon did for space station supply runs. The fact that, since Mr Musk unveiled the BFR’s design in 2016, it has been refined in such a way as to make its capabilities almost identical to those of the fully developed
SLS, suggests that SpaceX is quite aware of this. But the implicit offer of something better and cheaper than what the government is building for itself is one that, for the moment, the government believes it can continue to refuse.

  This is not just because of the Senate’s love for the SLS. As a matter of strategy, the government does not want to be left with a monopoly provider of the launch services it deems necessary. Many in Washington—especially, I believe, in national security circles—see Mr Musk as something of a flake. It took a long time for the Defense Department to give SpaceX access to the lucrative market for launching spy satellites which is the purview of the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Just as the government bought space station resupply flights using the Cygnus as well as the Dragon, so the Dragon contract for taking astronauts to the station is paired with one for Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, an Orion-lite vessel designed to do the same job. The idea that the BFR should be America’s only super-heavy-lift system is apparently quite disturbing to some policymakers, even though a super-heavy-lift capability has no obvious national security applications.

  Without government support of the sort that helped SpaceX in the past, the development of the BFR, which Mr Musk sees as an outlay of about $5bn, seems too much for the company’s coffers. Successful though the Falcon-based launch business is, it is unlikely to provide that big a cash flow, and its market does not have that much near-term room for growth. SpaceX has ambitious plans for a huge new constellation of communication satellites that may one day deliver many billions of dollars. But at the moment this is a competitor for investment that could otherwise go into the BFR rather than a cash cow to exploit.

  Hence a new interest, on Mr Musk’s part, in the Moon. When he first talked about the possibility of flying a BFR spaceship to the Moon, his tone was more dutiful, or indeed embarrassed, than enthusiastic. “It’s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now,” he told an audience of the faithful. “What the hell’s going on?” It was vintage we-were-promised-the-Moon entitled orphan stuff. Mr Maezawa’s scheme, though, offers something with more immediate charm than one day making up for the absence of the moonbase someone else should have taken care of. It offers SpaceX a way to get some development money for the BFR, an early version of which will send him and his artists on their way. Mr Musk has said, “Mr Maezawa is paying a lot of money that would help with the ship and its booster.”