And he does not require the whole system. #dearMoon’s free return trajectory uses so little fuel that the spaceship would require no in-orbit refuelling. Nor would it need a life support system as ambitious as that required for the long flight to Mars. It could be a preliminary, stripped-down version.
Mr Maezawa’s down payment on its own is not going to pay for the BFR’s development. A few more such missions, though, might make a significant contribution. Someone excited by the prospect of putting together a landing party of artists or of others might be able to do so for a billion. A simple moonbase could probably be had for less than has been spent on the SLS to date. No one should bet on #dearMoon actually taking off in 2023. But even a slower-than-promised Moon programme from SpaceX would probably bring about the Return before a programme based on the SLS, and before the Chinese, too.
AND SPACEX IS NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN. JEFF BEZOS, THE founder of Amazon, one of the world’s first trillion-dollar companies, is at the time of writing the richest person in the world. Since 2000 he has been regularly investing slivers of his wealth in Blue Origin, a company that builds rockets. Its first, New Shepard, is a small reusable rocket not unlike the first stage of a Falcon 9, though with only one engine it is considerably less capable. New Shepard is designed to launch a capsule in which tourists can enjoy trips above the atmosphere like those offered by Virgin Galactic.* If one or both of them launches its first passengers on July 20th 2019, I would not be remotely surprised.
New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, whose suborbital trip in the first Mercury spacecraft, Freedom 7, made him the first American in space. Blue Origin’s first orbital rocket, a mostly reusable system which is intended for launch in 2021, is the New Glenn; John Glenn, in Friendship 7, was the first American into orbit. The New Glenn will be capable of launching a bit more than a Falcon 9 and rather less than a Falcon Heavy.
After that, Blue Origin plans something in the super-heavy-lift category. The company calls it New Armstrong.
Blue Origin’s accomplishments to date lag far behind those of SpaceX. It has launched nothing into orbit; it has made more or less no money. But it is clearly technically competent—the New Shepard has flown nine times apparently flawlessly—and Mr Bezos is a relentless man. He has talked of investing $1bn or so in Blue Origin every year in perpetuity. Unlike Mr Musk, he is not bewitched by Mars or unduly worried about humanity’s eggs-to-basket ratio. Instead, he hopes to take part in, or indeed lead, an industrial revolution in space like the one which Gerard O’Neill and others outlined in the 1970s and 1980s.
Mr Bezos talks of a future a few decades hence in which a million people live in orbit, at least for some of their time, running industries that no longer have a place on Earth. In this great inversion, the economic activities that were once seen as central, the activities of making and muscle, become peripheral, and the Earth they circle is restored, through means not immediately made clear, to some mosaic of wilderness, park, golf course and garden city, a site not of production but simply of delivery.
Delivery is a business Mr Bezos knows well. And until there is stuff made or mined in space ready to deliver to Earth, Blue Origin will deliver Earthly stuff to space—not just to orbit with New Glenn but also to the surface of the Moon, using a vehicle called Blue Moon. It is designed to go into space either on a New Glenn or on some other company’s rocket—one of ULA’s, perhaps, or even the SLS—and land four and a half tonnes on the surface of the Moon. That is enough for it to carry a small return vehicle that could get samples back to Earth or low Earth orbit.
In late 2018 Blue Origin and a number of other concerns, including the European Space Agency and Airbus, the biggest European aerospace company, announced that they were setting up a new competition called “The Moon Race”. Start-ups and small companies will compete with designs and programs to meet four challenges: to make something from lunar materials, to isolate a bottle of lunar water, to bring light to the lunar night and to grow a plant in a lunar greenhouse. The winning proposals will get money for prototyping; the best prototypes, money for development; the best developed plans, money for building hardware. The overall winners will be launched to the Moon in 2024.
Despite the name, the Moon Race is not a race to the Moon. There has already been one of those this century, and it was at best only a heavily qualified success. Announced in 2007, the Google Lunar X Prize offered $20m to the first company to land a rover on the Moon and send back high-definition video, with a variety of smaller prizes for achievements on the way to that goal. Although the original deadline was relaxed, no one won it; in early 2018, the prize was cancelled. Some of the competitors, though, are running still; SpaceIL, which is behind the Israeli mission launched in early 2019, and iSpace, the Japanese team which plans to launch an orbiter in 2020 and a lander in 2021, are Google Lunar X Prize veterans, as are MoonExpress and Astrobotic in the United States.
Instead of a race to the Moon, the Moon Race is a race to get things done on the Moon. Getting there is part of the prize, not the object of the competition. As such it marks the beginning of the commoditization of access to the Moon. By the mid-2020s, there should be a number of companies capable of taking cargo to the Moon and providing it with electricity and communication links once there. If the market looks good—if funding bodies will pay for lunar-surface science, if investors will pay for scouting out of resources, if enough rich enthusiasts just want to do stuff—then missions which bring something back will be feasible, too. From the late 2020s or early 2030s there should be a number of super-heavy-lift vehicles capable of placing ships on the Moon’s surface that are able to get back to low Earth orbit, not to mention small habs. If the BFR lives up to its billing, that could happen sooner; but even if the BFR F’s up, it seems a fair bet that New Armstrong or the Long March 9 will get the job done.
And once reusable rockets can reliably get robots and humans to the Moon, humans and robots will go.
Not just robots and humans paid for by governments or patrons of the arts. Private people, private robots, with private plans. The success of SpaceX, the promise of Blue Origin and the boom in innovative small satellite companies supported by the sort of venture capital that built Silicon Valley’s semiconductor and software industries have created a groundswell of enthusiasm for freelance Moon exploration and indeed colonisation. Concrete plans fostered by this enthusiasm are not, as yet, fully formed or fully public. But there is an ambition for the Return which is more than just aspiration and speculation. There is a growing number of entrepreneurs with experience of doing things in space for far less than such things used to cost, along with a growing number who have billions to spend and some universe-denting yet to do. Between them they look likely to play a big role in the Moon’s near future. This could be a great opening up not just of the Moon but also of space more generally.
It seems certain that more people will go into space and more companies will try to do things there. At the same time, you might worry that there could also be something of a closing down in the way that the process is being undertaken.
Elon Musk has led the most successful spacecraft development programme since Apollo; as “Chief Designer” he is said to have mastered much of SpaceX’s engineering detail himself and has kept its technological developments in line with well-articulated long-term aims; he has put together a team that is able to do his very demanding bidding and has facilitated that team’s consistent success. It is a truly extraordinary achievement. That Robert Downey Jr. has talked of seeing Mr Musk as a model for his performance as Tony Stark, “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, might make you cringe—Mr Musk’s almost endearingly stilted cameo in “Iron Man 2”, partly filmed at the SpaceX factory, certainly will—but it is not all that much of a stretch. He does not have superpowers. But his technology has superempowered him to the extent that his decisions might affect history.
He is also a prick. Not an irredeemable arseho
le, though he has recently looked more like one than he used to, but someone who mocks people in no place to fight back, who responds to reasonable requests with unreasonable disdain, whose self-indulgence, sometimes charming, can be gratingly self-satisfied; someone who seems willing to despise without troubling to understand, someone too easy with sycophancy and too scornful of critics. The blatant uneasiness at some public events; the maladroitness; the urge to protect things, an urge that one cannot help but trace to the damage he has talked of suffering from an abusive father: all these complicate the picture. They call forth in me, for what it is worth, a qualified affection alongside my great admiration for his achievement and my dislike of much of his recent behaviour. But for all that, and despite the fact that he has been friendly and engaged on the occasions when we have talked, he is still a prick.
I am certain that Mr Musk sees his Martian goals as altruistic. At the same time, allied with what the public knows and suspects of his character, they give people cause to worry. The idea of preserving a multiplanetary humanity from threats to the Earth is easily understood as providing a bolthole for yourself, along perhaps with your friends.
Mr Bezos (whom I have met only once—at a lunch in the 1990s we chatted briefly about science fiction stories that deal with the end of the world) is clearly more disciplined than Mr Musk. In putting his own money into buying and reviving the Washington Post, without as far as can be seen seeking to influence its agenda, he did a service to America and the world.* And in Amazon he has built a company that provides services I use on a disturbingly regular basis, all the while guiltily admiring those of my friends who, despising the company’s readiness to minimise its tax burden, choose to buy things from merchants whose size and attitude they prefer.
To the extent that I can judge, Mr Bezos sees himself, like Mr Musk, as well motivated. His vision for the future might be construed as simply commercial, a plan for cosmic duopoly in which Blue Origin owns the infrastructure of the world above while Amazon delivers its bounty to the world below. But that does not seem to be his motivation. He seems to me a science fiction fan who internalized Heinlein, and O’Neill, and Greg Bear, and “Lucifer’s Hammer”, not to mention “The Man Who Sold the Moon”: bleeding Amazon to feed Blue Origin has a touch of the D. D. Harriman to it, even if it is being done considerably more sustainably. Through his application of new technological capabilities to business, he has realised the power to make some of the things in those stories happen. He thinks that will be good for humankind as well as fulfilling to him personally.
All that said, he has become the richest man in the world through the ruthless expansion of a company which acts in predatory and anti-competitive ways and which has long enjoyed the services of distribution-centre workers who find themselves pissing into bottles to avoid being penalized for the time taken to get to the toilet. One should not discount the possibility of prickishness.
George Bernard Shaw—who, on reading Arthur C. Clarke’s essay “The Challenge of the Spaceship”, applied for membership in the British Interplanetary Society at the age of 91—wrote in his “Maxims for Revolutionists” (1903) that:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I do not think this is a universal truth. Individuals are not, in the run of things, a major source of progress in themselves, and those who are rarely become so purely to rearrange the world to their requirements. But I do think Shaw captures something about some forms of change brought about by and through companies. I once worked at a company whose founder wished it to be revolutionary. Shaw’s maxim was quite prominently displayed on the desk of one of his co-founders, something to point to while rolling your eyes after a particularly unreasonable outburst. That “unreasonable man” meant, at least to some extent, “prick” was a given.
The people who get into space courtesy of billionaires need not share the foibles, the philosophies or the politics of those who open up the way. But if expansion into space is too strongly identified with, led by and reliant upon superempowered men who behave like pricks, it could lessen, sour or endanger the whole undertaking.
* In polite company, the F is held to still stand for “Falcon”.
* It is when such fripperies have been compared to SpaceX that Mr Musk’s animus on the subject has been most clearly expressed.
* As well as, obviously, to journalists like me.
EXPOSURE
THE EARTH IS PROTECTED. ITS AIRS AND WATERS HOLD IN THE warmth of day and summer to comfort it in night and winter; their cooling flow drains away excessive heat. Its atmosphere is a shield, too, turning incoming bodies from outer space into the harmless splendour of shooting stars and absorbing the harshest wavelengths of the Sun’s light. The magnetic field driven by currents in its molten core protects it from cosmic rays and solar wind. To travel beyond these protections to the Moon is to be exposed to the cosmos.
The exposure is not limited to the time spent travelling. Astronauts walking or driving across the cold-hearted Moon may have arrived—but they are still in space, still bombarded by swift matter and harsh energy and its extremes of temperature, still deprived of the worldly flows of a living world. The surface of the Moon bears witness to all those injuries and absences.
The constant drizzle of particle-breaking, glass-creating micrometeoroids changes the texture and colour of the regolith. It darkens, sub-millimetre crater by sub-millimetre crater, over the millions of years. Any freshly excavated material, like that which lances out in bright rays from craters like Tycho, will lose its lustre to this weathering. Tycho will be a much subtler feature on the full Moon in a billion years. But some other bright sunburst of un-weathered dust will in time take its decorative place.
The solar wind, that plasma of charged ions blown off the Sun, is another source of weathering. Thin hardly begins to do justice to its lack of substance; a cubic centimetre of the wind contains only about five ions, compared to 25 thousand million billion molecules in a cubic centimetre of air. It takes a few million years for a square kilometre of the Moon to pick up just a couple of grams from this wind. But thin as it is, the solar wind still packs a certain punch; its ions move even faster than the micrometeoroids do. Some of them bounce back into space, either still charged or transformed into neutral atoms by a fleeting interaction with the surface. Some stick around. They may be absorbed into the regolith as is. They may drive change.
Hydrogen ions—which make up more than 90% of the wind—may pick up oxygen. Sometimes, through this mechanism, they create water molecules. How much water is made this way, and where it ends up, has yet to be well understood. If the oxygen thus liberated comes from iron oxides, it can reduce those ores to unmodified iron. The thin layers of metallic iron thus built up make fine particles of moondust susceptible to magnetism.
The effects of the wind are made more complex by the Earth. Because the solar wind is composed of charged particles, and charged particles respond to magnetic forces, the Earth’s magnetic field sweeps much of the wind away; it flows round the Earth as water in a stream flows around a rock. Some of the wind, though, is captured and trapped within the magnetic field, creating a “magnetosphere” which girdles the planet above the atmosphere.
On the Earth’s sunward side this magnetosphere is compressed by the brunt of the wind; downstream, it is drawn out like a pennant in a sea breeze. Once a month, when the Moon is opposite the Sun in the Earth’s sky, and thus full, it passes through this wake. Its surface, normally bathed in the positively charged solar wind, is for a day or so buffeted instead by the negatively charged plasma of the Earth’s magnetotail.
As well as its wind, the Sun provides the Moon with light, including wavelengths that the Earth’s surface never sees, such as very-short-wavelength, and thus “hard”, ultraviolet radiation. This is powerful enough to knock electrons free from atoms, providing a static charge to th
e dayside as if it were amber rubbed with a cloth. The nightside is not thus charged. This explains the curious glow above the horizon recorded just before sunrise by the cameras on some of America’s Surveyor landers. Charged up by the ultraviolet, the lightest dust particles repel each other and thus levitate into the sunlight, a mineral mist rising above the morning horizon.
No humans on the surface have been in a position to see the ghostly electric fingers of the lunar dawn or to have their equipment whipped by the plasmas of the passing magnetotail. The Apollo landings were all on well-lit parts of a less-than-full Moon, with the Sun well up in the sky, but not fully overhead. During the Return, though, they will surely go back for longer—for whole lunar days and whole lunar nights. They will explore more widely, looking for places which provide exceptions to the simple and established rules of the lunar regolith: don’t move until you are hit; don’t permit flows of energy if you can possibly help it; don’t change.
- VII -
ON THE MOON
WHERE FIRST? THE OBVIOUS ANSWER IS THE POLES—THE subject of the paper on lunar-base siting by Mr Wingo that I read on the California train journey described in the introduction. But while the poles may be where the first humans go, their robot vanguard will explore more widely.
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