The case for landing near the ice is reinforced by the fact that if you have a single moonbase and a supply of fuel, all the rest of the Moon becomes easily accessible. As Robert Zubrin points out, the delta-v needed to get a NewLM lunar lander back from the Moon to low Earth orbit is also enough to have it take off from one place on the Moon, land at more or less any other place, take off a second time, and land again back where it started. You can repeat the procedure for some other destination as soon as you can scrounge together another six tonnes of propellant.
This is not the way that NASA is currently planning to do things. When, under President Obama, the space agency developed the idea of capturing a small piece of asteroid and studying it in space—an idea sold, in an unconvincing way, as preparation for a trip to Mars, and seen by many as an excuse for not committing to a Moon mission—it imagined building a small space station near the Moon to serve as the asteroid wranglers’ base. When President Trump’s pivot to the Moon saw the asteroid plan dumped, this Deep Space Gateway became the Lunar Orbiting Platform-Gateway, and its purpose changed to lunar exploration. Now it is just the Gateway. But it survives, as do most NASA programmes on which money has started to be spent. And it is still a bad idea.
The Gateway is a much smaller version of the International Space Station that is much farther away. The same partners are involved, at least so far. It is American led, but the Europeans have said they will provide some hardware, as have the Canadian and Japanese space agencies; whether the Russians will stay the course is hard to say. The power system is to be bought from the communications-satellite industry. The first habitable components are, in theory, to be launched in the mid-2020s by the SLS.
Thus, in assembling a space station from prefabricated components, the Gateway programme recapitulates something done more ambitiously two decades before, but this time on a smaller scale in a much less accessible orbit as a way of justifying the use of an otherwise pointless rocket which will probably not be ready on time.
Staging missions to the surface of the Moon from the Gateway makes them more complex than they would otherwise need to be but provides no clear benefit. Before the Gateway lost its asteroid rationale, few if any experts thought that a stopping-off point somewhere between low Earth orbit and the lunar surface was a useful addition to plans for lunar missions. The Gateway crew on board could, admittedly, control tele-operated rovers on the lunar surface with less of a time lag than if they were back on Earth. But as they twiddled their joysticks they would be soaking up a lot of cosmic radiation from which they could be protected by the nice regolith walls of a moonbase.
This is not to say that a spacefaring future will have no need of orbital infrastructure. If people, or their robots, are to do more things in Earth orbit—assemble large new satellites, repair ailing old ones, manufacture weird materials in microgravity, enjoy honeymoons with out-of-this-world views and microgravity sex, build space weapons that can shoot down other people’s satellites, disassemble small asteroids, whatever—they will benefit greatly from a set of depots where spacecraft in need of delta-v can pick up propellants. Going back down to Earth to refuel means having to spend about nine kilometres a second of delta-v just to get back to orbit. It also means that your spacecraft needs to be tough enough to withstand the stresses of re-entry and launch from Earth. Spacecraft that stay in space require less mass for their construction, and thus less propellant for a given amount of delta-v. Like the LM, they can be delightfully flimsy.
Propellant depots in orbit are, at the moment, the main export market imagined by the sort of companies and enthusiasts who talk about making a business out of lunar resources. The rationale is that it is a lot easier, in delta-v terms, to get to low Earth orbit from the surface of the Moon than it is from the surface of the Earth. One study by ULA estimates that fuel delivered to such a depot might be worth $3,000 a kilogram. A moonbase which exported 300 tonnes a year would thus be turning over the best part of a billion dollars. If you could build a bargain basement moonbase for $10bn or so, it might, if you squint a bit, pay little attention to the risks and cross your fingers, look like a potentially profitable proposition.
If you can do it at scale, you do not even need to burn any of the precious lunar fuel in order to export it. Imagine a factory on the Moon making little barrels with heat shields and tiny engines, filling them with propellant and throwing them towards the Earth with a mass driver like the ones that Gerard O’Neill popularised in the 1970s. The mass driver, being solar-powered, needs no fuel at all. The heat shield is used for aerobraking—skimming into and out of the Earth’s upper atmosphere so as to lose velocity without being subjected to the rigours of full-on re-entry. The barrel having thus slowed down, the little engine nudges it into low Earth orbit, where a fuel depot empties it of its burden. Its metal structure is sent back to the Moon to be reused or recycled.
Alternatively, create an orbiting tether like the one in the BOLAS mission, but longer and in a higher orbit. Then start it rotating around the centre of mass. With the right rate of rotation and the right length of tether in the right orbit, you can pick things up from just above the surface of the Moon when the tether is vertical and throw them towards the Earth as it swings up and around. If the throwing arm catches the returns, the system’s energy needs might be minimal.
This all means it is possible to export fuel from the Moon for quite a low marginal cost. But to do so in bulk, you need to invest a fair amount of capital—not just to mine the ice and volatiles and refine them but also to build your mass driver and its power plants, or put together your spinning tether system. And that is why the Earth, for all its delta-v handicap, looks likely to keep the Moon out of the fuel business. Both liquid oxygen and liquid methane are pretty cheap on Earth. The fact that you have to use a lot of them to lift a bit more of them into orbit is not the problem it might seem.
It has been suggested that, once the development has been done, the unit cost of a BFR might be somewhere in the region of $300m to $400m, which is what a big modern airliner costs. If you got 100 flights out of it, you would have a cost per launch of about $7m. If you chose to lift 150 tonnes of fuel to a low-Earth-orbit depot with that launch, you would be spending about $50 a kilo to get it there.
It is possible to imagine a moonbase might be a competitive source of low-Earth-orbit fuel at $3,000 a kilo. But at $50 a kilo you need an imagination that extends to unicorns and fairy dust. Obviously, the same might be said of a BFR that performs so miraculously well. But a system 50 times costlier would still undercut that price point quoted for fuel from the Moon.
Hence the fundamental paradox of commercial moonbase development. It is not really possible to build one without the low-cost ways to reach Earth orbit that systems like the BFR seek to offer. But if costs get that low, then the Earth will own the market for low-Earth-orbit fuel. If costs stay high, then maybe a moonbase can turn a profit on selling fuel. But if getting to orbit from Earth stays expensive, then people will not do it very much, and the market for on-orbit fuel will remain small.
If, like Gerard O’Neill, you can imagine a use for tens of thousands of tonnes of very cheap lunar materials in another orbit, then mining the Moon may make sense. If you can find something on the Moon that is economically transformative, the same might be true. But if you want the Moon to provide moderately high-margin goods which are readily available for launch from Earth, you will be disappointed.
The uses of space that have so far made money have all been Earth-centric—communications, remote sensing, navigation services. To the extent that space can support the industrial dreams of someone like Mr Bezos, this has to continue to be the case. That means that, contrary to the stance of the true believers, space will not be an alternative to the Earth, a step beyond it. It will be an extension of the Earth. And in that world, there may be little room for an economically relevant moonbase.
THE FACT THAT THEY MAY NOT BE APPEALING AS A SOURCE OF export earnings does not mea
n that the volatiles at the poles are not interesting. A moonbase with local access to water and other volatiles is a much sounder proposition than one which needs to be supplied with everything from Earth. That is why politics, too, argues for putting your first base at one of the poles, and possibly hastening to make the first crewed landing of the Return there. To do so would be a way to stake a claim.
The states party to the UN Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, agreed to keep space from becoming a place of national rivalry, recognising it instead as “a common province of mankind”. The treaty put no restrictions on going into space, as long as it was for peaceful purposes. The states retained sovereignty over any spaceships and extraterrestrial bases they might use to further those purposes, in the same way that their national law applied on their ships at sea or their bases on (similarly stateless) Antarctica. They also had to take responsibility for any spacecraft or bases owned by their citizens or launched from their territory. But they themselves had no right to claim sovereignty over any celestial body, or any part of one, whether by declaration, by occupation or by other means.
That meant the states could not claim mineral rights anywhere beyond the Earth. But what of non-states? Typically, the rights to exploit mineral resources are governed by national law, and without sovereign claims such law would not be settled. The problem was left to future treaties, conventions and protocols to sort out.
The Moon Treaty of 1978 was the first attempt to do so. When it came to resources, the Moon Treaty made the Moon “the common heritage of all mankind”, a status which precluded its exploitation for purely private gain. Any economic benefits flowing from the Moon had to be shared. The treaty recognised that the nations responsible for letting those benefits flow would have a special claim on them, but so would developing nations which had no way of competing for such resources. To redress, over the long haul, that lack of wherewithal, the treaty included the idea that the technologies which permitted such development should be shared, too. “The Moon Belongs to Everyone”, as the song has it.*
President Jimmy Carter’s administration wanted to ratify the Moon Treaty, and thus become bound by it. Proponents of private enterprise, in America and elsewhere, objected to it. One of the first campaigns the L5 Society undertook was to block the treaty’s ratification. Whether or not its efforts made a difference, the treaty did not get ratified. The Soviet Union refused to play ball, too. When the Moon Treaty struggled into force in 1984, its strictures bound only its 18 ratifying states, none of which had an independent space-launch capacity.
The terms of the Moon Treaty would not make commercial exploitation of lunar resources impossible. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed in 1982, applies the same concept of “the common heritage of all mankind” to resources on and below those parts of the seabed beyond continental shelves and territorial waters. This is one of the reasons why the United States Senate, despite being urged to do so by presidents of both parties, has never ratified the Convention on the Law of the Sea, either. But the convention’s application of the common-heritage principle does not preclude commercial development.
The Convention on the Law of the Sea created the International Seabed Authority as a way to spread the benefits of mining the ocean floor while seeking to maintain incentives for investment. The convention’s critics draw a direct line between the creation of this authority and the fact that, almost half a century after people first began to enthuse about ocean-floor resources such as manganese nodules, there are still none of them on the market; they blame rules, bureaucracy and parasitic expropriation. They may have a point. But an alternative, or at least complementary, view is that the technological innovation required was hard and the demand for sea-floor minerals not all that great. Today a number of companies are sending robots to the floor of the Clipperton Fracture Zone in the eastern Pacific to explore the possibilities of harvesting manganese nodules. The International Seabed Authority approved those efforts, is monitoring their environmental impact and will reap some of the eventual benefits, if any. But so will the companies. That is why they are doing it.
It might seem pretty fruitless for the states party to the Moon Treaty to set up a similar regime, given that none of the nations with the capability to get to the Moon are among them. And such a regime might stymie resource exploitation if it was poorly thought through, or if that was its intention. In other circumstances, though, a legal regime might encourage such developments. People making big investments normally like to do so on a firm legal footing, and an International Lunar Authority might provide such a thing. It could also serve what may become the important role of arbitrating between different interests.
Some examples. There are radio astronomers who want to build instruments on the lunar farside, the only place within light years that is permanently shielded from the Earth’s racous radio emissions. But other scientists on the farside, or for that matter ice miners in South Pole-Aitken basin, might rather like to use radios of their own. Who decides what they get to do?
Solar physicists have realised that just as today’s regolith preserves today’s solar wind, so past regoliths preserve solar winds of the past—which might be intriguingly different. Sampling parts of the maria where there is a stratigraphic sequence—where the top of a lava flow was pummelled into solar-wind-absorbing regolith, absorbed some solar wind and was then covered over by a second flow of lava, which produced a second layer of regolith, and so on—might provide a record of hundreds of millions of years of solar activity. But this laminated regolith might also store hydrogen and other goodies particularly well. If such sites are rare, do they get preserved for the scientists or exploited by the miners?
Until quite recently, such never-never problems only worried obsessives. But now the Return looks reasonably imminent. And the mapping of resources from orbit which has made the Moon look more promising in terms of resources has also made it look much smaller.
The Moon’s total area may be greater than Africa’s, but even generous estimates of the permanently shadowed regions at the poles give those of the North Pole, added together, an area just a little bigger than that of Gambia, the smallest nation on that continent; those of the South Pole are roughly the area of eSwatini, formerly Swaziland, the second smallest. Put another way, the combined cold traps of both poles cover slightly more ground than the Greater Houston metropolitan area. And if the six or so Peaks of Eternal Light that offer sunshine for more than 80% of the year cover an area greater than that of Houston’s six largest shopping malls, I’d be surprised.
The areas around the peaks and close to the shadows are thus in very short supply. They are also quite possibly subject to conflicting interests. The slowly accumulating volatiles there might be treated as an economic resource; they might also be treated as another valuable stratigraphic record, one recording impacts, and perhaps other processes, over the whole history of the solar system. And mining at one site might, if it produced a lot of stray vapour, contaminate others.
These are not necessarily big problems. eSwatini is only a tiny sliver of a country, but it is still quite a large place. More than a million people live there. Solar panels on Houston’s Galleria mall alone could provide tens of megawatts. But small problems are still problems, and when there is no way to settle them, they can grow. The Outer Space Treaty, by which every country which might get to the Moon is bound, gives science precedence over other activities. But it provides no mechanism for solving disputes over what is real science and what is an attempt to cover the land with something that has a specious scientific rationale simply in order to lay claim to it. Nor does it have a way of offering either relief or intervention.
In the past, it might have been possible to come to some sort of international agreement that would set up a framework for resolving disputes and allocating some sort of rights, whether under common heritage or some other principle, building on the Moon Treaty. It might just be a matter of registering limited claims to specific
areas for specific times and abiding by rules about contaminating other places. It might be something more profound, such as ruling one pole to be the place for exploiting the ice and the other the place for studying it. Either way, though, the world is less capable of such things than it was. International institutions are on the defensive, not stretching their capabilities. The United States, which invests more in space than any other country, has more capabilities in space than any other country and has more space-focused entrepreneurs and start-ups than any other country, has long had a distrust of treaties, in part due to the fact that their government can be sued by its citizens if the treaties are breached. The idea that American entrepreneurs who make it to the Moon should be able to exploit it for their own profit is not a remotely controversial one in Washington. Many Americans would see it as axiomatic.
But that does not necessarily mean that the Moon Treaty has no power. If China acceded to it, for example, and led a round of negotiations aimed at establishing a new lunar authority—an authority it would surely seek to dominate—it would become a much bigger issue. If India, France or Japan joined in the process, it would be bigger still. Jan Woerner, the director general of the European Space Agency, champions what he calls the “Moon village”, a vision of relatively small-scale settlement in which different public and private ventures co-operate, either on a shared site or in a more distributed way, in the development of a lasting human presence on the Moon. Common goals, common values, common technical standards: it is an appealing vision. It would surely be even more so in the presence of a clear, permissive legal structure.
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