The Moon

by Oliver Morton

  In practical terms, as mentioned before, an Earth-free sky is particularly attractive to radio astronomers. They have a particular goal: looking at the earliest universe using wavelengths which will

  not as a way of understanding the vast and inhuman universe, but as a way of understanding, through that universe, humans and the Earth.

  reveal otherwise invisible remnants of the cosmic inflation that begat the Big Bang. The wavelengths they need to do this are, on Earth, either blocked by the ionosphere or cluttered with very-high-frequency radio transmissions. Only on the lunar farside can they set up the array of antennae they need. They would be simple little things, aerials like those once seen on cars, but setting them up would be quite an undertaking. You would need perhaps a million of them, spread across the floor of a basin 100km across. There they would sit, listening to echoes of the creation of the universe while, elsewhere on the surface, robotic rovers look for the meteoritic vestiges of the early Earth.

  And the far side could also be a stepping stone. General Worden’s boss, the billionaire Mr Milner, is funnelling millions of dollars into the wild idea of “starshots”. Because light, though massless, has momentum, a laser beam exerts a force on things which it illuminates that is independent of the energy with which it heats them: specifically, a gigawatt of light provides six newtons of thrust, which is roughly the weight of a pint of beer on the Earth, or a fifth of a firkin on the Moon. Make a spacecraft of the thinnest reflecting foil, its payload just a square centimetre or so of microchip sensors, and an array of lasers which, combined, can produce 100 gigawatts could accelerate it to 20% of the speed of light in a few minutes. A hundred gigawatts is, admittedly, the laser-light equivalent of a large country’s electrical grid. But it is not all that much more than the power of the five F-1s that shouldered the weight of Apollo 11 in 1969. It is just that, in a starshot, those gigawatts accelerate something that weighs a few grams, not 3,000 tonnes.

  In the coming years, telescopes trained on exoplanets will seek in their dim light evidence of an off-balance, lively, Earthly atmosphere. Were they to find evidence of such a planet around one of the closest stars, a swarm of fifth-of-the-speed-of-light starshots would be able to reach such a wonder in just a few decades, once they and their launching laser had been developed. As they flew by their target they would be able to return new measurements, perhaps new pictures, of what Copernicanism always promised: another planet that is another living world, hanging gibbous or crescent in the darkness.

  It is a fantastic idea. It is also one that the team Mr Milner has been assembling may understand, from an engineering point of view, about as well as, say, the rocket pioneers Hermann Oberth and Robert Goddard understood the engineering of a Saturn V in the 1920s. Some aspects of a real Moonshot would have been beyond the early-20th-century pioneers—there were, in their time, no digital computers at all—and some of what a starshot would take is doubtless beyond today’s technology. But the basics of what Moonrockets might be were quite understandable to the pioneers working 50 years before those basics were made real. To bet against any starshots actually zipping off to Alpha Centauri or some other nearby star in the next 50 years would probably be quite smart. The Saturn V did not, after all, come about just because believers in spaceflight met the challenge, but because, in Clarke’s words, of other causes powerful people felt deeply. But it seems to me that to take the other side of the bet would not be entirely stupid.

  There is, though, a potential sticking point. Just as the rockets that Oberth lectured young Willy Ley about in the 1920s were good for the delivery of high explosives as well as for postal services and space travel, so there could be unsavoury uses for a 100-gigawatt array of lasers, especially if, for maximum efficiency, you put it up above the Earth’s atmosphere. Aimed at the stars, it is a magnificent engine. Aimed back down at Earth, it is a fearsome weapon, one that strikes at the speed of light and against which there is no defence. Not the sort of thing many would want in orbit.

  You might build it on the ground, and deal with the inefficiencies imposed by the atmosphere as best you could. But you might also build it in the one place where it can never be turned back to the surface of the Earth—the lunar farside. It gets as much solar power as anywhere else around these parts and has raw materials for solar cells and laser mirrors, at least.

  When people return to the Moon, for however long they do, most will look back. And that is proper.

  But some, perhaps, will look out. And that is proper too.

  * That boss of mine who brought about progress by being unreasonable loved it.

  * The phrase had been in jocular circulation as a fundamental principle of economics since the 1930s; Heinlein’s book fixed it in the lexicon of the anti-socialist right.

  * He did not mention Heinlein, nor did Milton Friedman when he used the phrase as a book title four years later.

  * “Mike” is short for Mycroft, as in the sedentary but brilliant Mycroft Holmes, but also evokes Michael, which means “He who is like God” and is the name of the Martian messiah in Heinlein’s most famous novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land”. Heinlein clearly reused the idea of a god called Mike knowingly.

  * Admittedly not a great response to a stray black hole.

  CODA

  THUNDER MOON

  July 19th 2016, Brevard County, Florida

  Shortly after sunset there had been juddering green stabs of lightning to the south, but by quarter to one in the morning there is nothing in the warm, wet air over Cape Canaveral but a thin patchwork of moonlit cloud. And then, precisely at the time it was meant to happen, there is something new—a sudden light on the horizon. A light that rises.

  I WROTE THOSE WORDS SITTING IN THE LOBBY OF THE HILTON at Cocoa Beach three hours or so after that light rose. As had been the case a month before on that downbound train in California, I was tired. But I was also wired.

  A couple of decades before, when we were having lunch in Colorado Springs—the city from which D. D. Harriman’s Moonrocket Pioneer took off—my friend John Logsdon, the leading historian of US space policy, asked me whether I had ever seen a rocket launch. I told him I hadn’t. He said that if I wanted to remain a dispassionate observer of the space programme I ought to keep it that way. If you see a launch, he told me, it changes you; it infects you.

  John is perhaps a little biased. The first launch he saw was that of Apollo 11—a less sudden light, but a far grander one. As he says, when men walk past you in the morning who will be on their way to the Moon that afternoon, that is something special.

  Not all launches have quite that effect. But for a while I took him seriously enough to resist going out of my way to witness a launch. And then, for a while, I stopped writing about space, and so the matter didn’t arise. The Falcon 9 taking a Dragon from Cape Canaveral to the space station that night was the first launch I saw.

  And John, it turns out, is right. When you watch a 550-tonne machine taller than a 20-storey building throw itself into the sky, it does make you feel different about such undertakings. Quite how right, though, I cannot really tell, because of what happened afterwards.

  Before coming to that I should mention two things. One is that the reason I quote what I wrote that night (it would later be the beginning of a piece in The Economist) is partly because of what it misses out. There was not nothing in the sky but cloud; if there had been nothing, the clouds would not have been moonlit. The Moon was full and high behind our backs as I and other journalists watched the event, shining on the ground around us as well as in the clouds above. I think I thought of mentioning it in the piece. But just the fact of its light seemed quite enough for the atmosphere I wanted. The Moon itself, film-screen bright, was peripheral.

  The other thing was that Michael Elliott, a friend of mine, had died a few days before.

  In the moments after the launch, the Falcon 9 rose straight and sure into the sky. Its noise had yet to reach us, but the torchlight of its flame filled out the ni
ght, washing the Moon-silvered clouds with a brass burnish from beneath as it rose towards them. Then it was through them, faster, leaning away from the vertical, stretching its legs. Above the most cloying air, it was time for it to pile on the easterly delta-v the Dragon needed to reach orbit. Filtered through the clouds, the receding flame—nine flames in one—still looked cutting-tool sharp.

  After 160 seconds, the light went out, then flickered faint again before fading. The stages had separated. The single engine of the second stage would add the rest of the delta-v the Dragon needed. The first stage had done its part. Its fires banked, it had become invisible. But its night was not yet over.

  High above the Atlantic it slewed round like a car drifting into a curve. It relit three engines, now pointed away from us, to kill its easterly speed. As the Earth turned beneath it, the first stage started to fall back towards the Cape. A couple of minutes later, when its engines lit again to protect it from the thickening atmosphere with a heatshield of fire, it was falling at 4,500kph. Stubby grid-fins of titanium kept its trajectory true.

  It slowed, but still it fell, still well above the speed of sound. Then, at about ten kilometres, the engines fired for a fourth and final time. The clouds were lit again from above, the Moon again outshone. The return had none of the stateliness of the rise; the flame fell with swift and certain purpose, like the stroke of a great piston. As it reached the ground a flat, fiery flower spread out from its base. Four landing legs the size of oaks smacked into the concrete of its landing pad, much closer to us than the launch pad was. A second later, the double whip crack of its sonic boom provided an almost-too-perfect punctuation to the end of the story. The watchers cheered and clapped.

  One of the reasons that I cannot say for sure that the launch changed me is that I think the landing changed me more. It was so deliberate; not power unleashed, but power applied, power sharp and sure. I remembered a man I used to know who went on to run a launcher programme for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency describing his apprenticeship as a carpenter to me, trying to convey the balance of power, practice, precision and just letting the tool do what it was made for that allowed an expert to drive a seated nail into wood with a single hard-enough-no-harder blow, the momentum of the hammer perfectly transferred into the wood piercing of the nail. That was what the landing Falcon was like: the right tool, right skill, right result. A conclusion: not, though, a full stop.

  Eighteen months later, that same first stage, B1023, was back at the Cape as one of the two flanking boosters on the first and as yet only Falcon Heavy launch: the one which sent Elon Musk’s red sports car out to the orbit of Mars. This time I was watching on television, but the thrill of seeing it and its comrade land again, within a few kilometres and a second of each other, with the same sudden supersonic-to-stationary grace, took me back to that night.

  B1023 has since been retired; newer Falcon boosters are more reliably reusable, it seems. I suppose B1023 has been scrapped. Or recycled.

  After the landing, the other reporters headed back to the Cape proper for the post-launch press conference. I wandered around Port Canaveral, unsuccessfully looking for a bar and strangers to say “wow—yes—I know” with, before heading back to the Hilton, still too energized to sleep. Hence sitting in the lobby at four in the morning trying to get an encounter with the edge of space down in words. And then stepping out to look at the Moon sinking in the west.

  I MENTIONED MIKE ELLIOTT’S DEATH FOR THREE REASONS. ONE is that it was part of how it was to be me that night. The death had not been unexpected—he had been suffering from various cancers for some time—but it was sudden. Just a couple of days before, I had learned, there had been a big party held for him at which he had been in fine fettle. It was a party I might have gone to had I known about it. I had been in Washington, DC, on the right day. But I had not thought to call him or any mutual friends. Not the worst missed opportunity—we had seen each other not that long before—but still bitter, worth a little self-reproach on top of the sadness. “How many more times will you watch the Moon rise?” Paul Bowles asked. You will probably never know.

  Another is that, in July 1999, Mike had asked me to write a cover package for Newsweek International pegged to the 30th anniversary of the landing at Tranquility Base. Its coverline was “Life in Space: Thirty Years After the Moon Landing, the Universe Looks More Friendly”. It argued that, in the 1970s, “Earthrise” and the lack of any signs of life on desolate Mars had killed all hope of seeing life beyond the Earth. In the 1990s the discovery of numerous exoplanets round other stars and of oceans under the ice of at least one of the moons of Jupiter, along with the belief that Mars had been more hospitable in its youth, had made things look more promising.

  The piece said nothing at all about the Moon as a future destination or about the possibility of a human return. It looked on to Mars, and to great exoplanet-seeking telescopes in orbit, and to probes that might sink through the ice of Europa to study the oceans beneath. It offered the idea of a living universe more as a consolation than as an invitation, an abstraction not a destination. The practical, possible but peripheral Moon was not part of the package.

  It never made the cover. I spent a week in New York putting the pages together. But shortly after I took off from Newark, the plane taking me home to London passed unknowingly over the wreckage of the plane that John Kennedy junior had been flying from Fairfield, New Jersey, to Martha’s Vineyard. By the time we landed in London, the Newsweek staff was busy rebuilding the magazine, remaking the cover. A Kennedy had died again and the world had eclipsed the sky. Why should it not? The sky wasn’t going anywhere.

  The third reason was a fond memory of walking along a Long Island beach with Mike the morning after a friend’s wedding a few years later, his daughters’ red hair blowing in the wind, talking of everything, in communion.

  THE NEXT DAY IN COCOA BEACH I WAS AT A LOOSE END. I HAD booked an extra night before flying out because, everyone told me, not booking an extra night was a sure-fire way to guarantee the launch you were covering would be delayed. In the late afternoon I started to walk along the beach, thinking of everything—of death, definitely, and of space and of the spectacle of the night before, but of Larry Hagman, too—I had just passed a street called I Dream of Jeannie Lane—and of champagne in the morning and churches in Norfolk and waves, and in-laws, and what to have for supper. The Sun’s warmth was lifting the sea to the sky, the cooler air at height condensing its vapours into droplets, ice and energy, stirring the atmosphere into huge clouds of deep, subtle pastel colours out over the ocean, hazy but shapely clouds that seemed more distant than they could possibly have been, vaster, it seemed, than storm clouds but gentler. Clouds through which to fly the Millennium Falcon to a floating city, their colours deepening as the Sun slid down.

  Everything seemed large but tender. The waves had a soft rhythm, the tide was out, every song that shuffled into my headphones seemed an apt delight. And as the Sun sank in the soft sky, the Moon rose, unseen at first, a light not sudden, but when noticed perfect, washed out in the remains of the daylight, familiar, strange, tied to the water that would follow it up the sand as if by a wish. It climbed and shrank, brightening and hardening into the just-now darkening sky.

  I was not alone, and did not feel alone—it is a beach where people stroll and play, and plenty of them were doing so. But I felt a strange, solitary peace, and a smooth, uplifting joy, one that had something to do with loss and something to do with sure return and something to do with hope and something to do with the depth the sky holds within itself. Something to do with that light that rose the night before. The Moon was not central to it, because it never is. But it was there, it was part of it, it mattered.

  And it was beautiful.

  “Moanin’”, by Art Blakey, shuffled on to my headphones, a cough in the mike, piano sure and percussive, sax breathy, sprung, sliding as if brushed, then popping eight phrases in, irresistible in the moment, the trumpet jumpin
g as high as the sky. I stopped, took off my shoes, cued the track back to its beginning. Grinning and turning, changing and sure to change again, I danced in the surf to the rising Moon.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THIS BOOK HAS BENEFITTED FROM THE TIME AND GENEROSITY of many people, during both its long mostly unwitting latency and its somewhat frenetic execution. For various sorts of information, inspiration and practical help, I would like to thank Oded Aharonson, Eric Asphaug, Stewart Brand, Holly Jean Buck, Niall Campbell, Andrew Chaikin, Carissa Christensen, Charles Cockell, Ashley Conway, Olaf Corry, Ian Crawford, Martin Elvis, Jeff Foust, Mike French, Trevor Hammond, Bill Hartmann, Jim Head, Tracy Hester, Scott Hubbard, Laura Joanknecht, Roz Kaveney, John Kessel, Jeff Lewis, Simon Lewis, Simon Lock, John Logsdon, Neil Maher, Will Marshall, Chris McKay, Jay Melosh, Farah Mendelsohn, Philip Metzger, Clive Neal, Ted Nordhaus, Ted Parson, Stephen Pumfrey, Bob Richards, Paul Robbins, Stan Robinson, Simon Schaffer (as always), Jean Schneider, Rusty Schweickart, Sarah Stewart, Timothy Stubbs, Bron Szerszynski, David Waltham, Dennis Wingo, Nick Woolf, Pete Worden and Kevin Zahnle.

  Three meetings held during 2018 were extremely helpful to me in shaping the book’s themes: I am very grateful to the organisers of and participants at the 49th Lunar and Planetary Science Symposium in Houston and its preceding Brown/Vernadsky micro symposium; to Daniel Zizzamia and the participants at the Planetary Designs workshop at Harvard; and to Bron Szerszynski, Katarina Damjanov and the participants at the Multiplanetary Futures meeting at the University of Lancaster. “The Moon—From Inner Worlds to Outer Space”, an exhibition at the Louisiana Museum curated by Marie Laurberg, provided a new spurt of inspiration very late in the process.