Space Pioneering: the passion and dream continue! (But leave the dusty Moon to others.)

I just returned from the International Space Development Conference at the LAX Sheraton in Los Angeles, where I had the honor to MC the awards luncheon, presenting to my friend (and NIAC colleague) Frank Drake the Pioneer Award for profound contributions to humanity’s outward vision.

Other award recipients and honored guests included Jeff Bezos, Freeman Dyson, Buzz Aldrin… and Toni Weiskopf, legendary publisher of Baen Books, presented the Baen short story award winners.

photo by Nadia Drake

The day before, I gave a talk about Defense and Potential Conflict in Space at Northrup-Grumman and - with my son Ben - got a fairly close look at the James Webb Space Telescope, being assembled for launch soon. (We’ll all be biting nails!)

The evening before that, I gave a talk about Our Place in the Universe at UCLA for the annual Julian Schwinger Colloquium.

And next week I fly to Washington meetings for the NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) and at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Plus an event for the nascent DC Museum of Science Fiction.   (See my calendar at http://www.davidbrin.com)

So, all in all, a very spacey month! 

Which leads me to zoom back to something almost every space enthusiast (and I love you guys) seems to accept romantically, while ignoring actual facts. I'm talking about the self-destructive allure of the USA getting mired in a “return to the moon.”

== Building Mars abilities, so we can stay ==

For starters, I have nothing against Mars. In fact, I think it is a fine, mid-distant objective - a lure to entice us onward. An "inspirational goal," according to Scott Pace of the National Space Council. Alas, as a near term goal, it has problems. A rushed Mars program would have to use the Apollo Method, seeking a single, short-term victory lap. 

Compare two kinds of expeditions, to the top of Mt. Everest... or to the South Pole. In both cases, you spend 90% of your time going back and forth, building a base camp that lets you build an advance camp, that lets you supply an assault camp. With Everest, the aim is tourism and glory. When it comes to the South Pole, the U.S. wasn't first; but when we went, we stayed. And the scientific benefits have been huge. Still, everything needed by humans at the pole must be supplied from "Earth."

Mars expeditions will only make sense when we have truly sophisticated methods. Foremost, ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization) facilities, not only on the Martian surface, but also on Phobos, that can extract and store volatiles, like water, for use not only as fuel, but also in closed life support (CELS) systems.

(Note: like everyone else, I am dazzled by Elon’s spectacular plans for skyscraper rockets! These would up-end the economics and timing in terrific ways. But the order in which things should be done does not change. We still need ISRU and CELS and some asteroid work before Martian trips will be sustainable for reasons other than glory.)

If ISRU provides tons and tons of water (and oxygen and fuel) stored at both locations, then the cost of repeated (instead of one-off) Mars missions plummets and their odds of success go far higher. This effect quintuples if there are also automated greenhouses, using that water to grow food. (Indeed, Elon's original idea was to send a greenhouse to Mars  To demonstrate how CELS will bring the dream closer.)

Those techniques (ISRU etc.), happen to be the same ones we can develop by doing asteroids as our near future project.  So, Mars lovers truly should also be asteroid lovers, especially since Phobos is the key to Mars, and Phobos may be a volatiles-rich asteroid!

== Back to a … dustbowl? ==

None of this can be said about the sterile, empty, and — at least for now — useless lunar surface.

A deliberately provocative assertion. Can I back it up?  

First, recall how I cited Scott Pace, a few paragraphs back. Here he explains the New Presidential Space Policy, that the U.S. should Return to Moon. By all means listen in.  Better yet, get and read "The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement," cited in the image you see here. 

Alas, though, I see no reason to back down.

1- Other than small amounts of polar ice, there is nothing of tangible value on the lunar surface. Nothing. Let me repeat that. Not one thing. 

Truly. Try asking any of the lunar guys to back up their arm-waved “resource” justifications, by showing us any actual, actual lunar “ores.” Except possibly for scattered meteoritic iron, such ores are not even theoretically possible. 

(See below an addendum explaining "ores" and how they came about on Earth and asteroids... and why I'll eat a bug, if you find any high quality ores on the moon.)

Or demand that they justify their assertion that the moon is an ideal “way-station” on the way to Mars.  It sounds logical, but it’s not true! Not at all. Not even a little bit. The numbers make that clear.

2- What about that lunar ice?  My doctoral advisor James Arnold predicted polar ice! I rejoice that it’s there… 

…and it belongs to future lunar colonists. For us to rape them by stealing their water for rocket fuel would be a crime, especially since the water and/or fuel would have to be hauled out of a gravity well, with a polar penalty! None of which is true for the vastly richer sources of water elsewhere.

3- Andy Weir (author of “The Martian”) wanted to write about a lunar colony in ARTEMIS. He wracked his brain for any economic justification for such a colony, and found only one reason to make a near term lunar settlement: tourism.

It’s why the U.S. went, as a nation, in the 60s!  It’s why (symbolic glory) the Chinese, Russians, Japanese, Indians, Europeans and billionaires are desperate to plant flags and dusty footprints on that useless plain. 

Indeed, it's why some business should invest in lunar capabilities!  Because making money off tourists is a perfectly legitimate business plan!

Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway

4- Hence, a Lunar Orbit Station makes sense! Set up shop above the moon. For one thing, it could peer down and search for ores-n-such to prove me wrong!

Plus, instead of being tourist-suckers, let’s sell tourism! Charge hotel and landing services for all those symbolism-obsessed lunar Apollo-wannabe tourists! Charge the Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Indians, Europeans and billionaires! 

A lunar orbit station is also perfect for analyzing asteroid samples and testing methods for human deep space flight. That was the plan approved by all the sage NASA advisory panels who actually know stuff and weighed all factors, till symbolism-obsessed politicians over-ruled everybody who actually knows stuff.

== The two biggest reasons not to get trapped in dusty quicksand ==

5- Dig-it. There is no reason for Americans to repeat past glories when we could be accomplishing things that only we can do. 

Read that twice. Why repeat what we did ages ago? Things the Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Indians, Europeans and billionaires are eager and ready to do?

Let’s do things they can’t!

6- Oh, then there's the dust itself. Nasty, nasty stuff. Sharp, brittle grains that... oh, look it up.

7- Prediction.  If we start a big “return to the moon” push, for American glory, it will prove expensive. And suddenly, a GOP president will declare a diplomatic victory! Remember when the jingoistic “Space Station Freedom” suddenly got transformed into the “International Space Station”?  Well, Trump and/or his successor will brag and preen over a great new agreement to do Return to the Moon jointly with China and Russia, yippee.

And, of course, this will require technology sharing. And yes, every single U.S. advantage and trade secret and advancement will be given away, while those nations get cost savings for their symbolism-tourism. America - and posterity - get nothing.

8- Finally, my biggest objection is guilt by association. 

“Back to the moon” has become a central catechism of the Republican Party. The very same people who are waging all-out war on science - and every other fact-using profession - are also the folks shouting “back to the moon!” 

Seriously, this is no coincidence. The correlation is perfect. And while guilt-by-association may be less than mature, in this case it is spectacularly apropos. Those who are trying to cripple every single aspect of U.S. science also want NASA to fritter away our one chance to lead the new space era, by repeating an insipid obsession with useless, dusty footprints.  This is what the sworn enemies of science and progress want.

That fact should be enough for anyone.

Ad Astra.

==

Addendum on why there are few useful "ores" on the moon.

Why are there fractionated - or already partly-refined “ores”-  on asteroids, but not on the moon?  Refinable ores are the result of some kind of natural separation process… or else the delivery of something already separated.

-  On Earth the separation processes usually involve water flows, sometimes volcanism, or else meteoritic impacts.  Most of Earth’s metal sank into the core, long before the Moon formed from Earth’s light crust.

- Most asteroids come either from volatile-rich comets, or else from a shattered proto-planet. Millions are from that planet’s core. So, you have some asteroids rich in water (which should be fairly easy to harvest, using the "baggie" method), and some that are stunningly rich in almost already refined metal.

- The moon started metal poor (from Earth’s outer crust). No water separation processes. Some scattered meteoritic iron (that came from guess where?) A little water at the poles. 

Oh… and Helium3! Mythological, with no actual evidence and no known customers.  Next time someone like Scott Pace armwaves vague reasons for shifting all of our efforts to the Moon, do ask for specific studies weighing the likely wealth and benefits that real scientists have assayed to be actually present on the lunar surface, and actual tradeoffs of the "way station" argument. If he doesn't offer decisive links... well... you know.

Our - controversial - future in space

This one will be a mix, mostly about space. Some riffs about a U.S. "return to the moon," plus news about SETI... some interesting snippets! And a wee observation on politics.

Okay for starters, I suppose this counts as “space news.” President Trump announced his intention to send NASA back to the moon!

NASA funding, Forbes

Alas, as Ethan Siegel shows in Forbes, it simply isn’t going to happen: As a percentage of the federal budget, investment in NASA is at a 58 year low, and Trump shows no sign of changing this.  

Oh, there is one way an American will step on the moon in say a decade or so, without much increase in NASA budgets, and I’ll tell you how, below.

Of course, this return-to-the-moon fetish - a GOP obsession - is a debacle that will only do us harm. With this decision to squander NASA resources on the same dumb goal sought by every wannabe Apollo-imitator -- China, Russia, Europeans, Indians and various billionaires -- Trump sabotages our chance to do what none of those others - only we - can do. 

Only the U.S. has the capability to go where the real riches are. Asteroids & Phobos… which also happen to be the route to Mars. That path is not helped an iota by landings on the Moon. Only the utterly delusional think that our path to becoming a spacefaring species passes through that dusty, sterile gravity well.

Sure, a lunar orbital station is valuable for many reasons! Scientific, developing deep space capabilities, and defense, among others. Such an orbital station would be ideal to bring back robotically retrieved asteroidal materials for study and processing, to see if estimates are true... that there are hundreds of trillions worth of resources to be easily accessed out there.

Also, such a lunar orbital station could sell services to all those wannabe groups desperate to plant dusty footprints on the (for now) useless moon! How's that for savvy? Us making a buck or two out of others' obsessive rush to imitate our past glories, repeating Apollo? The Russians can't complain, having charged us vampire rates to launch our astronauts to the space station.

But another U.S. Apollo landing?  Yawn! Go ahead. Name any benefits for the U.S. joining the symbolism craze! Say what? Helium Three? Yippee, let's base space policy on cheap sci fi flicks! But zero facts. (Care to show us this magical substance in samples of lunar regolith, in “ore” concentrations? Show us how to collect it or refine it? Um, care to point out a real life customer who will buy it?)

What? You want to do this out of pride? All that repeating Apollo does is make us part of the pack! 

And now it is prediction time: dig what will happen. As costs mount, Trump will declare a diplomatic breakthrough! Turning the US moon landing effort into a wonderful "international cooperation" like the ISS! A new detente! And suckers will fall for it, kvelling as we subsidize Russian and Chinese footprints and they get access to every scrap of U.S. space technology. A lose-lose-lose for good old USA.

The fact that our political civil war has become dominant even in choosing space destinations is a pathetic sign of our times. Alas.

Just like the coming Iran War, the winners in all of this are the same… those who rake in billions by controlling down-Earth resources in energy and minerals want to divert us from new, sustainable technologies and access to the true riches out there. And as an added bonus, disappointment in the utter uselessness of this boondoggle is sure to associate NASA with both money-wasting and Trumpism, undermining overall support among the US citizenry. Spaceba tovarisch!

== The gold in them thar rocks... ==

The Planetary Resources site can show you a lot of cool stuff about the advantages of asteroids. Many are easier (robotically) to reach than the moon's surface. And the "fractionation of ores" can be a million or a billion times better than we see on the moon.

See also their planned spacecraft, which was to be a partner in NASA's own effort re asteroids, a business-public partnership that Republicans claim they want to see. 

I reiterate. There are zero aspects to this ‘back to the Moon” announcement that serve long term U.S. interests. Indeed, every outcome will favor foreign rivals and legacy mining interests down here, who want us never to access the real riches in space.  

Yes, doggie. Gooood doggie.

== Star Wars defense ==

I was critical of 1980s "star wars" space weapon fantasies – if supportive of the technological research. But this "historical" article is lefty-biased, tendentious and throws out babies with bathwater. 

There was plenty to diss about the Pournelle-led “Citizens’ Advisory Council on Space.” It was too rightwing to see clearly, and would have demolished the one thing (reciprocal deterrence) that kept us alive through the Cold War. We now know most of the required tech was not achievable then or now… though some core goals were! (In a weird way that I won’t talk about.) Fortunately, Isaac Asimov had the whole thing sussed. It was in fact an economic and psychological weapon to shatter the Soviets’ budget and morale. And you can’t argue with such success. (Though one can argue with how Bush Sr. completely blew the ensuing peace, consigning us back into another, even more vicious “cool war.”)

Alas, this essayist also attempts to discredit the “sci fi” notions of space resources and industry, needlessly welding that admirable and achievable ambition to the far-right. And thus the article proves that the left also contains its own shortsighted jerks.

In contrast, some Strategic Clarity: Exponential industrialization of space is more important than combat lasers and hypersonic fighters. This author takes the same position as the Air University Space Horizons faculty, that investing in "take-off" industries in space could secure strategic and economic leadership and safety for generations to come.

Our next target in space?

Lots of reaction to my earlier article on the Nautilus site, asserting -- (proving!) -- that 2015 was by far our best year, ever, in humanity's forward exploration of the cosmos. Now let's follow up with a look at where our ambitions should take us next.

(Further down... see a weird-wonderful type of Time Travel via gravitational lens!)

== Should we go back to the moon? ==

NASA has determined that its long term destination for astronauts will be the surface of Mars, with asteroid retrieval and appraisal in lunar orbit as the intermediate step. Lunar orbit is perfect in many ways. Others have different ideas, though.

With their new video, The Moon Awakens, the European Space Agency declares its goal to send humans to Luna over the next decade.  This article says “ESA has become increasingly bold with its lunar preferences." Both China and Russia are also aiming to explore the moon. And several private endeavors hope to turn it into the most expensive and high-status of all aristocratic tourist destinations.

Really? Fine. It’s closer and in many ways easier. Those who want the moon are welcome to it. I do not object to others repeating or improving on the Apollo missions. Indeed, if romantic billionaires want to boldly go or take small steps of their own, then hurrah for them, subsidizing that realm for the rest of us.

But I am far less impelled by romanticism than by pragmatic considerations. Indeed, very few scientists or space-resource folks feel even slightly tempted by the moon, in the near term. 

1- The lunar surface lies at the bottom of a steep gravity well, fairly expensive to descend and depart through.  

2- None of the samples brought home by astronauts, nor minerological satellite data from orbit, are indicative of fractionation-separation of elements into what anyone on Earth would call "ores" or concentrations of useful materials, except apparent ice deposits at the poles that were predicted long ago by Jim Arnold, my doctoral committee chair at UCSD. 

Indeed, one would be hard pressed to offer up even a theoretical way that substantially useful ores might exist there. According to current models, the moon was made from chunks of the Earth's crust torn away by a giant collision... after Earth had already experienced separation of heavy metals sinking to the core. Hence any metals on the moon's surface would have been delivered later, by meteoritic impacts. And yes, there may be iron rich impact debris fields. Perhaps you could get some by dragging magnets... just as one might mine a little ice at the poles...

3- But that is harder than going to the source... meteoroids themselves! See this video from Planetary Resources on the economic advantages of mining asteroidal resources. (And now Luxembourg declares their intent to help mine asteroids, teaming up with Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.)

4-  Suppose you do find a lunar debris field rich in meteorite bits and drag them together.  You then use solar concentrators to melt and separate and shape them, right?  Only on the moon you have 2 weeks of darkness each month.  Meanwhile asteroidal solar smelters work around the clock.

5- Back to the one "ore" we know-of --those polar ice deposits. Those could be nice. But so far, they appear to be too small and too valuable to just grab and use-up, willy nilly, sucking Luna dry, in order to fuel activities elsewhere. To my mind, they belong to future generations of moon colonists -- loonies, not wasted as rocket fuel. 

6- Please. Do not bring up Helium 3. Not till you show me a fusion reactor that will use the stuff. (Though it was a way-cool gimmick in Iron Sky.) Oh, sure.  Let's land a few rovers to check lunar soils for embedded solar He3.  It's called science.

7.  This should not be true. But it seems your political-partisan leanings somewhat predict whether you are an asteroid zealot or a loonie... sorry lunati... oh, never mind that.

8. The moon is not a way station to Mars. It is not a way station to anywhere.  Lunar orbit is.

I could go on, but why? I don't mind some rich fellows funding return to the moon. But scarce tax dollars should go to basics, empowering the tool sets that entrepreneurs might then use, to give us a true space industrial basis. NASA's plan to use cis lunar orbit as a marshalling yard is brilliant. We could do asteroidal tests there, and also service those fools... I mean bold folks... who spend their own money to go down to the lunar surface and prove me wrong!  

Invent cheap Helium 3 fusion power and show me how you'll moon harvest it, for example.  That movie trope is a real reach, for at least the time being.

But go ahead.  Few things would make me happier.

== Further out in the cosmos ==

What an era!  Only a decade ago, cosmological gravitational lenses were considered freaky marvels… wherein a giant galactic cluster at an intermediate distance bends and focuses light from objects vastly farther away, allowing us to glimpse some of the very oldest epochs in the universe. (Though some of us have speculated about them for a long time, and they figure prominently in my novel EXISTENCE.)

NASA/ESA

Now? These lenses are tools that astronomers catalogue and use, with as much familiarity and skill as their own telescopes! Moreover, there is an incredible quirk: the nearer cluster often forms multiple images of deep background objects, far beyond, arraying different versions of the same distant galaxy in an extended arc. Or in an arrangement called an ‘Einstein Cross.’ 

And since these images have slightly different transit times to our planet, we get to witness events across multiple viewing times. For example, when a supernova was spotted in one of these lensed and magnified scenes, scientists crafted models to calculate when the same explosion would appear in other focal images of the same galaxy. And lo, the stellar explosion – in a galaxy ten billion light years away – popped up as predicted! “The supernova has been nicknamed Refsdal in honor of the Norwegian astronomer Sjur Refsdal, who, in 1964, first proposed using time-delayed images from a lensed supernova to study the expansion of the Universe.”

Seriously, did you grasp how cool that is? The implications are stunning. Among them: astronomers were able to zoom in on the distant star before it exploded, knowing that it would, in advance. A kind of time travel? 

Wrap your head around it. You are a member of a species and civilization that's doing cool stuff like this! You paid pennies for it, in taxes. So tell the "mad as hell" anger merchants to get bent.

Oh, and the universe is apparently older than 6000 years. Yes it is.

== Much closer to home… ==

... astronomers have discovered the closest potentially habitable planet found outside our solar system so far, orbiting a star just 14 light years away. The planet, more than four times the mass of the Earth, is one of three that the team detected around a red dwarf star called Wolf 1061.  

Aw heck, I just alluded so I might as well... one hot topic has been the interface (if any) between science and religion. I've been writing a whole book on it(!) and contributed a chapter to Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion (edited by Paul Levinson & Michael Waltemathe), which explores what may be the best motive for human exploration of space: the desire of every human being, essentially spiritual, to understand more about our place in the universe, how our lives on Earth are inextricably part of that bigger picture. 

Even most atheists will admit to that hunger... and we got our richest meal in 2015... the "best year in space, ever."

Now to even better years.  Make 2016 the one when we all - especially Americans - decide to make it very clear that we love science!