Tim Radford in London
Suddenly the moon has become precious real estate: a kind of off-planet investment. Twenty-five years since two astronauts from Apollo 17 dusted their hands off and climbed back into a lunar module, Nasa scientists had peered at data from an orbiting spacecraft and found water at the lunar poles.
Now a new world of possibilities has opened. The European Space Agency is studying EuroMoon 2000: a government-industry journey dreamed up by European astronaut Wubbo Ockels to celebrate the Western millennium. It will begin with a 100kg LunaSat orbiter to be designed by 50 European scientists and launched in 2000, and will map the planned landing area – the peak of Eternal Light on the rim of the 20km Shackleton south pole crater – for a 440kg EuroMoon lander in 2001.
There are more ambitious programmes – long before this discovery, European space chiefs had contemplated a human colony. It is an old dream: it was an ambition of Wernher von Braun, the designer of the Nazi V2 rocket. But there were problems. The moon was baked as dry as a biscuit. No one thought that, concealed in the eternal shade of polar craters, there might be primordial ice.
“It could be that now there is a significant find of a resource which you could use, which will transform the economics of going to the moon and establishing a colony, then I think it becomes a thing that could be presented in a more concrete way,” says Paul Murdin of the British National Space Centre.
Says Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation: “Since we landed on the moon, the thinkers – the designers, the engineers, the scientists – have had nothing to do for the last 20 years except come up with things to do on the moon. I have seen so many lunar base designs, so many lunar hotel designs, so many different types of lunar observatory designs. Now perhaps some of them can begin moving forward.”
Some might move very swiftly. A Virginia firm called LunaCorp, of which Tumlinson is a director, is proposing an industry-led exploration by solar-powered robot of the water-bearing craters round the moon’s poles. “It would go up to the crater rim, which is basically in permanent sunlight, charge itself up, go down for a day’s mission in the crater, explore for ice, then go back up and charge itself up again, and keep doing that,” says Tumlinson.
There would be another payoff: two lunar rovers could roam the moon, while high-definition video cameras would relay what they “saw” to a theme park on Earth. People would be able to “see” the moon for themselves, and even to “drive” the rovers.
But right now, there are big questions to be answered. How much water is there? How cheaply could robot machines extract it? How could robots and men in spacesuits construct places to live, and systems to recycle the water, and greenhouses to grow food to support life in space? But above all, the water is there: it does not have to be shipped there.
“That is a huge advance,” says Murdin. “There is no hi-tech substitute for water. The cost of putting water into orbit for the Mir station is about $10 000 a pint, which puts the prices you pay in your local pub into perspective. So the cost of maintaining an astronaut is about $100 000 a day in water alone. Multiplying that for a colony of people and putting them there for a year makes a significant dent in the budget.”
The water could in theory be split by electricity from solar panels to make liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen: the two components of rocket fuel. That could supply spacecraft for the return journey or provide fuel for journeys into space.
“At the moment the whole philosophy for manned space travel is that you have to take everything with you,” says Murdin. Discovering lunar water was “the first glimmer” that explorers would find requirements in space.
Under a United Nations moon treaty, Earth’s neighbour is part of the common heritage of all mankind. There will be some debate, sooner or later, about who has the right to exploit it.
The moon is also a possible site for the perfect observatory: there are no earthquakes to shake instruments and no atmosphere to absorb starlight. And the far side of the moon would be in a radio shadow. From a base on the moon, researchers could listen for telltale signals from ET and his chums, Murdin says.
The first payoff could be for science itself. The water was delivered by comets and meteors, dumped out of the solar glare. Did water on Earth arrive in the same way? And where did it come from? For astronomers, the most precious thing about the water is that it can never have been recycled: it would be primordial water, and in its isotopic composition would be the story of the formation of the solar system.