Colonisation of the Moon
As we’ve seen, science fiction (and fantasy) writers have been predicting human colonisation of the Moon (and in some cases, alien colonisation or alien life anyway) for centuries now, but writing about it is relatively easy. Making it happen? Ah well now, that’s a whole different kettle of ballgames of a different colour. After a basic loss of interest in the Moon, attention is again being given to the possibility of our living or at least working there, although any such project is going to take a long time to come to fruition obviously.
The first real attempts to return to the Moon seem to centre on the Artemis Project, a programme led by the USA but with other nations involved, whose main goal, this time, is to land the first woman on the Moon. You can’t help but think that’s due to social pressure, that NASA doesn’t really care about that, and that it’s all for the cameras in a PC world. Not that I have any problem with a woman walking on the Moon, but you’d think it would have been something that they might have tackled before closing off the Apollo program, no? Anyway, that’s the goal for 2024. They also intend to create what they call “a sustainable human presence on the Moon”. Whether this means a base, colony or what I don’t know at the moment but I guess we’ll find out. Oh, and they’re tendering for businesses to get involved. Just great. Commercialisation of the Moon, why not?
The first spaceflight in this program,
Artemis 1, was originally due to be launched in November of this year, but there have been delays, and though it doesn’t say so, I have to assume unrest in the USA since the election of 2020 and the impact of Covid-19 has contributed to that delay. Tentative launch date has now been moved to either later December or early January of 2022.I shudder when I hear such phrases as “lunar economy”, but I guess that’s how things are headed now. By 2026 it’s envisioned there will be a space station in orbit called
Lunar Gateway and the fifth
Artemis mission will dock there. The
HLS - Human Landing System - is under development by - guess who? Yeah. SpaceX, otherwise known as Elon Musk’s baby. They’re going to be responsible for the other space vehicles too, known as
Falcon Heavy and
DragonXL (sounds like a video game). Guess the
Simpsons were right, and soon the Moon will belong to America, in a very real sense.
The Russians, long forgotten and left behind in the Space Race though are not to be left out, and are developing their own system of Moon bases, under the code name
Luna-Glob. They intend their lunar bases to be robotic though, cutting out the need for those pesky humans and, possibly, providing a staging area from which the newly-sentient robots and machines can launch a pre-emptive strike against Earth. Nah, it’s only robotic while it’s being built, then the evil humans will arrive to oppress their robotic slaves. The Russians are being a little more realistic in their ambitions here than the US, planning to only begin construction of the base, to be named
Lunny Poligon, or
Lunar Range after 2030. Its first orbiter and lander missions are scheduled to take place from 2022.
In our new environment of (incredibly super-super-rich) space entrepreneurism, although NASA and other government agencies are still in the driving seat for such projects, independent, self-financed plans are being drawn up by, among others, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to either help or head missions to the Moon with a view to colonisation, or at least the establishment of bases there. In a warped and twisted way, this makes perfect sense. The richest people in the world want to get richer (they ain’t offering their services for free, folks!) and intend to exploit, rather than explore, the final frontier in order to do so. That may seem a little cynical, but you can bet that the first lunar bases Bezos establishes will have links to Amazon, and SpaceX is unlikely to face any competition in the contract to supply ships, launchers and whatever else is needed in their efforts.
The nightmare vision of an Amazon-controlled Moon scares the sh
it out of me (although I do recall, with a grin, the B-movie
Amazon Women on the Moon!) but there is of course no way we can prevent that. Both Bezos and Musk have more money each than the US Government probably, and where there’s money there’s power. They also have the research and the people to run it, so NASA and the like will have no real choice but to involve them. Let’s just hope that when they get their bases built you don’t need like an Amazon Prime account to go there or something!
There may be an alternative though. The Open Lunar Foundation is a collection of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs whose stated objective is to “allow denizens of all nations to participate in building a peaceful and cooperative lunar settlement.” Sounds promising, doesn’t it? I don't know any of these people but maybe you do. They include Steve Jurvetson, Will Marshall, Chelsea Robinson, Jessy Kate Schingler, Chris Hadfield, and Pete Worden. They seem to believe they can establish a lunar base with less than five billion. Sure where does five billion go these days? Still, compared to NASA estimates I bet it's a drop in the ocean.
Speaking of which, the confirmation of lunar ice – which would mean that there is water there somewhere, as already discussed multiple times in this article – was one of the driving forces that led to rekindled interest in the moon as a colony. One of the main stumbling blocks had always been the difficulty of transporting water there, as it was believed there was no native source. Now that it has been more or less discovered that there is, colonisation efforts can go ahead and now it looks like we're back in the Space Race again, as governments and even private corporations and individuals race to be the first to get their lunar base built.
But of course, it's not going to be as easy as just deciding to build one. There are several serious problems to living and working on the Moon which will need to be overcome before we can even consider beginning construction. One of the major ones is the length of the lunar night, which is about 27 Earth days. That's a long time to lie awake waiting for the morning, but more to the point, it will increase the amount of solar powered light required to light the night, as it's exceptionally unlikely everyone will go to bed for a month! So we'll have to be able to work, ahem, through the night, and that means we need to be able to push back the darkness. Can you imagine the power consumption needed to run lights for a month straight?
Here's another of those videos made for kids. At least, I assume it's for kids. It's ironically great.
And then there's the cold. The Moon is not a warm place, and while obviously there would have to be habitation domes built (we couldn't just live out on the surface) the method of keeping them permanently heated is another problem. We've determined that there is water on the Moon, but we don't know for sure how deep or where it is, and it may prove hard or even impossible to access, in which case we will have to look for alternative methods of harvesting water, perhaps from passing comets or asteroids. Sounds like fun. There's danger from exposure to cosmic rays (cosmic, man!) which batter the Moon all the time, and proton exposure from the solar wind. The Moon's magnetic field is not our friend either. Moon dust is sticky and abrasive, and may also be poisonous. It certainly will be a hazard to machinery, floating around and sticking to everything. And how exactly do we grow food on this barren, desolate rock? Our native crops and plants aren't used to a night that lasts so long, and likely would not survive it.
Where would the bases go? Given the discovery of water at the poles, and also the areas there that receive perpetual sunlight (known as “peaks of eternal light”) at the north pole, this might seem a good choice. Still, it should be noted that this sunlight does nothing to warm up the Moon, which, even at these points, never climbs above -53 degrees Celcius and can fall to twice that. There are natural formations on the Moon which may help create the buildings for bases, such as lunar tubes, hollow remnants of the passage of volcanic lava flows, although ideas have included inflatable habitats and even cannibalised spacecraft. Also considered are underground bases and, um, ones printed on a 3D printer. No, really.
Energy sources could be nuclear (which would of course require the construction of a nuclear reactor on the Moon – wonder what Greenpeace think about that?) or solar, utilising the already-mentioned peaks of eternal light. Rovers would probably be utilised, and expanded to take more than one or two passengers, or even railway systems, probably using the Maglev (Magnetic levitation) models. Then there is even the possibility of a flying lunar vehicle: I guess, given the much lower gravity on the Moon this would be easier to achieve than it would be on Earth. And then we're back talking about space elevators again, but we move swiftly on to discuss the perhaps valid question of why anyone would want to live, or even work on the Moon?
I suppose, given the rapid population explosion we've seen here in the last two centuries it might be expedient, even necessary to find somewhere else to live for some of the population, and of course if it's a military base (which surely at least one of them is bound to be) you'll go where you're told. But I doubt it could ever be much fun there. It would be interesting to hear of the first humans born on the Moon, and then whether they would owe allegiance to Earth or to its satellite, especially should some sort of conflict... but now we're getting far beyond the realm of speculation and into that of science fiction, which is not the remit of this particular part of the article, so we'll drop that.
New and more efficient spacecraft are already being designed, as the Saturn V rockets which blasted Apollo spacecraft into orbit and even their successors are unlikely to be viable for the Moon missions and voyages of the future. But get ready to dig deep for those freight rates, calculated (admittedly at the upper end) at around 40 million dollars PER KILO! You'll certainly be making sure everything is weighed properly before you send it to or from the Moon! Some of the costs may be offset by export from the Moon to Earth; one of the proposed commodities could be helium-3, which occurs in the solar wind and is very scarce back home. What little there is sells for about 1.5 million dollars per kilo, more than a hundred times the price of gold. Helium-3 could be used in the future in thermonuclear reactors.
Whatever happens on the Moon, it will be in our future but that looks to be at least interesting. After being ignored for almost forty years, while interest is not exactly at fever pitch, with such projects as the Mars and Pluto missions taking up most of the media attention, the Moon is at least back on our radar, and who knows, some day someone may read this and marvel that some stupid Irishman thought the idea of building a lunar moonbase far-fetched, as he or she look out through specially tinted and reinforced windows at the busy scene of trains thundering across the lunarscape while flying cars zoom overhead, pop their hologram generator on and roll their eyes as they enjoy the sixteenth reunion of all the dead members of the Rolling Stones.
But for us, that's it. We've spent much longer on the Moon than I had intended, and my fingers are tired tapping out on this ancient keyboard, writing much more than I believed I ever would or could on a potentially dead piece of rock orbiting our home planet. I guess it just proves that even something that seems boring and humdrum can yield some really interesting stories and information.
But if the Moon is one of our most universally recognised and loved celestial symbols, there's another one, off there to the right, that has tickled our fancy and fired our imaginations even more, and that's our next stop.