Reaching for the Moon: a lunar base as envisaged by Nasa engineers in 1989
From the end of the Apollo and Soviet missions in the 1970s until 2005 there were only two missions to the Moon. But since 2006, nine missions have been launched— from Japan, India, China, Europe and the US. Eight more are being put together and Britain is pondering its own voyage to the dark side. Why the sudden interest?
In the short term, the new players in space are reaching for the Moon while keeping their eyes firmly on planet Earth. As Jon Cartwright reported in “Star Wars” (Prospect, December 2009), satellites for communications, intelligence gathering and navigation have become important military assets. And Moon programmes, like all space programmes, allow the rising powers to develop technologies that have a crucial military function in a civilian guise.
Yet countries like China and India have little experience of building and launching the rockets required, navigating them accurately or deploying and managing the satellites. The technologies they need still exist largely in the US, Russia, and to a lesser extent in Europe. For the moment, the US is doing what it can to prevent China from getting access to them. Astronauts from 15 nations have been invited to visit the International Space Station, the centrepiece of Nasa’s operations, but China is not one of them.
However, China’s Moon programme, Chang’e (named after a fairytale princess who travels to the Moon with her pet rabbit) is eroding the effects of US containment. The Chang’e 1 probe relied on the European Space Agency’s ground stations to manage the tricky insertion into lunar orbit on bonfire night in 2007. And China has become a junior partner in Galileo, the European satellite navigation system currently under construction which will rival the US-controlled GPS.
While the cost of building a permanent lunar base—the ultimate goal—will be high, the latest little probes are very cheap: just $57m (£35m) for Nasa’s most recent, out of an annual budget of $17bn. This is especially valuable to the new entrants; like Apollo, today’s moonshots build prestige abroad and solidarity at home.
But the long-term interest in the Moon lies in the dawning realisation that its exploitation may now be within reach, a consequence of 40 years of improved technology and accumulating evidence of usable resources. Nasa’s LCROSS probe, which was crashed near the Moon’s south pole in October, threw up debris containing 25 gallons of water. Water is important, not only to drink, but also because it can be cracked to provide oxygen and hydrogen, which combine into rocket fuel needed to get people back to Earth, on to Mars or off to repair a satellite.
And water is far from the only incentive. At the Moon’s poles, there are dark corners of craters that are never reached by the sun, where odd frozen minerals not found on Earth have accumulated. We don’t yet know what most of these are, let alone what their value may be. There are also mountains at the poles whose peaks are almost permanently in sunlight. It now seems likely that, at the south pole at least, a base can be constructed with continual solar energy and access to water. And the south pole’s Mount Malapert always faces Earth, helpful for future communication systems.
For these reasons, the south pole of the Moon is now being hyped as the 21st-century equivalent of the Saudi oilfields. And who will get control of this new “field” is increasingly unclear. A treaty drawn up by the UN in the 1970s ambitiously aimed to put the Moon under UN governance, banning military use and territorial claims. But it has failed—none of the space powers has ratified it—and so the Moon is unprotected by law. At the UN, there is a month-long debate every autumn on security issues that includes discussion of a new treaty aimed at prevention of an arms race in outer space. This could provide the missing legal regime. But in recent years the US has always vetoed the proposals. As the country with the most advanced space technology, it has the least incentive to replace the rule of force with that of law.
For now, it’s not known what can be won on the Moon. Perhaps the water will turn out to be unusable. Talk of commercial opportunities may evaporate. Is there any military significance to a place two days’ journey away from our planet? If so, it’s probably decades away. Yet, if you ignore the Moon, you risk being disastrously outflanked. Like a fretful Russia before the first world war, you are obliged to mobilise—obliging your rivals to do so in turn.
Chinese officials have repeatedly stated that “whoever conquers the Moon first will benefit most.” There’s a large dose of bravado in this: for now it seems only Nasa has pockets deep enough to contemplate a permanent base. But that’s typical. As Antarctica did a century ago, the Moon today inspires a heady mix of bravery, inquiry, national enthusiasm and imperial dreams. Thirty nations currently maintain bases in Antarctica, many jostling over territorial claims that have no clearly realisable commercial or strategic value. The clear lesson from our own south pole is that treaties can reduce tension, but they are unlikely to remove the threat of force if anything of real value turns up.
From the end of the Apollo and Soviet missions in the 1970s until 2005 there were only two missions to the Moon. But since 2006, nine missions have been launched— from Japan, India, China, Europe and the US. Eight more are being put together and Britain is pondering its own voyage to the dark side. Why the sudden interest?
In the short term, the new players in space are reaching for the Moon while keeping their eyes firmly on planet Earth. As Jon Cartwright reported in “Star Wars” (Prospect, December 2009), satellites for communications, intelligence gathering and navigation have become important military assets. And Moon programmes, like all space programmes, allow the rising powers to develop technologies that have a crucial military function in a civilian guise.
Yet countries like China and India have little experience of building and launching the rockets required, navigating them accurately or deploying and managing the satellites. The technologies they need still exist largely in the US, Russia, and to a lesser extent in Europe. For the moment, the US is doing what it can to prevent China from getting access to them. Astronauts from 15 nations have been invited to visit the International Space Station, the centrepiece of Nasa’s operations, but China is not one of them.
However, China’s Moon programme, Chang’e (named after a fairytale princess who travels to the Moon with her pet rabbit) is eroding the effects of US containment. The Chang’e 1 probe relied on the European Space Agency’s ground stations to manage the tricky insertion into lunar orbit on bonfire night in 2007. And China has become a junior partner in Galileo, the European satellite navigation system currently under construction which will rival the US-controlled GPS.
While the cost of building a permanent lunar base—the ultimate goal—will be high, the latest little probes are very cheap: just $57m (£35m) for Nasa’s most recent, out of an annual budget of $17bn. This is especially valuable to the new entrants; like Apollo, today’s moonshots build prestige abroad and solidarity at home.
But the long-term interest in the Moon lies in the dawning realisation that its exploitation may now be within reach, a consequence of 40 years of improved technology and accumulating evidence of usable resources. Nasa’s LCROSS probe, which was crashed near the Moon’s south pole in October, threw up debris containing 25 gallons of water. Water is important, not only to drink, but also because it can be cracked to provide oxygen and hydrogen, which combine into rocket fuel needed to get people back to Earth, on to Mars or off to repair a satellite.
And water is far from the only incentive. At the Moon’s poles, there are dark corners of craters that are never reached by the sun, where odd frozen minerals not found on Earth have accumulated. We don’t yet know what most of these are, let alone what their value may be. There are also mountains at the poles whose peaks are almost permanently in sunlight. It now seems likely that, at the south pole at least, a base can be constructed with continual solar energy and access to water. And the south pole’s Mount Malapert always faces Earth, helpful for future communication systems.
For these reasons, the south pole of the Moon is now being hyped as the 21st-century equivalent of the Saudi oilfields. And who will get control of this new “field” is increasingly unclear. A treaty drawn up by the UN in the 1970s ambitiously aimed to put the Moon under UN governance, banning military use and territorial claims. But it has failed—none of the space powers has ratified it—and so the Moon is unprotected by law. At the UN, there is a month-long debate every autumn on security issues that includes discussion of a new treaty aimed at prevention of an arms race in outer space. This could provide the missing legal regime. But in recent years the US has always vetoed the proposals. As the country with the most advanced space technology, it has the least incentive to replace the rule of force with that of law.
For now, it’s not known what can be won on the Moon. Perhaps the water will turn out to be unusable. Talk of commercial opportunities may evaporate. Is there any military significance to a place two days’ journey away from our planet? If so, it’s probably decades away. Yet, if you ignore the Moon, you risk being disastrously outflanked. Like a fretful Russia before the first world war, you are obliged to mobilise—obliging your rivals to do so in turn.
Chinese officials have repeatedly stated that “whoever conquers the Moon first will benefit most.” There’s a large dose of bravado in this: for now it seems only Nasa has pockets deep enough to contemplate a permanent base. But that’s typical. As Antarctica did a century ago, the Moon today inspires a heady mix of bravery, inquiry, national enthusiasm and imperial dreams. Thirty nations currently maintain bases in Antarctica, many jostling over territorial claims that have no clearly realisable commercial or strategic value. The clear lesson from our own south pole is that treaties can reduce tension, but they are unlikely to remove the threat of force if anything of real value turns up.
