Giant Steps I: Walking on the Moon.

 

"Giant steps are what you take, walking on the Moon."

The Police, Walking on the Moon.

As part of its Artemis series of lunar missions, NASA plans to create "a sustainable human lunar presence" on the surface of the Moon.  Which sounds great, but what do we mean when we use the word "sustainable"?

Current usage would suggest that they're looking at creating an eco-friendly community with access to affordable housing and good public transit, but really, what they're talking about are the more practical aspects of sustainability - a settlement that would be able to exist independently of Earth.  It's an intelligent approach to the process, but there are a few hurdles to cross before we get there.

The first step in the process is picking the right location. The Apollo missions concentrated on the Moon's equatorial region, but NASA's plan is for the Artemis missions to land at the South Pole, thereby taking advantage of the water ice which has been observed in craters around the pole.  And that's the second step:  access to water. 

As Chris Hadfield pointed out in his Exploration show, once you have water, you have everything:  oxygen to breath, water to drink, and oxygen and hydrogen for fuel.  "Everything" is perhaps an over statement, I think you need to get some nitrogen in there for the air supply, but it's certainly the place to start.

The other thing that lunar ice gives us is a source of water for possible plant cultivation, which will be a crucial aspect of sustainability, acting as a source of both food and oxygen.

The third step is designing our base, which, given that form follows function, leads to a question which should possibly have come first:  why are we even building a base on the Moon? We've already got the planned Gateway Station, which can act as a hub for travel from Earth to Mars - why are we bothering to build anything on the surface?

I suspect that in reality, part of the answer to this question is "because the President said we were going to" - very similar to the reasons for the first Apollo landing, when you think about it.  However, there are probably better reasons than that.

One of the problems with the Gateway station will be radiation.  The Earth's magnetic field gives astronauts on the ISS some protection from solar radiation, but the Moon doesn't provide a similar barrier.  As a result, the Gateway Station will not be manned on a permanent basis.

The Moon suffers from the same problem, but constructing a base on the surface allows for a much more robust structure, possibly underground, that will act as a shelter from radiation, thereby allowing for permanent occupancy.  Not only that, but the Moon also has at least some gravity, which will hopefully help to reduce the negative long-term effects observed in the zero-gravity environment of the ISS, and the ready supply of water starts us down the path to sustainability, something that Gateway could never achieve.

It's easy to see the Moon base as the staging area for the exploration of the solar system, a kind of jumping off point for future missions.  A permanent base would be part dry dock, part storage depot, part fueling station, and, ultimately, part community - a city on the Moon, a place where people would live their lives and make their homes.

This takes us to the next question:  how do we go about building a lunar city - a colony as opposed to an outpost?  The next posting will take a look at the challenges of constructing a place to live on the Moon, a process which, if it's going to be done properly, will require a paradigm leap on the part of the international space community.

- Sid