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By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 01:20 pm ET
23 July 2002



HOUSTON, TEXAS -- Nearly thirty years ago, the last sightseers on the Moon left in a puff of dust. NASA's Apollo adventure ended - a $25 billion outpouring of technological muscle energized by beat-the-Soviets resolve.

As distant geological real estate goes, the Moon is an extreme form of continental drift. However, the Moon is ideal territory for astronomy, to mine, and to train future Mars-bound astronauts, as well as grounds for a cash crop of 21st century businesses entrepreneurs that gathered here July 18-20 at the Fourth Annual Return to the Moon Symposium, "Crossroads to the Cosmos," sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation.

Taking the fast-track

"The Moon is a blank slate," said Rick Tumlinson, founder of the California-based Space Frontier Foundation. "When we return, we can redefine how we go back. We can go back in a public-private partnership that involves private citizens, the government, science, even religion and academics of all sorts," he said.

Tumlinson said there are a trio of must-do space action items - efforts in which the United States should take lead role beyond the International Space Station project.

They are: Detect, track and ameliorate threatening near-Earth objects; create cheap access to space for Americans and people around the world; and move civilization outward, first to the Moon and then onto Mars.

"It's a new time…a time to generate new ideas," Tumlinson said.

Tumlinson and Manny Pimenta, the Foundation's Return to the Moon Project Manager, both urged NASA to embrace a recent recommendation from the National Research Council. Earlier this month, that prestigious science body called for the return of lunar samples from the Moon's Aitken Basin, the largest impact site known in the solar system.

"This is a great sign that NASA may finally reconnect with the Moon after 30 years," Pimenta said.

The Space Frontier Foundation is pushing for NASA to "fast-track" the lunar sample return project. Furthermore, the group feels NASA can open the door to commercial lunar development by implementing a data purchase program to encourage the gathering of much-needed information from the Moon.

Painfully obvious

Getting back to the Moon is critical to the future of NASA, said Paul Spudis, Deputy Director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Supporting a human trek to Mars on a quest to spot nanofossils is dead reckoning, he said, a voyage that takes too long and costs too much.

Spudis said that NASA lost its way in space after the shutdown of Apollo. "The agency has no mission and long-term direction," he said.

Congress and the public are losing confidence in the agency, both due to failures of certain robotic missions and the seemingly "never ending ISS mess," Spudis said.

"Missions of space shuttles to the ISS are losing their luster as exploration," he added.

The Moon offers a wealth of benefits, Spudis said, including support of national security needs.

Lunar-based astronomical instruments would yield deep scans of the surrounding universe. Water ice locked up in South Pole craters can be processed to provide human explorers with water, oxygen, and fuel. The Moon itself is a natural space station that gives expedition teams a place to learn how to live and work off Earth.

"I feel like a real estate salesman here. Actually, that's what I'm trying to do. I consider the Moon's South Pole as the most valuable piece of real estate in the Solar System. It's location, location, location," Spudis said.

Spudis believes that NASA should return to the Moon, not as a mining mission to make a profit, nor a mission to establish a colony off Earth.

"It is a mission to go and learn how to do these things. Use the Moon as a laboratory test bed. The mission is an engineering research and development mission. We're after the knowledge, not the profits. Once NASA figures out how to do this, and do it well…then is the time to commercialize," Spudis said.

"NASA should go to the Moon next. It is so painfully obvious that it's going to take a long time for everybody to realize it," Spudis said.

Beam scheme

A Lunar Solar Power (LSP) System can create a power bridge between the Moon and an increasingly energy-hungry Earth, said David Criswell, Director of the Institute for Space Systems Operations at the University of Houston.

The scenario: Sets of solar arrays planted on the lunar surface could beam energy back to Earth. On the receiving end of energy-carrying rays, a crowd of some 10 billion people on our planet demand an estimated 20 Terrawatts of power.

Given that the Moon receives 13,000 Terrawatts of power from the Sun, Criswell said, by harnessing just one percent of that solar power and directing it via microwave to Earth, fossil fuel power plants could be replaced. "Clean, safe, low-cost commercial electric power can be dependably delivered to receivers on Earth," he said.

"The LSP System will establish material industries on the Moon, in cis-lunar space, and on Earth that will produce a growing range of products and services," Criswell said.

Also, such a power-beaming scheme could direct focused energy to an incoming, hazardous comet - one with Earth's name on it. A concentrated beam could heat up the comet's icy surface, causing a burst of gas to jet out of the object, nudging it ever so slightly out of harm's way, Criswell told SPACE.com.

Cradle to grave

Think of the Earth-Moon system as a double planet in the Solar System. Being a celestial twosome they are intimately tied together, a cradle-like link that involves Mother Earth and the nurturing of life on this planet.

So explained Wendell Mendell, co-chair of the symposium and manager of NASA's Office for Human Exploration Science at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center here.

"The Moon has a significance to our existence that's much deeper than the fact it's just a nearby way station. That's an important philosophical point to communicate to humanity at large," Mendell said.

Meanwhile, for Chan Tysor, the lunar burial of human cremated remains is a policy frontier. And maybe future money making enterprise too.

As president of Celestis, Inc., Tysor said his firm offers a roster of space memorial services for departed loved ones. For instance, aboard NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft that roared off to the Moon in 1998, the craft carried the cremated remains of noted space geologist, Eugene Shoemaker.

Sealed inside a Celestis flight capsule, those ashes were deliberately crash-landed into a crater on the Moon's South Pole in July 1999, deposited there after the probe finished its science duties.

"At Celestis, we try to do the art of the doable," Tysor said. Right now, the group is looking for rides to the Moon, either into lunar orbit or down onto the surface.

"I don't envision our company claiming any ownership of the Moon in relation to this type of activity. Nobody claims any ownership of the sea when ashes are scattered there," Tysor said. There is a void in existing policy that prohibits or permits future lunar burial activities, he admits.

"We're going to offer our Lunar Service until someone tells us we can't…we're going to assume that such activity can be done," Tysor said.

Safe deposit box

William E. Burrows, professor of journalism at New York University, proposed making the Moon as part of an overall planetary defense plan. To this end, he detailed the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, or ARC for short.

"ARC is best thought of as backing up the planet's essence for the same reason discs are used to back up a computer's hard drive," Burrows said.

The thinking behind ARC is to continuously copy Earth's overall civilization and nature for safekeeping. History, politics, science, technology, art and literature of any nation or society that wants to participate can join the ARC endeavor. In addition, the preserved DNA of life forms, plants and animals, would also be archived.

ARC could have multiple repositories, even here on Earth. But in the event of widespread devastation on Earth -- say from a cosmic clobbering from an asteroid -- the perfect station already exists, called the Moon, Burrows said.

"Using ARC, the inhabitants of the lunar colony could organize a relatively quick response to help the home planet. If massive tragedy does strike, the colony would not only be able to use the archive to reconstitute whatever cultural assets were lost, but it would be able to perform social and engineering rescue work as well," Burrows added.

Steven Wolfe, ARC's executive director in New York, said the idea is not to create a time capsule.

"In the event of a global catastrophe, ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth," Wolfe said.

Credible image

Activating a return to the Moon program amongst the public and politicos in the near term is undoubtedly a tough challenge. Arguably, it’s bound to stir up "been there, done that" responses.

When looking at the future of lunar exploration today, NASA's Mendell said a popular song line by Christopher Cross comes to mind: "When you get caught between the Moon and New York City."

"The 9/11 event has changed the nation in a tremendous way," Mendell said. One repercussion has been on the flow of information and trade on the international scene.

The global campaign against terrorism has heightened worries of technology transfer that, in turn, impacts scientific collaboration with other nations, he said.

Also, as budget deficits replace the short-lived budget surplus, Mendell said, finding funds to do exciting NASA projects will become ever more difficult.
Lastly, there is the issue of the International Space Station. The super-expensive effort is tarnished, prompted by programmatic and financial ills. "The end result is a perceived failure of process," Mendell said.

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe is tackling how the space agency does business, hoping to recover from poor management of the ISS.

"It is really important for NASA to have a credible image in Congress and in the country.

That's important so the next time we propose to do something dramatic and large it can be believed," Mendell said.

"The world we now live in has dramatically changed. We need to readjust our thinking of how to deal with those changes…and also understand that NASA has to deal with those changes. We have to play with the hand we're dealt, be it a good or bad hand. That's the challenge we face in moving civilization off the Earth into space," Mendell