ON AND ON, UP AND UP WHAT COMES AFTER A LANDING ON THE MOON?

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32007, 6 June 1969, Page 8

ON AND ON, UP AND UP WHAT COMES AFTER A LANDING ON THE MOON?

(Reprinted from the "Economist" by arrangement)

The moon in six weeks, and then what? As Apollo 10 returned like a star into the Pacific and the American navy went into action to recover the men who had seen inside the craters of (“very smooth inside, like wet clay,” said Colonel Stafford) American officials were declaring with permissible exaggeration: “The real goal ... is interplanetary travel.” But, if that statement was meant to be taken at its face value, there is a long way to go yet before Americans are in any position to do more than they will attempt in July (or August), which is to spend three hours on a patch of moon 600 yards in diameter, fixing some simple instruments on the surface, and collecting about 501 b of soil and pebbles to take back to earth with them.

This is precisely what is worrying an increasing number of American taxpayers who have to date contributed $24 billion more or less uncomplainingly for the purpose of putting an American on the moon. They may not go all the way with the noisy attack of Senator Edward Kennedy on the space programme, but the closer each successive group of astronauts gets to the moon, the more embarrassed the authorities have become attempting to explain just what they will do when they get there. It will be an enormous achievement of human courage, engineering and organisation. The moon stones will excite the scientists; but if, after analysis, they do not yield anything remarkable or unexpected, what then? Starting Cautiously For the moment, the Americans are in no position to do much more. While the astronauts lack a moon vehicle, they cannot explore the place in the classic sense, however intriguing are the distant hills and craters. Starting cautiously with the flattest and safest sites, they hope in later landings to bring the lunar module down on the more

puzzling parts of the moon, including the lips of some of the biggest craters, and, with more experience, to travel as much as a mile from the module, particularly if plans succeed to add some extra fuel tanks, remove some instruments, and give the astronauts a little tracked vehicle of sorts. But that is only for the very end of the present programme. Dr Thomas Paine, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s administrator, was anxious to deny that the moon was any “celestial Mount Everest to be climbed.” But for the time being that is precisely what it is.

The fault is not entirely the space planners'. When the war in Vietnam cut into their budget they had only two options: to slow down the entire programme by spending more frugally over a stretched-out timetable, or to maintain the Apollo programme and jettison those parts of it that would only come into operation after Apollo had been shown to work, and which would not be needed if it did not. And that included those plans for mini-moon colonies which would have given journeys to the moon a long-term purpose.

Probably this was the right choice. To slow down work in Apollo itself was to risk being beaten by the Russians to it. That was unacceptable to men who had been second in space for too long. 10 Years Hiatus But there is going to be an hiatus of anything up to a decade before the N.A.S.A. or anyone else can start serious preparations for space travel. Last Christmas’s flight was, almost incredibly, the first time prolonged manned flight away from the earth had been attempted; all the previous manned space shots had followed a restrained orbit round the earth. What happens next may depend on how the political wind blows in the United States; it is already blowing for more spending on manned flights. There may be pressure to copy the Russians and attempt assembling space platforms orbiting above the earth before going for something more ambitious. These space caravans are conceived asi workshops where big rocket' assemblies, ferried in sections from the earth, would be bolted together for longer space journeys with bigger crews. The Russians have linked two space capsules: together into a four-room! log-cabin-in-the-sky with ac-l commodation for 12 cosmonauts.

In a rather panicky announcement shortly after the Russians did this, the N.A.S.A. said it too was working on a 12-man space station designed as the forerunner of a 100-man one. The American Defence Department has its own orbiting laboratory coming along about which it is keeping very quiet. It does not want to go out into space: it just wants to watch the earth. First Base At best, earth orbital sta-l tions are uncomfortable transit points; the best staging post for the planets is likely to prove to be the moon itself and, if the Americans are really set on interplanetary travel, then their first base will be there, operating like their scentific station at; the South Pole, which is only slightly less uncomfortable i and hazardous than the. moon’s crust.

But the earth orbital platforms will still have to come first, so that the components of the moon stations can be collected there before being ferried out' on the long journey to the moon. And if the cost of lifting sizeable tonnages of plant and equipment off the earth is not to be prohibitive, the present wasteful habit of one-trip rockets may have to be discarded and a reusable space vehicle substituted. Some of these vehicles are on the drawing board: the N.A.S.A. puts the cost of developing them together with the orbiting space stations at around $lO billion, or half the cost of putting man on the moon. And the time-scale is around 10 years. It will be from such bases that men will explore the moon in long-ranging moonjeeps; discover whether or not there is water trapped in its rocks that can be extracted to form the basis for some kind of life; and whether or not there are minerals on and below the surface that could provide rocket fuel. Space flights would begin to look very different if the moon really were an obliging satellite. Improving The Climate Given the rapid development of solar batteries, power itself is not too much of a problem on the moon’s surface although nuclear power is still considered essential for large-scale operations. But it is doubtful just the same whether life there will ever be anything but confined, awkward and spacesuity.

Looking at some of the weirder desert plants on earth, scientists think that one or two of them might actually grow on the moon, and, for an outlay equivalent to one year's gross national product of the United States, they could improve the moon’s climate sufficiently to let men walk unprotected on its surface.

But this might take 100 years, and it is easier to conceive life as life under a protective dome—although, as local water appears to exist in the form of deep-trapped ice or permafrost, there is no telling what sort of life and living greenery men, may eventually develop under those domes with their own self-sustaining atmosphere. When that happens, the composition and possible industrial use of those moon pebbles will be of more than curiosity value. Habitable Stars? There is a chance, with odds ranging from 9 to 1 to a remote 90 to 1, that as many as 14 major stars in the known universe may be habitable; but the nearest of them is over four light years away (light travels at 186.400 miles a second, or around 6 trillion miles a year) and the farthest 21J light years, which seems to rule them out for practical space travel.

And this leaves man with very few places to visit, unless he settles for astromigration, as the families who emigrated permanently across the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did. Most planets are the wrong size, shape, temperature and distance from the earth to be endurable anyway, even In a space suit.

Venus, which is only a manageable four months’ flight away, has turned out to be a boiling cauldron. Only Mars at this stage remains a hopeful enigma. Provisioning Problem Mars has a little moisture: 1 it has an atmosphere of sorts ' that could conceivably retain enough oxygen for man to breathe, had there been sufficient free oxygen on the planet in the first place. It is a seven-month flight away. I representing a round trip of something like 2] years i because astronauts would I have to spend some time waiting for the earth to come round into a convenient juxtaposition to get home. The concent of provisioning a space ship for a 2t-vear {voyage gives some idea of the (engineering the world would !be taking on if it attempted | such journeys. ' But if that credibility gan can be spanned (there is little the vaulting imagination of a snace scientist cannot) then there is no point at straining over the next concept. which is that of deliberately manipulating the climate of Mars—terra-form-ing is the word—to increase the dubious plant life thought to grow on its surface by farming greenery under domes of earth atmosphere, and hoping that the spread of it will encourage photo- | synthesis to oroceed at such la rate that the Mars air will eventually hold enough oxygen to become breathable. Again, scientists think living under domes would be simpler than going to such trouble. A Very Long Shot j This may be near-fiction at |the moment, or at anv time but it gives some idea of [where men nn the moon could [hope to go. Because the moon is near and accessible, bashing its rocks about will show whether all the techniques on which interplanetary living would have to be based, such as extracting water and nitrogen from rocks and reforming free gases to form elementary protein and even more elementary cell life, are in fact possible. We already know that some living cells can live in what astronomers suspect is the Mars atmosphere. At best, it is a very long shot. But it is the only direction in which manned space flight could be said to be leading. Otherwise, the world must face up to the conclusion that the main use of men in space is going in the end to be military, and that the best way of exploring the planets is going to be bv unmanned space probes, which are easier, simpler, cheaper and travel further than anything that can be contemplated by human voyagers. And it is, until we evolve a new race of men who can breathe in space, the only way of approaching the great, hostile majority of planets. The taxing and terrifying moon landing of Apollo 11 may be the start of new worlds. But that is going to depend on how the politicians, rather more than the scientists, feel about it. It is still entirely possible that the moon could turn out to be another Everest, so that attaining it is an unparalleled feat of human courage, making the heart of man to soar in satisfaction, but beckoning other men only to a waste of time.