The Sunday Times
January 21, 2007
Mission possible
It’s been 35 years since man walked on the moon. But now Nasa plans to go back and build a permanent base there. And this time, they can’t do it without Britain.
By Bryan Appleyard
The Sunday Times
January 21, 2007
From the Sea of Serenity on December 14, 1972, Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 commander, and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, lunar module pilot, blasted off to rejoin the pilot Ron Evans in the orbiting command module America. Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, said: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” The inscription on the plaque they left behind spoke of the completion of man’s “first explorations of the moon”.
Legend has it that the very last words spoken on the moon were Cernan’s: “Okay, Jack, let’s get this mother outta here.” And, with that, we returned the place to its 4.5 billion years of solitude.
Then, for another 35 years, nothing happened. British scientists laid bets on when we would return to the moon. All the dates on which they gambled have long gone. After the glories of the Apollo programme, humans, it seemed, were destined to do no more than spin around in low Earth orbit. Only robots would go into real space. But finally, George Bush, in 2004, said he wanted people back in space and, in December, Nasa revealed its “mission architecture” to establish a moon base and then to fly on to Mars. A human boot is scheduled once again to kick regolith – lunar dust – in 2020. And this time we plan to stay. “Unless disaster strikes the world,” says Ken Pounds, the grand old man of British space science, “this could be the great human endeavour of the 21st century.”
NI_MPU('middle');He speaks with feeling, for he comes from a deeply disappointed generation. They were inspired by the Apollo programme and expected human space exploration just to continue. Now he thinks we may have started too soon. “I spoke to Buzz Aldrin [the second man to walk on the moon] and he said the Apollo programme came too soon, the world wasn’t ready for it. It was very much part of the cold war, when Kennedy wanted to outdo the Russians in terms of prestige.”
In fact, it seems to be a similar impulse that has converted Bush to manned space exploration. India and China have made it clear they want to go to the moon and they undoubtedly have the technical capacity to do so. Russia, meanwhile, has, in the Soyuz rockets, the most reliable launchers in the world. Putin also seems to want to restart the cold war, and competing with America in space would be one way to do it. If only politically, it looks as though the US has to put boots back on the moon.
But there are other, better reasons. Robot exploration of the planets of the solar system has not delivered the scientific goods. Crucially, we still don’t know if the planet ever harboured life. Robots do dumb, routine tasks well, but they don’t improvise and can’t undertake large-scale engineering work like deep drilling.
Increasingly the scientists have become impatient. Two influential American scientists, Michael Malin and Kenneth Edgett, who last year announced the most persuasive evidence yet that there was water on Mars, have virtually issued a demand for renewed human exploration of space. “We’re constantly aggravated by the fact,” said Malin, “that all the questions we have about Mars could be answered by Ken and me if we could just walk around on the planet for a few days.”
And Ken Pounds was a member of a Royal Astronomical Society team that, in 2005, concluded that human space exploration is essential if we are to answer the big questions. “Scientific missions to the Moon and Mars,” the report said, “will address questions of profound interest to the human race. These include: the origins and history of the solar system; whether life is unique to Earth; and how life on Earth began. If our close neighbour Mars is found devoid of life, important lessons may be learned regarding the future of our own planet.”
Then, in December, Britain’s leading scientific body, the Royal Society, had a surprise guest: Dr Michael Griffin, the boss of Nasa since April 2005. Griffin is a big Winston Churchill fan, and an all-round Anglophile. The ostensible reason for his visit was to present the RS’s Copley Medal to another of his British heroes, Stephen Hawking. But the real reason was, he wanted to set Nasa’s manned missions to the moon and Mars in political concrete. Bush has committed to the missions and Congress had made them obligatory for Nasa. But Bush will be gone in 2008 and nobody can guess at the attitude of the next administration.
Griffin’s strategy, therefore, is to move as quickly as possible to get the moon-Mars project under way. International partners are vital, as they will make it more difficult for America to pull out.
And Griffin was specifically wooing the British. We could take part as members of the European Space Agency (ESA), but Griffin was looking for a bilateral deal (the US working only with Britain). His lecture to the Royal Society was a grand hymn of praise to the British exploratory heritage, invoking Churchill, Hawking (who has suggested he wants to make the journey into space), Captain Cook and John Harrison of longitude fame. “And so,” he said, “over many generations, the primary language of the United States came to be English and our dominant cultural traditions are derived from Great Britain… So my hope is, the English language will not only remain in common usage around the world, but will spread throughout the solar system over the course of the next century…”
We could get on board this linguistically imperial mission, the RAS team estimated, for about £150m a year over the next decade. Will we do it? “I think the answer is yes,” says the new science minister, Malcolm Wicks, “but it’s early days.” In fact, British government policy is not to fund manned space missions.
But Wicks is aiming to loosen this particular stranglehold on our scientists. “The government policy means we don’t want somehow to pretend that we can launch our own missions to the moon. But that’s to present our position in a negative way. We want to be encouraging a proper relationship with Nasa in terms of the things we do best – robots, astronomy, small satellite technology.”
But should we be pursuing this fantastically expensive – one estimate suggests it might cost $1 trillion to go to Mars – and risk-laden project? What is it for? What will we do? The space scientists are coming up with answers as if their lives depended on it, which, of course, they do.
The Nasa “architecture” is not, in principle, new. The primary rocket, the Ares V, will be a beefed-up version of the Saturn V and the procedure involving an Earth orbit, a lunar orbiter and lander will be almost identical to the Apollo missions, as will the procedure for the Mars mission. One big difference will be that the Ares V will be unmanned, launching cargo only, primarily the Orion, the spacecraft that will fly to and land on the moon. The long, slender Ares 1 – aka the Stick – will launch the crew into orbit to rendezvous with Orion. The other big difference will be scale. This system will deliver more astronauts to the moon for longer periods and will be able, over time, to construct a base there housing anything from half a dozen to, according to the most wildly optimistic forecasts, hundreds of people.
But this whole scheme has been subject to stinging criticisms as being wasteful, slow and old-fashioned. The author and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin reckons he could get to Mars much quicker for only $50 billion. There might be a 30% chance that everyone would be killed, but mountaineers on Earth willingly take bigger risks. That’s what exploration is about. And one of the leading experts on Nasa’s methods and policies, Howard McCurdy of the American University in Washington, DC, fears they may be about to make a familiar mistake. “The purpose of going to the moon is to practise technologies that are necessary to get humans into the inner solar system… But by investing heavily in the first step, Nasa may be precluding the possibility of taking the second step.”
With both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS), Nasa set itself tasks that ultimately overwhelmed the entire organisation. The Shuttle was costly, had two disastrous failures, and never lived up to the demands of its designers and political paymasters. Much the same can be said about the ISS.
Both were also intended to be stepping stones to outer space.
Now the ISS is to be abandoned by the Americans, who seem to be “tossing Europe the keys” – ESA alone has plans for attaching a science module. Peter Voorhees, an engineer at Chicago’s Northwestern University, sees folly in this. A lot of important science should have been done on the ISS involving, crucially, dealing with fires in space, but it has now been abandoned.
“We’re going ahead with a manned mission while losing out on very important research that will impact the exploration initiative.”
Furthermore, the use of traditional chemical rockets is seen as a backward step. We should be moving on to nuclear or ion drives; maybe even, as Hawking has suggested, exotic matter/antimatter collision systems. “We’re never going to get to Mars using chemical fuels,” says McCurdy. “It’s too slow. Nasa is talking about a 900-day mission. With a little more investment in propulsion technologies, we could do 100- or 200-day missions. With 900 days there’s so much back-up equipment, costs could rise as high as $1 trillion.”
Meanwhile, Griffin’s strategy will leave Nasa with an embarrassing four years when it won’t be able to launch people into space. The Shuttle is to be phased out in 2010 and the Ares-Orion system won’t be ready for flight until 2014. Aware of this, Nasa has awarded $500m worth of contracts under its Cots (Commercial off-the- Shelf) programme to develop cheap launching systems. This is an acknowledgment that the private sector may be able to find short cuts the public sector can’t even imagine. Jeff Bezos of Amazon has recently successfully tested a rocket christened Goddard. Richard Branson, via Burt Rutan’s cheap, light and utterly original rocket, will soon be offering space tourism and, using Soyuz, the company Space Adventures is working on a $100m round-trip ticket to take punters round the dark side of the moon. Some talk of lunar Winnebagos. Tourists would be dropped off, given a lunar rover to go where they liked, then picked up two weeks later.
Tourists on the moon before astronauts and scientists would be even more embarrassing than China getting back there first.
Okay, so Mars may be pricey and tricky, but the Americans are, it seems, definitely going back to the moon if only out of embarrassment. They will use tried and, leaving aside Apollo 13, trusted technology. With luck, we should end up with a permanent base there. So what will it be like and what will it do?
At the Open University, Colin Pillinger, the brilliant maverick of British space science and the man behind the ill-fated Beagle 2 Mars lander (named after the Beagle, the ship that the other Great British scientist Charles Darwin sailed on to the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s), is a Mars man to his bones. He thinks, like Zubrin, we could easily miss out the moon completely and just fly to Mars from Earth orbit. But now, at 63 and cruelly stricken by very-late-onset multiple sclerosis, he’ll make do with the moon.
He is sceptical of the suggestion that in the near future, the base could assemble rockets to fly to Mars and beyond. “It’s difficult enough building them here. We could transport and assemble then. But why not just do it in orbit?” But he does accept that the moon may be valuable as a rehearsal for Mars.
“We are going to rehearse the events and find out what it’s like living in an environment where you have to be totally shielded, with enormous temperature fluctuations – the psychology and physiology of all that. It’s not like Antarctica, where you can just get a helicopter in there.”
So the first big function of the base is to find out how to live in space. This is a notoriously complex business and The Man Who Knows is Kevin Fong. Fong is a very young-looking 35, and his day job is as an anaesthetist at University College Hospital in London. “But,” he says wistfully, “not many astronauts come into casualty.”
But he also studied astrophysics and he wants to be an astronaut. He is just the kind of person a moon programme would need: multiply qualified, fit and awesomely keen and focused. He knows the medical issues of space inside out.
The key issue is low gravity. The human body is built on the assumption that it will spend its entire time on the Earth’s surface and thus never experience any gravitational load more or less than 1G for any length of time. We know the effect of living in the zero G of orbit from astronauts who have stayed in the ISS and in the Russian Mir space stations. The body suffers bone loss and muscle wastage, but also increased difficulties with hand-eye co-ordination because the brain seems to use 1G as a means of calibration. What we don’t know is the prolonged effect of the one-sixth G on the moon and one-third G on Mars.
Fong wants to find out if there is some gravity threshold at which bad effects kick in. Or will we simply adjust temporarily?
Solutions may include a punishing exercise regime or some form of artificial gravity created by spinning the moon colonists around in a centrifuge. This may turn out to be a necessary – and heavy – piece of equipment on the moon base. Colonists would have to sit in this for a short period every day. “There are some groups,” says Fong, “who think that might be the answer.
These short-arm centrifuges spin at 40 times a minute. It’s quite a ride.”
(cont)
January 21, 2007
Mission possible
It’s been 35 years since man walked on the moon. But now Nasa plans to go back and build a permanent base there. And this time, they can’t do it without Britain.
By Bryan Appleyard
January 21, 2007
Legend has it that the very last words spoken on the moon were Cernan’s: “Okay, Jack, let’s get this mother outta here.” And, with that, we returned the place to its 4.5 billion years of solitude.
Then, for another 35 years, nothing happened. British scientists laid bets on when we would return to the moon. All the dates on which they gambled have long gone. After the glories of the Apollo programme, humans, it seemed, were destined to do no more than spin around in low Earth orbit. Only robots would go into real space. But finally, George Bush, in 2004, said he wanted people back in space and, in December, Nasa revealed its “mission architecture” to establish a moon base and then to fly on to Mars. A human boot is scheduled once again to kick regolith – lunar dust – in 2020. And this time we plan to stay. “Unless disaster strikes the world,” says Ken Pounds, the grand old man of British space science, “this could be the great human endeavour of the 21st century.”
NI_MPU('middle');He speaks with feeling, for he comes from a deeply disappointed generation. They were inspired by the Apollo programme and expected human space exploration just to continue. Now he thinks we may have started too soon. “I spoke to Buzz Aldrin [the second man to walk on the moon] and he said the Apollo programme came too soon, the world wasn’t ready for it. It was very much part of the cold war, when Kennedy wanted to outdo the Russians in terms of prestige.”
In fact, it seems to be a similar impulse that has converted Bush to manned space exploration. India and China have made it clear they want to go to the moon and they undoubtedly have the technical capacity to do so. Russia, meanwhile, has, in the Soyuz rockets, the most reliable launchers in the world. Putin also seems to want to restart the cold war, and competing with America in space would be one way to do it. If only politically, it looks as though the US has to put boots back on the moon.
But there are other, better reasons. Robot exploration of the planets of the solar system has not delivered the scientific goods. Crucially, we still don’t know if the planet ever harboured life. Robots do dumb, routine tasks well, but they don’t improvise and can’t undertake large-scale engineering work like deep drilling.
Increasingly the scientists have become impatient. Two influential American scientists, Michael Malin and Kenneth Edgett, who last year announced the most persuasive evidence yet that there was water on Mars, have virtually issued a demand for renewed human exploration of space. “We’re constantly aggravated by the fact,” said Malin, “that all the questions we have about Mars could be answered by Ken and me if we could just walk around on the planet for a few days.”
And Ken Pounds was a member of a Royal Astronomical Society team that, in 2005, concluded that human space exploration is essential if we are to answer the big questions. “Scientific missions to the Moon and Mars,” the report said, “will address questions of profound interest to the human race. These include: the origins and history of the solar system; whether life is unique to Earth; and how life on Earth began. If our close neighbour Mars is found devoid of life, important lessons may be learned regarding the future of our own planet.”
Then, in December, Britain’s leading scientific body, the Royal Society, had a surprise guest: Dr Michael Griffin, the boss of Nasa since April 2005. Griffin is a big Winston Churchill fan, and an all-round Anglophile. The ostensible reason for his visit was to present the RS’s Copley Medal to another of his British heroes, Stephen Hawking. But the real reason was, he wanted to set Nasa’s manned missions to the moon and Mars in political concrete. Bush has committed to the missions and Congress had made them obligatory for Nasa. But Bush will be gone in 2008 and nobody can guess at the attitude of the next administration.
Griffin’s strategy, therefore, is to move as quickly as possible to get the moon-Mars project under way. International partners are vital, as they will make it more difficult for America to pull out.
And Griffin was specifically wooing the British. We could take part as members of the European Space Agency (ESA), but Griffin was looking for a bilateral deal (the US working only with Britain). His lecture to the Royal Society was a grand hymn of praise to the British exploratory heritage, invoking Churchill, Hawking (who has suggested he wants to make the journey into space), Captain Cook and John Harrison of longitude fame. “And so,” he said, “over many generations, the primary language of the United States came to be English and our dominant cultural traditions are derived from Great Britain… So my hope is, the English language will not only remain in common usage around the world, but will spread throughout the solar system over the course of the next century…”
We could get on board this linguistically imperial mission, the RAS team estimated, for about £150m a year over the next decade. Will we do it? “I think the answer is yes,” says the new science minister, Malcolm Wicks, “but it’s early days.” In fact, British government policy is not to fund manned space missions.
But Wicks is aiming to loosen this particular stranglehold on our scientists. “The government policy means we don’t want somehow to pretend that we can launch our own missions to the moon. But that’s to present our position in a negative way. We want to be encouraging a proper relationship with Nasa in terms of the things we do best – robots, astronomy, small satellite technology.”
But should we be pursuing this fantastically expensive – one estimate suggests it might cost $1 trillion to go to Mars – and risk-laden project? What is it for? What will we do? The space scientists are coming up with answers as if their lives depended on it, which, of course, they do.
The Nasa “architecture” is not, in principle, new. The primary rocket, the Ares V, will be a beefed-up version of the Saturn V and the procedure involving an Earth orbit, a lunar orbiter and lander will be almost identical to the Apollo missions, as will the procedure for the Mars mission. One big difference will be that the Ares V will be unmanned, launching cargo only, primarily the Orion, the spacecraft that will fly to and land on the moon. The long, slender Ares 1 – aka the Stick – will launch the crew into orbit to rendezvous with Orion. The other big difference will be scale. This system will deliver more astronauts to the moon for longer periods and will be able, over time, to construct a base there housing anything from half a dozen to, according to the most wildly optimistic forecasts, hundreds of people.
But this whole scheme has been subject to stinging criticisms as being wasteful, slow and old-fashioned. The author and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin reckons he could get to Mars much quicker for only $50 billion. There might be a 30% chance that everyone would be killed, but mountaineers on Earth willingly take bigger risks. That’s what exploration is about. And one of the leading experts on Nasa’s methods and policies, Howard McCurdy of the American University in Washington, DC, fears they may be about to make a familiar mistake. “The purpose of going to the moon is to practise technologies that are necessary to get humans into the inner solar system… But by investing heavily in the first step, Nasa may be precluding the possibility of taking the second step.”
With both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS), Nasa set itself tasks that ultimately overwhelmed the entire organisation. The Shuttle was costly, had two disastrous failures, and never lived up to the demands of its designers and political paymasters. Much the same can be said about the ISS.
Both were also intended to be stepping stones to outer space.
Now the ISS is to be abandoned by the Americans, who seem to be “tossing Europe the keys” – ESA alone has plans for attaching a science module. Peter Voorhees, an engineer at Chicago’s Northwestern University, sees folly in this. A lot of important science should have been done on the ISS involving, crucially, dealing with fires in space, but it has now been abandoned.
“We’re going ahead with a manned mission while losing out on very important research that will impact the exploration initiative.”
Furthermore, the use of traditional chemical rockets is seen as a backward step. We should be moving on to nuclear or ion drives; maybe even, as Hawking has suggested, exotic matter/antimatter collision systems. “We’re never going to get to Mars using chemical fuels,” says McCurdy. “It’s too slow. Nasa is talking about a 900-day mission. With a little more investment in propulsion technologies, we could do 100- or 200-day missions. With 900 days there’s so much back-up equipment, costs could rise as high as $1 trillion.”
Meanwhile, Griffin’s strategy will leave Nasa with an embarrassing four years when it won’t be able to launch people into space. The Shuttle is to be phased out in 2010 and the Ares-Orion system won’t be ready for flight until 2014. Aware of this, Nasa has awarded $500m worth of contracts under its Cots (Commercial off-the- Shelf) programme to develop cheap launching systems. This is an acknowledgment that the private sector may be able to find short cuts the public sector can’t even imagine. Jeff Bezos of Amazon has recently successfully tested a rocket christened Goddard. Richard Branson, via Burt Rutan’s cheap, light and utterly original rocket, will soon be offering space tourism and, using Soyuz, the company Space Adventures is working on a $100m round-trip ticket to take punters round the dark side of the moon. Some talk of lunar Winnebagos. Tourists would be dropped off, given a lunar rover to go where they liked, then picked up two weeks later.
Tourists on the moon before astronauts and scientists would be even more embarrassing than China getting back there first.
Okay, so Mars may be pricey and tricky, but the Americans are, it seems, definitely going back to the moon if only out of embarrassment. They will use tried and, leaving aside Apollo 13, trusted technology. With luck, we should end up with a permanent base there. So what will it be like and what will it do?
At the Open University, Colin Pillinger, the brilliant maverick of British space science and the man behind the ill-fated Beagle 2 Mars lander (named after the Beagle, the ship that the other Great British scientist Charles Darwin sailed on to the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s), is a Mars man to his bones. He thinks, like Zubrin, we could easily miss out the moon completely and just fly to Mars from Earth orbit. But now, at 63 and cruelly stricken by very-late-onset multiple sclerosis, he’ll make do with the moon.
He is sceptical of the suggestion that in the near future, the base could assemble rockets to fly to Mars and beyond. “It’s difficult enough building them here. We could transport and assemble then. But why not just do it in orbit?” But he does accept that the moon may be valuable as a rehearsal for Mars.
“We are going to rehearse the events and find out what it’s like living in an environment where you have to be totally shielded, with enormous temperature fluctuations – the psychology and physiology of all that. It’s not like Antarctica, where you can just get a helicopter in there.”
So the first big function of the base is to find out how to live in space. This is a notoriously complex business and The Man Who Knows is Kevin Fong. Fong is a very young-looking 35, and his day job is as an anaesthetist at University College Hospital in London. “But,” he says wistfully, “not many astronauts come into casualty.”
But he also studied astrophysics and he wants to be an astronaut. He is just the kind of person a moon programme would need: multiply qualified, fit and awesomely keen and focused. He knows the medical issues of space inside out.
The key issue is low gravity. The human body is built on the assumption that it will spend its entire time on the Earth’s surface and thus never experience any gravitational load more or less than 1G for any length of time. We know the effect of living in the zero G of orbit from astronauts who have stayed in the ISS and in the Russian Mir space stations. The body suffers bone loss and muscle wastage, but also increased difficulties with hand-eye co-ordination because the brain seems to use 1G as a means of calibration. What we don’t know is the prolonged effect of the one-sixth G on the moon and one-third G on Mars.
Fong wants to find out if there is some gravity threshold at which bad effects kick in. Or will we simply adjust temporarily?
Solutions may include a punishing exercise regime or some form of artificial gravity created by spinning the moon colonists around in a centrifuge. This may turn out to be a necessary – and heavy – piece of equipment on the moon base. Colonists would have to sit in this for a short period every day. “There are some groups,” says Fong, “who think that might be the answer.
These short-arm centrifuges spin at 40 times a minute. It’s quite a ride.”
(cont)
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