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So much of the current attention on space exploration is focused on Mars — Matt Damon getting stuck there in The Martian, NatGeo’s recent Mars miniseries, Elon Musk’s pie-beyond-the-sky plan to go there in the next decade — that we’re overlook a more obvious destination.
Mars, Schmars. Let’s go back to the moon.
I get that we’ve been there and done that. (Allegedly.) We conquered that space mountain numerous times in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And in the four decades since, we’ve progressed to building the International Space Station, sending satellites to the other planets, and landing remote-control rovers on Mars. The reason to make the moon our once and future destination, though, is the promise it holds to become a convenience store on the intergalactic superhighway.
Rocket fuel is heavy, as one NASA scientist notes early in the new CuriosityStream documentary series Destination: Moon from Chris Haws, a former BBC producer and Discovery Channel executive. If we could produce rocket fuel on the moon, which has one-sixth the earth’s gravity, we wouldn’t have to waste so much of it lugging more rocket fuel to use after we leave earth’s orbit. (One of the scientists in the series calls this fuel “dumb mass,” which I plan on working into a lot of conversations in the coming months.) There’s water on the moon and rocket fuel is a liquid form of water’s two atomic components, so it’s theoretically possible to produce it there.
Besides water, there are other resources on the moon that could eventually be economically viable to mine and ship back to earth, including rare materials used in the production of microchips and an isotope called helium 3 that’s extremely rare on earth but plentiful on the moon. Two payloads of helium 3 could fuel astonishingly efficient clean, radiation-free fusion power back on earth and enough of it to supply all the electricity the United States would need for an entire year.
Everybody wants a piece of the rock, and there may be a 21st-century space race to see who can get there first. Scientists in Destination: Moon said the United States has as well-developed plan to start sending payloads of robots to the moon in the next decade to start mining for water and building a habitat and that China, Russia and the European Space Agency are working on their own plans to do the same.
Destination: Moon presents all this — OK, most of it — in layman’s terms that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand, and the sophisticated animatics make it all seem like a plausible or even inevitable natural extension of of the work that NASA and agencies have done in the last half-century. But how inevitable is that we’ll build a lunar colony with robots and mine it for the 21st-century version of gold (and also actual gold)?
“All of this works in theory,” Dr. Paul Spudis, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute says in the series. “It works on paper, but no one’s ever done it. No one’s ever built a big system of systems from small robotic elements. Nobody’s ever extracted water from extraterrestrial materials and then used it in some application. Nobody has ever put together an outpost on a planetary surface using robotic machines controlled from somewhere else. It all works in theory, but does it work in practice?”
The argument advanced in Destination: Moon is that it will work in practice and that the potential benefits outweigh the more pure-science objectives of sending a manned mission to Mars.
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
