“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
— President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961
Galileo's telescopic observations changed our views of the moon forever. It was no longer a mysterious white rock in the sky. It turned into a "sister" world filled with craters and ring-shaped mountains.
Why did we go to the moon?
During the Cold War, President Kennedy dared to be better than the Soviets, who where successfully launching satellites and men into Earth's orbit. There was not an outpouring from the scientific community to go there. President Kennedy just wanted to do something better. That's why he wanted us to visit the moon.
In fact, the Soviets were sending unmanned spacecraft to the moon before the Americans. We were the first nation to send humans to the moon.
Scientists discovered that the moon and Earth are different mixes of the same reservoir of materials.
In the final years of Apollo, there was talk of lunar colonies and exploiting the moon for commercial purposes.
Then a mountain of social upheaval in the United States and elsewhere buried all talk of future lunar exploration or exploitation.
Since the Apollo 17 mission, there has been a 22-year break in U.S. moon missions. During that time, scientists and universities analyzed data from the previous Apollo missions and information gained from the six probes sent there by the USSR.
Jeffrey G. Taylor, a University of Hawaii geophysicist, said NASA rationalized its long lunar exploration break by saying there already was a mountain of data on the moon and nothing on the planets -- which was true in some ways.
Alan Binder of the Lunar Research Institute said that Apollo just skimmed the scientific surface of the moon. The moon has a surface area equal to North and South America combined, but U.S. astronauts with Apollo spent only a total of three working days there. For Binder, that is hardly enough.
"We're talking about a whole world to explore," he said.
The most tantalizing resource that NASA is eager to discover on the moon is water. Binder headed up a $63 million project to map the remaining 75percent of the moon, via the Lunar Prospector. At the end of its mission, the probe crashed into the moon's south pole, where ice was expected to reside. It was hoped that vapor from the probe's crash into the ice would be viewable by Earth-bound observers. Nothing was detected.
Although vapor was not detected, the idea had an admittedly low probability of success -- about 10 percent, Binder says.
Why does water matter?
If humans colonize the moon, then water is the single most essential substance for humans and their machines. "Water is probably one of the most valuable strategic materials we can find in the solar system," said Dr. Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.
Water, of course, is a necessity for human life. But it can also be split into hydrogen and oxygen -- the two components of rocket fuel. So why build a rocket on the moon? Simply put, the gravity on the moon is much smaller than that of Earth's. This would allow humans to need less fuel to leave the moon, compared to the large amounts of fuel needed to escape Earth's gravity. This would make manned or unmanned missions to other planets in our solar system and beyond much cheaper.
That's why some experts treat a base on the moon as essential to manned missions to the planets. Launching from the moon leaves more fuel for the rest of the trip and extends the range of the mission.
The Lunar Prospector has mapped the location of 12 elements spread across the moon's surface.
"We had a tantalizing indication of what the global structure of the moon was but when you've only seen 20 percent . of the surface, you don't know what you've got," Binder said. "Now we know exactly what's going on. This is a big jump forward."
Binder's Lunar Research Institute is designed to pave the way for NASA's future, getting outside funding for its future missions to later sell the data to NASA.
Binder, a frustrated astronaut, said NASA "threw away" the capacity to fully explore and exploit the moon 25 years ago.
"Prospector is starting that process again and doing it commercially," he says.
He paints a picture where humanity colonizes space, including the moon and Mars. Moon miners will gather helium isotopes plentiful on the moon and figure out how to use them to create nuclear fusion energy. Mars-bound spacecraft could use the moon as a fueling station, cutting costs enormously.
The moon also is good place to do space-based astronomy, says Taylor, but we would need humans there to fix the instruments. The moon could be an excellent observatory, he said, moving slowly rather than whipping around like current space telescopes.
The moon also has a more stable surface than the Earth and no atmospheric interference.
"That means you can spread out a baseline of optical telescopes for interferometry," Taylor says. "It would be really big. At Mauna Kea (Hawaii) they are hooking up the two Keck telescopes with a 100-meter baseline. On the moon, they could have a 10 kilometer (6-mile) baseline."
The moon also is big enough for huge steerable radio telescopes, bigger than the steerable dishes at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, Taylor says, hardly able to contain his excitement.
Binder talks broadly of installing huge solar panels on the moon to collect energy and ship it back to Earth -- especially to Third World countries starved for power. These are hardly new ideas. In fact, the ideas date back 25 years, about the age of the Apollo program. Binder is just one of the few speaking frequently about it again -- partly because his plan is independent of government funding.
"The moon will become the New York City of the Earth complex in the future," Binder says.
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