AirSpaceMag.com

This report came out in 1994 (16 years ago) and nothing has changed. What's the basis for assuming that it ever will?

Of all the possible destinations in space, the Moon offers the proximity, accessibility, and materials necessary to learn how to use what we find in space to create new capabilities.  Harvesting the resources of the Moon will allow us to make what we need in space, rather than carrying it with us from the Earth’s surface.  The model currently used to pursue our national interests in space – design-launch-use-discard – restrains opportunity, affordability and capability.  We can break the limits imposed on all of these factors by learning how to use the resources of space.

The development of the Moon creates an extensible, flexible transportation system that opens up the new frontier for many possibilities.  Acquiring this essential space faring skill requires investment and commitment, with the full understanding of what will be achieved by this paradigm shift – the beginnings of a new space-based economy.  What price tag would you put on that?

A constant refrain in policy discussions is that the space program is too expensive.  This verity is at the core of the Augustine report, which asserts that Project Constellation (NASA’s Program of Record to implement the Vision for Space Exploration) is too expensive and requires at least an additional $3 billion per year to implement.  The “New Space” community is aggressively campaigning for commercial launch services, pronouncing any NASA-designed/NASA-built space system politically “unsustainable” due to the agency’s inability to receive adequate funding from Congress over the lifetime of a flight program.

The civilian space agency’s 2010 budget is about $19 billion.  That’s a nice chunk of change but compared to what the federal government spends elsewhere, it’s not a head-turning sum.  For comparison, the Department of Energy’s nominal funding currently stands at $26 billion, to which Congress recently added an additional “one-time” $35 billion for the next two years, averaging out to about $43 billion per year – more than double what NASA will receive.

Other federal agencies and departments are funded at even higher levels.  The Department of Education’s FY 2010 budget is $68 billion, of which $56 billion is “discretionary” (meaning non-entitlement).  This handsome outlay is for an agency whose principal mission is to influence and monitor public schools; in fact, educating tomorrow’s citizens is the responsibility of state and local authorities and is covered by those taxes, which make up approximately half of the states’ budgets.  So in federal spending terms, NASA does not consume as much as most people believe nor is it even “expensive” when stacked up against the cost of other agencies.  And when managed even moderately well, we get something for our investment in NASA.

What drives space costs?  Advanced technology alone is not the cause.  An iPod contains more advanced systems than any single piece of electronic equipment carried 40 years ago on an Apollo spacecraft and is available for a couple hundred dollars.  An array of electronic boxes in our homes offer 500 channels of high-definition video in surround-sound stereo – a stunning visual and aural sensory assault – for only a couple thousand dollars.  The family automobile contains sensory and monitoring computers, protective airbags, fuel injectors, catalytic converters, automatic parallel parking systems, GPS, satellite radio, DVD players, and a slew of other innovations only dreamed of 20 years ago.  These vehicles are affordable enough that most families have more than one in their driveway and buy new models on a regular basis.

Building and launching space vehicles is expensive but the reasons why might surprise you.  It’s not the equipment or even the infrastructure that drives up costs.  It may well cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to build a launch pad and its associated facilities, but once constructed and maintained, it is used essentially forever (some facilities at the Cape have launched rockets for over 50 years).  The propellant used to hurl payloads into space makes up only about one percent of the cost of launch.  Rockets are built of shaped aluminum (along with a few other more exotic metals) and those pieces make up an additional 10% or so of the total cost.

Spaceflight costs remain high because it requires complex machines, with millions of parts working together in a precise order and in perfect coordination to put a payload into space.  To assure that these events transpire as planned, we pay a large number of highly skilled technicians, engineers and scientists to design, build and operate space systems.  These high demand people don’t work for minimum wage.  It requires almost 10,000 people to operate the U.S. Space Shuttle launch vehicle system.  Everyone has a critical job, from program design to inspecting and replacing thermal tiles on the orbiter airframe, to stacking and configuring the vehicle for launch –- everything and everyone necessary for the construction, operation and flight of the vehicle to and from orbit.  It is a specialized machine that is custom-made and individually operated.  Moreover, each individual piece of hardware has a paperwork trail so that part failures can be tracked back in time and space.  Documenting these part histories and pedigrees requires many hours, all billed to some charge code.

Despite our best efforts, rockets are finicky and unpredictable.  Sometimes, satellites don’t wind up in the proper orbit or fail to operate correctly.  Customers who paid for the satellite need some kind of indemnification against these possibilities.  Insurance rates are based on a careful assessment and determination of risk.  For a launch system with a long history of reliable performance, premiums are relatively low (but still substantial).  New rockets and new companies face higher insurance costs and it may take many years to establish a track record of enough resiliency and consistency so as to significantly lower insurance rates.  These costs must be folded into the cost per kilogram to LEO.

Which brings us to the inescapable fact that a major obstacle to routine affordable spaceflight –what makes other high technology efforts affordable  – is the lack of mass production and automation in the fabrication of space systems.  If we could mass produce rockets and automatically assemble and check them out for launch, launch costs would drop dramatically.  Commercial items are inexpensive because development costs are amortized over very large sales volumes.  For space systems, development costs are very large and not easily hidden by amortization.

A way to make spaceflight “cheap” is to remove much of the highly paid human talent from the end-to-end processing stream.  One possibility is to automate most of the process of rocket fabrication, assembly, checkout and launch.  A wholly new approach to our launch service infrastructure and model of operations would be required and to my knowledge, no company or government entity is working on such an approach.  Even SpaceX uses a skilled cadre of people to custom build, launch and operate their vehicles.  The claimed goal of SpaceX is a factor of ten reduction in cost and increase in reliability.  I hope they reach it.  But even if they do, space travel is still a costly enterprise; reduction of cost from the current $10,000 per kilogram (Atlas 5) to $5400 per kg (the quoted current cost for a Falcon 9 launch, which is not yet operational) is progress, but is not the canonical “hundreds of dollars per pound” breakthrough sought by space fans everywhere.

Another way to lower costs is to do what others in high-technology fields have done: outsource the work overseas.  The Indian PSLV rocket can put 3700 kg into low Earth orbit and costs about $20 million (at least, that’s what informed sources claim it cost to launch TECSAR, an Israeli radar imaging satellite).  This price works out to be about $5400 per kg, exactly the same as the projected cost for the Falcon 9 – and the PSLV already has a proven track record.  The Russian Proton rocket puts about 20,000 kg into orbit for an estimated $115 million, about $5700 per kg.  Even the supposedly “costly” European/French Ariane V puts 18,000 kg into space at a cost of $120 million, or about $6600 per kg.

The cost of all these competing systems seems to be approaching a single value – $5000 per kilogram is achievable for launch within the existing engineering state-of-the-art.  Is such a cost “cheap enough?”  Commercial launch costs have hovered between $5000 and $10,000 per kilogram (constant dollars) for the last thirty years.  This “expensive” price structure has given rise to a thriving commercial space industry, especially in global communications.  And despite the hype about orders-of-magnitude decreases in the cost of launch, these numbers likely will persist for the indefinite future.  SpaceX has no access to special physics, ULA cannot repeal the law of gravity and XCOR cannot change the rocket equation.

Space launch costs what it costs.  Spaceflight is expensive because we employ and pay thousands of highly skilled and trained people to build and operate space systems.  Despite decades of planning and talking, these costs have not decreased significantly and the dream of cheap space launch remains a chimera.  We frequently get marginal improvements in the dollars per kilogram number, but never of the order-of-magnitude variety.  The problem of small volume/high cost cannot be solved by factors of two or three decreases in launch cost.  We need a new operational approach that severs the Gordian Knot problem of the cost of space launch.

The use of off-planet resources of materials and energy is that approach.  Despite new launch vehicles, new companies and supposed new approaches, we have only marginal improvements in the cost numbers for launch.  It is time for the new and fundamentally different approach of developing the Moon’s natural resources to build a space faring infrastructure that will create new capabilities and give us lasting value for our money.

A compressive thrust fault on the far side of the Moon: Is the Moon shrinking? (LROC image)

Back in the 1970’s Paleolithic age of lunar studies, scientists were busy using images of the Moon in an attempt to understand lunar processes and history.   In the rugged ancient cratered uplands of the Moon, they saw something curious.  Many small scarps dotted the highlands and were visible in only the very highest resolution images and even then, seen only under certain illumination conditions.   Moreover, these scarps appeared to cut or overlie small, very young impact craters – young in lunar terms (less than a few hundred million years) not some ancient feature recording an event that occurred billions of years ago.

These highland features looked similar to the Lee-Lincoln scarp found at the Apollo 17 landing site.  That scarp crosses the valley floor and trends up the slope of the North Massif.  Thrust faults are significant in that they are indicators of compression, where the crust is squeezed together due to some regional stress field.  Geologists interpreted Lee-Lincoln as a thrust fault, a zone of failure in which one slab of a planet is pushed over and on top of another.  Scientists had previously found abundant evidence for such compression in the dark, lowland mare basins (where piles of lava slowly sink under their own enormous weight) but they had not seen such evidence for compression in the highland crust.

This discovery, though interesting, was not revolutionary.  But it was curious – just what did the presence of these scarps mean?  Lunar scientist Alan Binder thought they could be highly significant and began searching all the panoramic photographs taken by the Apollo missions, mapping dozens of the small scarps scattered throughout the highlands, especially on the far side of the Moon.  He believed that these scarps indicated the Moon must have been completely molten at one time and even more startlingly, that their presence meant that after millions of years of quiescence, the Moon was becoming seismically active as its crust strained (“Moon-shaking”) under the compression of global contraction.

These were startling predictions and as expected, were challenged by other planetary scientists.  Some questioned Binder’s interpretation that the faults were real – such challenges are part and parcel of vigorous scientific research.  Others thought that while real, perhaps they were not as young and widespread as claimed, since the Apollo images covered a small zone around the equator of the Moon and only a few percent of the highlands surface was covered at resolutions and lighting conditions adequate to see the scarps.  Still others thought that the idea of a totally molten Moon did not jibe with what we knew from study of the lunar samples.

A new paper by Tom Watters and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera (LROC) team has answered some of the questions about the presence and distribution of these enigmatic features.  The LROC produces high resolution images that can resolve features less than a meter across on the lunar surface.  These new images have produced spectacular views of a variety of landforms and show the surface of the Moon in incredible detail.  While mapping coverage is not yet global, it does extend our high-resolution vision well beyond the equatorial “Apollo zone” to the polar latitudes.  The new results indicate that these small scarps occur all over the Moon.   Moreover, they are indeed “young” in lunar terms; many scarps cut small craters that should have been eroded to invisibility on timescales longer than a few hundred million years.  Thus, as Binder claimed, the scarps must have been created relatively recently.

So, how much “shrinkage” of the Moon might these new findings indicate?  The LROC team suggests that the radius of the Moon might have decreased by about 100 m or so, not a very large amount for a body 1738 km in radius and not nearly as much as estimated in Alan Binder’s original paper (about 5 km).  This new number comes from an estimate of the amount of strain relieved by the formation of scarps found to date.  If there are substantially more of these features and of larger size, the strain estimate may be much greater and consequently indicate a greater contraction of the Moon.  We know from images returned from the Mariner 10 mission in 1973 and more recently by the MESSENGER spacecraft that Mercury (a much larger body than the Moon) also shows compressive thrust faults on its surface and consequently has decreased in size, on the order of about 1-2 km in radius.

Could the Moon still be seismically active?  Interestingly, the instrument network emplaced by the Apollo missions showed that while the Moon is extremely quiet compared to the continuous, restless trembling of the Earth, moonquakes do occur and some in the shallow levels of the crust are relatively strong (Richter magnitude 5).  Could these quakes be caused by the relief of stress in the crust accompanying the ongoing formation of highland thrust faults?  Unfortunately, the Apollo seismic network operated for only a few years.  Constant, global, decade-long monitoring of lunar seismic activity is needed to fully answer this question.  Such a global seismic network mission has been proposed, but the prospects of deploying this seismic network by robotic spacecraft within reasonable cost guidelines is challenging, to put it mildly.

Scientific studies continue to unravel the complex story of our Moon and the new flood of superb quality data from recent and ongoing orbital missions are showing us a range of new things that we have previously seen incompletely, if at all.  We’ve only “scratched” the surface of the Moon.  From the newest data, we’ve found evidence for the previous existence of water in the deep interior, ice at the poles, unsuspected (and unsampled) new rock types, and now, crustal compression on a global scale.  Imagine what we’ll discover when we do more than just look at images – when humanity’s destiny of again walking on our Moon comes to pass.

Apollo 16 sample 60095, "Rusty Rock" -- contamination or Moon water?

The never-ending saga of water on the Moon continues apace.  In the latest revelation, it is now claimed that the Moon is indeed “dry” after all and never had much water  (this new finding is only in regard to endogenous lunar water contained inside the Moon, not to water that has been or is being added to the lunar surface from impacting debris).  Details of the controversy illuminate not only how science is done, but also how science is reported to the public by the popular press.

The current study by scientists at the University of New Mexico did not measure lunar water directly, but rather a chemical proxy for it, the element chlorine.  Chlorine is “hydrophylic” (water-loving) and in theory, its abundance and variations should track with those of water inside the Moon.  The new study finds that while the ratio of isotopes of chlorine largely are invariant in Earth rocks, they vary widely on the Moon.  The interpretation of this observation is that the Moon does not possess an “offsetting” mechanism that regulates terrestrial chlorine isotope ratios, and the biggest offsetting factor in such systems is the hydrogen present in water in the Earth’s interior.  The conclusion of this study is that as this factor is absent from the studied lunar samples, the Moon has no large amount of water nor did it ever have any.

Back in 1972, a “rusty rock” – sample number 66095 – was brought back to Earth by the Apollo 16 astronauts.  Lunar scientists have long debated the origin and meaning of the molecule hydroxyl (OH) in the mineral akaganite (an oxidized iron compound) that was identified on its surface.  Does this famous “oddball” rock sample indicate the movement of and interaction with water and the lunar surface, or did the akaganite form inside the warm, humid Apollo 16 command module during its transport to Earth?

Results from the University of New Mexico study are not inconsistent with what we’ve known about the Moon for some time.  Almost all of the Apollo samples are bone-dry (showing no hydrous mineral phases) and chemically reduced, indicating formation in a non-oxidizing environment.  Such conditions are possible in the absence of water.  Conventional wisdom that the Moon has no significant water derives from these and similar observations.

A 2008 analyses of lunar samples promised to change our perception of water and the Moon.  Studies of beads of volcanic glass from the deep interior and grains of the mineral apatite in several types of lunar rock surprised us by the presence of water (H₂O) or its related ion hydroxyl trapped in both the glass and mineral grains.  The amounts of water detected were still quite small (a few tens of parts per million), but significantly greater than previously reported.  Much was made of these new discoveries, including the suggestion that models of lunar origin would have to be reconsidered and perhaps revised.

Do the newly released study results negate previous work?  Hardly. What’s true for one part of the Moon may or may not be true for another.  Scientists must separate their observations from the subsequent inferences drawn from those observations.  Unless some error is made, the previous measurements of water in a sample are objective facts.  What the presence of that water means is something else.  The interpretation of facts draws on our understanding of how nature works and the completeness of our reconstruction of the history of the Moon; both are incomplete at best and just plain wrong at worst.  Moreover, there is a tendency for scientists to want their results to be significant.  Thus, they will sometimes draw broad, sweeping planet-wide conclusions that may not be justified by the actual observation.  I know this happens because I have done it myself.  There is no intent to falsify or mislead – only a desire to claim a fullness of understanding that may not yet be warranted.

When esoteric or complex arguments are made about the meaning of some discovery, it is sometimes very difficult for the popular press to fully follow the lines of reasoning.  They also have a desire to make stories interesting to their readers, so they tend to focus on controversy, often portraying different interpretation of facts as “fights’ between rival scientific groups.  These tendencies often result in hilarious headlines, e.g., “Moon not so watery after all” or my personal favorite, “Moon water dreams evaporate.”  Funny – I don’t recall ever “dreaming” about water in the Moon and I very much doubt that many of my colleagues do either.  But differing opinions means conflict and conflict means human interest, and so a fight it must be.

Nature is complicated and that can make for some missteps in our long struggle to characterize it and reconstruct its history.  The simple fact is, the Moon is more complex and interesting than we had thought.  Scientifically, this is a good thing.  We want hard problems to tackle and solve.  And the process of solving problems sometimes does create feuds between scientists; history is replete with them.  However, in this latest instance, a feud doesn’t exist – only a desire to fully understand the Moon and its history.  When Prohibition is repealed and we return to the Moon, many of our questions can be answered and there will be no need to dream up non-existent controversies with hyperbolic and misleading headlines.