"One small step" to settlement

Learning to live off the land on the Moon. A strategic human necessity.

Paul D. Spudis
The Once & Future Moon
Smithsonian Air & Space

At the recent International Space Development Conference in Huntsville, Augustine committee member and CEO of XCOR Aerospace Jeff Greason gave a talk on the goals of human spaceflight. While he discussed many things that I agree with (in particular, making the use of off-planet resources a high priority), one idea in particular stood out. Greason said that we need some type of long-range goal or objective for our national civil space program. Picking up on a statement by his Augustine colleague Chris Chyba, Greason suggested that “settlement” should be the goal of human spaceflight; if not, “what the hell are we doing it for?”

This observation naturally went over well with the crowd at the ISDC and the subsequent posting of a video of Jeff’s talk sent many space cadets of the internet into spasms of joy that someone would finally state in public the True Belief – humanity’s destiny is among the stars. Finally, out of all the confusion and bickering about heavy lift launch vehicles, depots, destinations, and crew vehicles, we have at last a clear articulation of the direction and purpose for the human space program.

There’s only one problem: it’s not the right goal for NASA.

First, let there be no misunderstanding. I agree that settlement and the expansion of humanity into space is indeed a noble and desirable thing — I call it the “ultimate rationale” for human spaceflight. By that, I mean that the idea of people going into space to live there, wherever our desires and aspirations may lead, is an objective of our species, a desire to spread human culture beyond its planetary cradle into the cosmos. That’s a different concept than making space settlement the objective of NASA’s human spaceflight program. I do not think such is an appropriate goal for a federal program that competes with all the other projects in the discretionary budget.

To most outside space circles (as well as to a surprisingly sizable number within the space community), space is a hostile, barren wilderness, with no harbor for man and his works. Their solution is to build machines that can be sent to return information from which we will decipher the secrets of the universe. Moreover, these people can think of at least two dozen different things they would rather spend that money on; you can bet that dreams of space settlement would fare poorly in comparison.

Another problem with “settlement” as an objective is that the metrics for success are difficult to define. When is space “settled” – when a single human lives permanently off planet? When a community is thriving on another world? How large a community and where? Buying into settlement as our goal means making a permanently moving target your objective; no matter what milestone is reached, you’ve never actually achieved your “goal” of settlement (for a current implementation of this mentality, see “Search for Extraterrestrial Life”).

Finally, settlement is a poor goal for a federal space program because it is so distant. No one seriously believes that humans will live in space or on another world permanently within the next several decades. Government programs can barely tolerate time horizons beyond one presidential term, let alone a multi-decadal trek through near-space. True enough, we can devise a program that delivers significant milestones toward the goal of space settlement within such time frames, but with such a nebulous end point receding into the distant future, it will lose its luster and consequent political support very quickly.

In contrast to Greason’s proposed “settlement strategy,” I have tried to frame a slightly different path for our national space program. Our “goal” is to expand human reach beyond LEO, first into cislunar space and then into interplanetary space (by “reach,” I mean the routine access of people and machines to any point in space where we need or want these capabilities to do whatever job we need to.) The “strategy” to accomplish this extension is to establish a resource-processing base on the Moon to make fuel for a cislunar space transportation system. A “tactical” implementation of this strategy is a robotic ISRU architecture, which will create our first foothold on another world.

What is the advantage of this path over Greason’s settlement sequence? For one thing, we can accomplish it much sooner than human settlement of space will ever occur; an operational lunar resource processing base can be up and running within 10-20 years of program initiation. Second, a space faring transportation system is relevant to critical national needs, specifically, our ability to maintain and extend the constellation of economic, scientific, and national strategic satellite assets that reside in cislunar space. By adopting this goal, we start from a position of political strength: we don’t have to convince Congress about our destiny among the stars, we just have to point out the critical dependence of modern technological civilization on our satellite assets in the volume of space between LEO and the Moon. Right now, those satellites are all designed as one-offs: build, launch, use, and discard. We want to change that template to build, extend, maintain and expand. Developing lunar resources to fuel a space transportation system allows us to do this and more.

By doing these things we lay the groundwork for space settlement. All agree that settlement requires the ability to access and use local planetary resources. Going to the Moon to harvest its polar water begins that process. If you want to look upon this as the first step in the settlement of the Solar System, be my guest. But I suggest that making lunar return relevant to important national economic and security objectives is more likely to help consolidate political support than setting the goal of “settlement” as NASA’s objective. NASA’s founding charter, the Space Act of 1958, lays out many different objectives and goals for the agency; space settlement is not one of them. But routine access to cislunar space is; cislunar space is specifically mentioned in the new NASA Authorization Act of 2010.

Settlement is a valid long-term goal for humanity in space – but we must have something with a practical and political payoff in the near-term.

Originally published June 3, 2011 at The Once & Future Moon, (Smithsonian Air & Space). Dr. Spudis is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. The opinions expressed are more informed than average.

Why settle the Moon?

G. Jeffrey Taylor
Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology
University of Hawaii - Honolulu

The space program needs a viable long-term goal. I suggest that the central goal should be to learn to live and work in space by living and working in space. A sustained presence on the Moon, with a vibrant infrastructure in cis-lunar space, is an essential part of that goal. Achieving this goal requires extensive use of lunar resources, active roles by both government and the private sector, and a social contract that the venture is worthwhile and worth funding. But why do it? Here are some reasons for pursuing this goal.

Challenge ourselves. We need grand goals that bring out the best in us. As President John F. Kennedy said about the Apollo program, we go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Settling the Moon, learning to live and work in space, and eventually going to Mars and beyond is certainly hard, much harder than was going to the Moon during Apollo. It will test our educational system, research laboratories, and industries, making all more effective and innovative than they are now.

New perspectives on our world, our problems, and ourselves. Space exploration has already provided us with new perspectives on Earth and our place in the universe. The first full Earth pictures taken by Apollo astronauts during their Moon journeys showed us that we live on an isolated, fragile, and beautiful island in space. Seeing the pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan called it, made everyone realize that we ought to take care of it, which helped fuel the environmental movement during the 1970s and beyond. Lunar settlements far from home may give us new perspectives on addressing other pressing problems, such as energy, health care, and poverty. Perhaps most important, it expands our view of our place in the universe. We are part of something larger than ourselves, our towns, our nations, and even our world.

Inspire all of us to become part of something larger. Many of us have claimed that the Apollo program inspired a generation of students. Maybe. But a sustained human presence will not provide the thrill of a short Apollo mission. What is the equivalent of Apollo 8, its crew reading from Genesis on Christmas Eve, 1968, or of Apollo 11 making the first landing? Instead, the inspiration will come from the new opportunities in commerce, science, arts, and humanities. Students from K through college will see opportunities for them to contribute to culture and knowledge. The new perspectives our human perch on the Moon provides may inspire the creative people in our society to aim high, to see the world differently, to think outside the box.

National pride and prestige. We have a growing number of space-faring nations. Believe it or not, the leaders of those nations are not driven to understand the details of magma ocean crystallization or searching for life in the cold deserts of Mars. They want to show the world that their nations can accomplish great feats.

Establish global partnerships. A good way for nations to work together is to collaborate on ambitious projects of mutual benefit. This is the other side of nationalism. It is pleasant to think about a coordinated effort involving many nations to establish a permanent, international settlement on the Moon, a settlement where differences were set aside for the common good, where governments, NGOs, companies, universities, and other entities from many nations worked together to learn how to live and work in space for the benefit of the citizens of planet Earth. This long shot is not a driving reason for space settlement.

Create the capability to travel to Mars and other destinations. The only way to develop the technical capability to travel anywhere in the solar system at affordable cost is to have a robust infrastructure in cislunar space that supports commerce. We need routine access to space, not one-off stunts funded entirely by a government or even an alliance of governments.

It’s what humans do. Humans explore. If we did not, we would not find humans living in every nook and cranny of the world. Space is still a wide-open frontier, awaiting adventurous humans who want to become part of something bigger than themselves.

How to begin: Making travel throughout cis-lunar space and lunar settlement affordable requires the use of lunar resources. In turn, this requires a thorough knowledge of how to handle materials on the Moon to extract useful materials, and an understanding of how to protect humans and agricultural products from radiation and other space hazards. Addressing the questions can begin immediately with a series of robotic missions. Commercial ventures can join in this by providing payloads on government-funded landed missions. A rich set of robotic missions can be envisioned while we wait for a cost-effective transportation system to be developed.

The 2009 Annual Conference of the
Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG)
is underway in Houston