Posted on 10/23/2002 11:47:15 AM PDT by dead
Humankind's presence on the moon was never supposed to be some boring public works project. It certainly wasn't supposed to be a failed one. When the easing of Cold War tensions and the economic disaster of the 1970s took the wind out of the Apollo missions, the dream of domed cities and low-gravity industrial parks died too. The moon remained a vacant lot in a bad neighborhood—until last month, when TransOrbital Incorporated became the first private company granted government permission to explore, photograph, and land there. What's fueling this moon rush is not just a juicy balance sheet, but a pulp fantasy version of the frontier. Rather than belonging to the world, lunar soil would belong to whoever staked a claim and had the best business model.
"It is necessary for humankind to move off-planet, and in the near future, if we are not to stagnate," TransOrbital executive Paul Blase says. And if the moon isn't turned into a commercial space, "then we are limiting ourselves to an observational presence only. . . . This will be only signing a suicide pact."
TransOrbital's Trailblazer mission, slated to launch in the next nine to 12 months from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, seems to lack the cachet to save industrial civilization from imminent collapse. You can send a lock of your hair up on the ship, or a business card, for $2500. The launch vehicle has room for corporate logos on the side (think NASCAR, but faster) for $25,000 and up. TransOrbital will license high-definition footage of the moon and daily Earthrise to the movies. Baldly commercial and on a shoestring, Trailblazer replaces the old NASA goals of scientific research and military advantage with a new one of profit-seeking and, over the long term, homesteading on lunar soil.
Though TransOrbital isn't laying down stakes, it's worth noting that the mission was spun off from the Artemis Project, a commercial venture to establish a lunar colony. Artemis has also founded a science fiction magazine and the nonprofit Moon Society. "The goal," says Ian Randall Strock, a member of the society's board of directors, "was to gather together people interested in getting back to the moon, in the hope that some of them might spawn commercial ideas which they would run with, creating spin-off companies to promote and finance both the Artemis Project and their own goals." Rather than lobbying for increased funding for the space program, the group wants to create "a space-faring civilization which will establish communities on the moon" and to promote "large-scale industrialization and private enterprise on the moon." In short, it's a nonprofit built for the support of profit.
Setting up shop in the heavens is perfectly legal, and perfectly American. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 barred nations from owning property upstairs but left companies with an all-clear. Later, the 1979 United Nations Moon Treaty declared Earth's satellite part of the Common Heritage of Mankind, exploitable only for the mutual benefit of all nations. But the U.S. and the Soviet Union never signed on. America refused because of "the conquistador mind-set," says William Hartmann, astronomer at Tucson's Planetary Science Institute, author of the current theory of the moon's origin, and novelist. "Basically, [failing to ratify the treaty] says that the rest of the world is up for grabs and is populated by a bunch of ignorant peasants, and since we are the most noble, advanced, and moral people, it is our duty to God and country to grab as much as we can for ourselves."
And there is plenty of profit to be made from the moon. It allows for efficient solar power (no clouds), radio astronomy (the earth generates a ton of radio "noise"), vacuums for integrated-circuit manufacturing, and, of course, advertising on spacecrafts—not to mention billboards on the lunar surface itself, for a captive audience of several billion below.
"I sure see a lot of conquistador mentality among what you might call the libertarian space buffs, who have a fantasy about 'getting NASA out of the way,' and then magically private enterprise will blossom with the investments needed to start space industry and a handful of people will get rich by developing space resources, and we'll all be happy," says astronomer Hartmann.
He argues that the real choice isn't between allowing the rich to develop space resources or ignoring those resources while the known world devolves into a pre-industrial state. Land-use planning, rather than letting the market carve the moon into real estate, can take the edge off the consumption of Earth's finite resources. Moon bases could generate electricity on the cheap thanks to 24-7 solar access, and proximity to nickel- and iron-rich asteroids could finally let us shut down terrestrial mines, "allowing Earth to relax back to its natural state," he says.
Unfortunately, outside of the small community of space buffs, much of the public debate over the TrailBlazer mission has been hysterical. Democrats.com (a site not affiliated with the political party) fumed, "Bush simply acted as if the moon were his to give away. The TransOrbital venture could be disastrous for the globe—no scientist today could predict yet how adding mass to the moon via human infrastructure or removing mass, via mining, will impact the delicate gravitational interplay between Earth and its only satellite."
The scientific illiteracy is easily refuted: Mining the moon will no more affect the gravitational interplay than mining the earth does. "Amounts of mass affected by mining the earth or moon are negligible compared to the planet's mass, so simple mining is not the issue, in terms of gravity and orbits," says Hartmann.
Nor was TransOrbital Dubya's end run around the law. TransOrbital received standard licensing from the State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under 1984's Commercial Space Launch Act. "President Bush, of course, had nothing to do with it, and probably doesn't even know what we're up to," says Blase, the company's chief technology officer. TransOrbital agreed to make footage of the earth available to any government whose land was captured in the images, applied to ship the TrailBlazer craft to Kazakhstan, and sought a license from the FCC. The company started the process in 1998, under President Clinton.
Still, the extension of globalization to a second globe doesn't need doomsday pronouncements or conspiracy theorizing to be a major concern. "If we turn over all cosmic resources to the handful of people who now have the money and technology," says Hartmann, "we guarantee a world in which the wealthy few nations further increase the spread in living standards and consumption rates—which ultimately leads to unrest, revolution, terrorism from the have-nots."
Hartmann instead suggests a model he talks about in his 2002 novel Cities of Gold. "I had my character travel in Europe to contrast with the current American system," says Hartmann. "I look down from the plane and see big cities and small towns, each surrounded by exquisitely beautiful farms and countryside. I ask my Swiss friends why don't people buy up that land around the edge of town and build malls and tacky developments. . . . They say it's in the Swiss constitution that while a farmer owns the land outside a town, the town also has rights about how that land may be bought, sold, or developed."
Now if only some Swiss farmers would launch a mission to the moon.
Democrats.com (a site not affiliated with the political party) fumed, "Bush simply acted as if the moon were his to give away. The TransOrbital venture could be disastrous for the globe—no scientist today could predict yet how adding mass to the moon via human infrastructure or removing mass, via mining, will impact the delicate gravitational interplay between Earth and its only satellite."
They got some real “rocket scientists” over there! LOL!
"I sure see a lot of conquistador mentality among what you might call the libertarian space buffs, who have a fantasy about 'getting NASA out of the way,' and then magically private enterprise will blossom with the investments needed to start space industry and a handful of people will get rich by developing space resources, and we'll all be happy," says astronomer Hartmann.
I must be a conquistador, I guess. The last thing I want to see is some Euro-consortium of internationalist knuckleheads, luddites, and assorted socialists managing the moon.
Doesn't sound like the farmer owns it at all, does it?
Being a tourist and taking photographs is okay according to the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty. Homesteading is not. Pass that spliff over here a minute, would you.
OTOH, we haven't really finished strip-mining the Earth yet...
So what is the craft that they are sending to the moon. I gather it is unmanned. From this it sounds like a trash can with a video camera. To even discuss homesteading from this venture is ludicrous.
Five pound bag of mixed fruit...oranges/apples---7 $'s!
One of the more folksy Alien/UFO continuing sagas is that of Billy Meier, a one-armed Swiss farmer...
Coincidence?
I see that the scientific illiteracy isn't confined to Democrats.com -- most of the Moon has a 354 hour nightime, when the Sun don't shine. The only exceptions are possible areas of permanent sunlight near the poles, but those are rare and very small, hence, very valuable. Let's hope some capitalists get there before the "non-Conquistadors" take over.
While small compared to the total area of the moon, I know the totally dark area is significant. I believe that's where all the water they discovered is.
Impossibly expensive.
I'm a "rocket scientist" but I told my boss that if we really want to become a spacefaring civilization we should simply STOP developing new rockets (keep the ones we already have and use them) and put all of our effort into space elevators (skyhooks).
About the only "possible" technology that could make access to space cheap enough to allow us to consider really ambitious projects.
See Clarke's Fountains of Paradise or Hogan's The Web Between the Worlds.
Personally I think Hogan has a more believable scenario.
--Boris
Well if the U.N. said it the universe had better listen eh?
No, because craters are mostly negative topographic landforms and its easy to make permanent darkness near the poles. Permanent sunlight requires a topographic high that towers above the surrounding terrain. They do occur (as crater rims and mountains), but there's less surface area than crater floors.
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