The Value of the Moon

by Paul D. Spudis

  Over the remainder of 2003, a major cabinet-level study of the human spaceflight program was completed. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the National Security Council (NSC) and NASA all participated in this top-level review. Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger took an unusual and impressively independent path. Rather than rehashing the plans of previous “visionary” efforts and reports, he posed a fundamental question about human spaceflight: Why? What is our long-range purpose in space?

  Many have wrestled with the “Why?” question over the years. Typically, this sort of pondering begins and ends in one’s own subdiscipline within the space business. For most of the scientific community, the answer has been to study the universe. For aerospace industrialists, it is to get long-term government contracts to build the biggest, most expensive machines ever imagined. For agency bureaucrats, it is to start, expand, and manage a large continuing program. Marburger reexamined the issue and posed a question: Why not bring space into our economic sphere? For years we have heard about “limits of growth” and various environmental crises, ironically enough, much of this talk spurred by the pictures of Earth taken from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts. But space contains virtually unlimited quantities of material and energy, and thus, in theory, unlimited wealth. Why not focus on developing the technology needed to harvest that wealth for the benefit of humanity?

  While the public focused on the Columbia accident investigation, two competing streams of thought emerged.22 One, favored by OSTP and OMB, focused on the practical and economic aspects of the space program. Could we reorient and retool the program to become a creator, rather than a consumer, of wealth? To do that, we would need to learn the techniques of planetary resource utilization, habitation, and extended operations. During Apollo, we had visited the Moon briefly for the purpose of scientific study and exploration. To extract useful products from the materials found in space, we would need an extended presence and different types of equipment and operations. Given the new findings about the nature and potential of the lunar poles, the Moon quickly emerged as the initial destination for the civil space program beyond LEO.

  The second stream of thought about future directions was a very familiar one to longtime space observers: a human mission to Mars, the project that many had long dreamed about. Once again, NASA hoped to emerge from the ashes of Columbia, Phoenix-like, to take humankind to the planets. It is fair to say that not all at the agency were on board with this direction—Readdy’s work on the lunar base studies, for example, showed considerable support for a return to the Moon—but it is equally fair to say that many were Mars-oriented, especially those involved in advanced planning decisions. A look through all the documents the agency produces detailing future missions shows that they largely revolve around the future, imagined needs of a humans-to-Mars program. Zubrin’s influence had infiltrated the agency enough to incorporate some of the features of his Mars Direct architecture, including ideas like splitting cargo and crew mission segments and ISRU propellant production. But no matter which way it was cut, a human mission to Mars was still too big a stretch, a much larger effort programmatically, technically, and fiscally than returning to the Moon. The battle lines were being drawn.

  These behind-the-scenes events were largely unknown to me as 2003 wore on. Then a chance meeting occurred at a November gathering of lunar base advocates in Hawaii. At that gathering, I described results for the lighting conditions at the lunar poles and the evidence for water in the dark areas. Also in attendance was Indian scientist Narendra Bhandari, who described his country’s plans to fly its first mission to the Moon, the orbiter Chandrayaan-1. This small satellite was about the same size and capability as Clementine, and I felt an immediate affinity for their effort. During a break in the meeting, I approached Bhandari and asked him if they had considered flying imaging radar as part of the payload to map the dark areas near the poles. He replied that they had considered one, but imaging radars were too heavy and power-hungry and as such would not fit on a small spacecraft. I told Bhandari about our efforts to miniaturize a radar instrument for this purpose; we believed that we could make an imaging radar that would be less than 10 kilograms in mass and would use only 100 watts of power, an order of magnitude less than typical radar instruments. He promised to report our discussion to the Indian space agency and get back to me.

  As the year waned, excited rumors circulated throughout the space community that a big announcement on space policy was imminent. The initial rumor held that President George W. Bush would unveil a new major space initiative in December, on the hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.23 But that anniversary and celebration came and went without any announcement, causing some to believe that the policy plan was in trouble, when in fact it was merely in its final stages of review and briefing to Congressional and Executive personnel and staff. At a White House meeting in mid-December 2003, a final review of the new initiative was held. The idea was to announce the policy goal and then implement it, giving NASA a one-time budget augmentation of about $1 billion spread over the coming five years with the agency’s budget rising only with inflation in subsequent years. Because the shuttle was an expensive, labor-intensive vehicle, its operating costs constituted a large fraction of the total NASA budget. Results coming out of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board urged that the shuttle be retired. The new initiative slated the shuttle for retirement, to be replaced by a new, less expensive human space vehicle, the Crew Exploration Vehicle or CEV, with both form and specifications to be determined. This replacement spacecraft would consume less of the annual agency budget, creating a “wedge” of money saved from the shuttle program that could be spent on missions beyond low Earth orbit. Thus, from the very beginning of the new initiative, the agency was being challenged to approach the effort in a new and innovative way. This was not to be a typical new program, with automatic “plus-ups” to swell the budget, so much as a new strategic direction. Within broad boundaries, the agency was given latitude to pursue its new destination goals in the manner that it perceived best. But go where?

  During the final review meeting, President Bush was presented with summary arguments for programs that focused on lunar return and human Mars missions. He recognized that the real objective was to create a new and bigger pie, not to simply decide how to cut and subdivide the remaining pieces of an existing, dwindling, small one. With its proximity and known resources, the Moon offered the possibility of early accomplishment, but more important, it offered a way to make an eventual Mars mission easier and more affordable. Thus, the president decided that the objectives were to be both Moon and Mars.24 In this sense, he was reinstating the goals of the abandoned Space Exploration Initiative that his father had proposed fifteen years previously. But this return to the Moon was different. In his major policy speech on the new Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), President Bush outlined the activities to be done on the Moon: to go there with the goals of staying for increasing periods of time to learn how to make useful products from what we found there. In other words, this lunar return was focused on sustained presence and the creation of new spaceflight capabilities.

  Sustainability and the creation of new capabilities from what we find in space: these startlingly radical aspects of the new program were largely dismissed or ignored by many observers, who then went on to characterize the return to the Moon as merely the prelude to a human Mars mission. This false interpretation of the purpose behind the new policy was widespread within the agency, as well as in the space community as a whole. The confusion led to immediate and significant problems for many early strategic decisions on implementing the VSE. But when President Bush announced the new Vision on January 14, 2004, in a special speech at NASA Headquarters,25 space advocates were encouraged. Finally, a coherent direction had been imposed on what was widely perceived as a foundering, directionless program. Despite the expected carping
from some in the space science sector, most agreed that the new strategic redirection of the civil space program was worthy. The president announced that he was forming a commission chaired by former Secretary of the Air Force Pete Aldridge to examine ways to implement the new Vision. This commission was to report back to him in six months. To my surprise, about two weeks after the announcement, I received a call from the White House asking me to serve on this commission, an assignment that I was more than happy to accept.

  NASA now had a new direction and the possibility of a fresh start after the Columbia disaster. For lunar scientists and advocates, the new VSE was an intoxicating promise to revisit our object of desire, and to develop new technologies that would enable long-term human presence off-planet. For the Mars community, there was subdued rejoicing and a somewhat irritated acceptance of being relegated to a “long-term” objective. But as things progressed, we soon discovered that despite the clear strategic direction the VSE provided, following it was not going to be so easy.

  5

  Implementing the Vision

  On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush unveiled the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) during a visit to NASA Headquarters. The product of almost a full year’s review by the White House and NASA, it outlined a strategic path to reestablish a sense of purpose and direction for the nation’s civil space program.1 The VSE consisted of four major elements: return the Shuttle to flight to complete construction of the International Space Station; develop and build a new human spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), and eventually retire the shuttle; set our space program on a course to the Moon with the object of “living and working there for increasing periods of time”; and eventually, undertake a human mission to Mars. No deadlines were declared for these milestones, although lunar return was given the scheduling guideline of “as early as 2015 but no later than 2020.” Budgetary direction to support the new Vision was articulated: a single, one-time budget augmentation of about $1 billion spread over five years, with the remainder of the funding needed for the implementation of the VSE, about $11 billion, freed up from existing funding through the retirement of the shuttle, since servicing and preparing it for flight was a labor-intensive activity that consumed a large fraction of the agency’s operational human spaceflight budget.

  The announcement of the new VSE caught many off guard, and although its reception was mixed in some quarters, the overall reaction to it from most space program observers appeared to be positive. As part of the rollout, it was announced that a commission headed by former Secretary of the Air Force, Edward “Pete” Aldridge, would meet to study how to implement the new space vision and report the various options to the White House within 180 days.

  The Aldridge Commission met for the first time in early February 2004 in an office complex in Arlington, Virginia. I was a staff scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory at that time. The other commissioners were planetary scientists Laurie Leshin and Maria Zuber, astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson, former Congressman Bob Walker, General Les Lyles, former Deputy Secretary of Transportation Michael Jackson, and Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Most of us had served on various space advisory committees before and knew what was expected of us. At our first meeting, we went around the table, assessing exactly where we all stood in regard to our task and the Vision. While all were supportive and excited about the new VSE, everyone expressed a concern for the need to develop and to articulate a strong rationale for a continuing, sustained program. Perhaps with a bit too much optimism, we thought that we could weave such a rationale into the report, both as an underpinning logic to our recommendations (whatever they were to be) but also for use by both the administration and NASA to help “sell” the VSE to congressional appropriators.

  Our work was prefaced with a series of presentations given by the various administrative codes of NASA (Space Science, Human Spaceflight, and so on). These summaries were designed to inform our group on what the various parts of the agency saw as their mission challenges and what they planned to do in response. Ed Weiler, then associate administrator for space science, gave one of the earliest presentations. A bullet point on one of his slides read, “activities on the Moon will be minimized and restricted only to those that support human Mars missions.” It was surprising to see this statement; after all, President Bush’s speech had been specific and concrete about activities for the Moon (something unusual in a presidential speech), indicating that learning to live and work on the Moon for increasing periods was a major objective of the VSE. It became clear that Weiler’s understanding, along with several others at the agency (especially in the Space Science section) was something entirely different from the straightforward language of the Vision. He took the position that the VSE was almost entirely about human Mars missions. When I pointed out this discrepancy to Weiler, my concern was dismissed without a meaningful response, only a comment to the effect that “this is how we understand the Vision.” Almost immediately, the lunar parts of the VSE were deemphasized, with a gradual yet perceptible shift towards using the Moon as a mere testing ground for the Mars mission.2

  I was able to trace this evolution in a series of both official and internal agency documents, ending with the Weiler interpretation of “minimal activity on the Moon.” The origins of this intellectual disconnect go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, with something called the NASA Decadal Planning Team—DPT, later called NEXT, for NASA Exploration Team.3 Chartered under Administrator Dan Goldin, this group was tasked with mapping a path for human missions beyond low Earth orbit, ultimately leading to a Mars mission. Although Goldin was fixated on Mars, the DPT focused primarily on nearer term objectives in cislunar space, including the libration points—that is, points in space that remain fixed in relation to Earth, Moon, and Sun—and the lunar surface. Additionally, both asteroid missions and missions to the moons of Mars were considered. The rationale behind the stepping-stone approach was to offer flexibility to some future administration that might be interested in a long-term, deep space goal for human spaceflight. The agency still maintained their fixation with Mars, and the idea was prevalent throughout the DPT that any activity on the lunar surface detracted from and delayed the Mars mission.4 In consequence, mission planning before the VSE did consider lunar missions but only in a cursory manner.

  Although we knew by 2000 that the poles of the Moon probably harbored ice deposits, water production from polar deposits was not included as part of any lunar surface architecture. Moreover, the key finding from Clementine that areas of quasi-permanent sunlight could be found near the poles (enabling sustained permanent presence on the Moon) was acknowledged but not integrated into a useful surface operations plan. In fairness, during those years of the DPT-NEXT, the agency had no authorization to proceed beyond the ISS and shuttle, so their studies, while interesting and useful in terms of what capabilities could be developed, could not be implemented or even integrated into any long-range strategic plan.

  The thrust of agency efforts in this era was the emphasis on the quest for extraterrestrial life,5 both the actual search for life elsewhere and use of “the quest” as a driving political and programmatic rationale for exploration beyond LEO. In part, this was a natural outgrowth of the parallel and continuing robotic Mars program. However, that intellectual milieu meant that when human missions were to be considered, lunar surface activities (which were thought then to be largely irrelevant to studies of life’s origins, an incorrect but widely held belief) tended to be deemphasized. I believe that this fixation with finding life on Mars held and still holds the agency hostage, unable to consider activities on the Moon to be anything other than a technology demonstration in preparation for a human Mars mission. Thus, when the VSE was announced, although considerable verbiage was devoted to detailing the activities to be undertaken on the Moon, the agency heard only one word as its destination: Mars. In consequence, the previous focus on the “search for life” carried over to become the
underpinning science rationale for the new VSE.

  The Vision, as originally articulated, was specific and quite different. The Moon in the VSE was to serve as a laboratory, a workshop, and a logistics depot. The idea was to learn how to use the material and energy resources of space (including lunar polar ice) to create new spaceflight capability.6 Many misunderstood or dismissed this latter concept. The Moon’s role in the VSE was mischaracterized as “landing the Mars spacecraft on the Moon for testing and refueling.” In fact, the significance of the Moon in the Vision was to use it to develop technologies useful for future missions, as well as to develop lunar resources to fuel the missions to distant destinations. This concept was the vision in the VSE.

  The Aldridge Commission held public meetings in Dayton, Atlanta, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C., to gather information and testimony from local experts and to give the public a chance to weigh in with their concerns and hopes for the direction of human spaceflight. Subgroups of the commission undertook fact-finding trips to the various NASA field centers with the aim of understanding whether all of the centers were needed to execute the VSE, or whether a different management model might be employed to make NASA more efficient. To evaluate the possible roles of the commercial sector in implementing the VSE, we gathered a considerable amount of information from the space industry. All the while, I attempted to revector the effort back toward its original intent of learning how to use space resources.7 Finally, we examined the configuration of management within NASA and deliberated on how to make the agency both more efficient and more accountable in the completion of its assigned tasks.