Susmita Mohanty, formerly an international project manager for Boeing,
and founder of MoonFront LLC,
was one of the organizers
of the Lunar
Base Design Workshop held in the summer of 2002, sponsored by the
European Space Agency; Susmita presented
several of the resulting designs at the San Jose meeting. The
workshop attracted some 40 students for a two week session at
ESTEC in the Netherlands;
the students then split into seven teams for a four-week follow-on
design and critique session in Vienna. The initial two weeks included
lectures and in-depth study with astronauts and scientists.
The teams of architects and designers then worked under various
assumptions for the needs of a lunar base. The
teams named themselves
ANAXAGORAS
(ice-mining and research station at S. Pole),
GAGARIN
(water research),
TSIOLKOVSKY
(solar power cell factory near equator)
TYCHO
(He-3 mining),
KEPLER
(buried habitat),
KOPERNIKUS
(surface habitat – service base and space port),
and CONTACT (radio telescope service habitat).

There were some general studies: movement will be substantially
different, and vertical movement much enabled through rails or
platforms; walking will be done in a lean-forward posture,
and bumpy floors will help increase the potential for forward motion.

Susmita covered the
KEPLER,
KOPERNIKUS,
and CONTACT designs in some
detail; the designs look beautiful, and also quite practical.
Careful consideration of docking with mobile vehicles, radiation
protection, crew quarters, agricultural space etc. were evident.
Susmita has a CD-ROM available, also all these designs were used
to replace
lunar
base designs on the ESA web site, with the
Aurora
project, and some of the participants have gone on to work with
ESA further.

Yuki
Takahashi of UC Berkeley then spoke about
some designs for
radio telescopes
on the moon. We’ve never been able to look at very
low frequencies (below 30 MHz) due to Earth’s ionosphere; one satellite
has been sent to try, but was swamped by noise from Earth broadcasts.
Every previous time we’ve looked in new regions of the spectrum,
we’ve found new objects and phenomena in the universe, and there’s
no reason to think low-frequency radio will be any different. The only
place we can do it in our solar system and avoid interference from Earth
is the far side of the Moon. Yuki discussed a “cheap” piggyback mission
on a lunar lander/rover in the S. Polar region that could drop simple
antennas into a crater and communicate back to Earth via a station
at the top of

Malapert mountain.

Yuki Takahashi also spoke for Claudio Maccone who was unable to make it,
on his proposal for a “Far side radio lab”, in the “quiet cone behind
the Moon” – for very low frequencies, diffraction around the edges of
the Moon and noise from Earth’s geosynchronous satellites means there’s
only one option, the very center of the far side in Daedalus crater,
about 100 km across. Dr. Maccone is also working to try to keep 60
degrees of the far side “pristine” through legal protection from the
international telecommunications union.

The moon track continued after lunch with a talk by

Lynn Harper of NASA Ames – Lynn is a founder of the field of
astrobiology, which
the Ames lab has been
particularly involved in,
and a very enthusiastic proponent of biological research in space.
She described the “space architect team” at NASA, which
was formed this past year and is headed by
Gary Martin;
they are working on an integrated strategy for the whole of NASA;
roadmaps, gap analyses, and investment recommendations.

In her view, things have changed from the days of Apollo and the “giant
leap”; today’s strategy is stepping stones and flexible building blocks.
The stepping stones are locations where space assets can
be aggregated – Earth itself, LEO, L1. But they haven’t looked
at the Moon recently, because they didn’t have a “science driver” for the
Moon. Lynn thinks she can justify the Moon based on new capabilities
in biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology,
which are opening previously inaccessible regions of biological research.
Study of “extremophiles” on Earth has proved very fruitful – space
is another extreme environment, and the major new domain, very low
gravity, has never been seen on Earth. Some cells behave quite
differently in low gravity; gene expression, proteins, metabolism,
structure – what’s happening here?

Some of what happens to people in space – bone loss, etc., follows
a pattern seen in aging people on Earth – but astronauts recover.
How? The Moon makes for a new environment again, a “mid-point”
between Earth gravity and free fall – life will adapt differently;
how? We are seeing the beginning of a golden age of space biology
- learning how life works, and how to live beyond this planet.
Is life planet-bound? Or can life from one world thrive on another?!
What is more profound? To find life on another planet, or to bring
life somewhere it has never been before? One thing we
may find on the Moon is life from Earth – meteorites from
ancient Earth with evidence preserved for millions of years.

Lynn concluded with a call for a “lunar university” –
we need not just the basic research on the moon, but exploration
of the full realm of human experiences. A very different future
is available to a species that can survive beyond, in her
terms, the planet of origin!

Former NASA flight controller Marianne
Dyson then gave us a fun session on some of the things
in her recent book, “Home on the Moon”, with a review of the
basics of things we know about the Moon, why we want
to go there, and how we’ll live when we get there.
First up were sizes, with some scale models and a simple
to-scale string between Earth and Moon, with knots for
perigee and apogee, to show the reality of the Earth-Moon
system. How the moon moves; full Moons and New Earths, and
more.

Marianne covered where we might live – her pick was the crater
Aristarchus, close to the lunar maria and KREEP deposits with
possible uranium. Nuclear power to survive the night-span would
help; the lunar surface base might best be a space station
derivative module covered in regolith. How we would handle
the radiation environment, growing plants in lunar greenhouses,
extracting oxygen from lunar rocks (and re-selling it for
Earth orbital uses). Estimates for building the first base are really
not out of range in terms of cost (similar to ISS cost).

This year should see launch of the first
commercial lunar
mission from TransOrbital;
a competing mission
from LunaCorp is scheduled
for next year. TransOrbital, at least, got its start with the
Artemis Project, a private
project to establish a permanent human base on the Moon.
Randall Severy
of the Artemis Project board of directors, provided an overview
and update on the status of the project. People assume that we
can only go back to the Moon by government effort, but that’s
not necessarily true; current cost estimates for the Artemis approach
are much less than Zubrin’s Mars Direct plan to start a Mars settlement,
and they believe the funds can be raised through media rights and other
private sources. A number of spin-off and affiliated companies
are working to help raise awareness, basic funds, and support
for the main project, including TransOrbital and Randall’s own web
software company, CyberTeams.
Of course the past few years haven’t been good for internet companies,
but they seem to be surviving.

Slowly but surely, it seems, the lunar development pieces of the
NSS roadmap are coming together. Whether NASA will be able
to make the government side of it happen before the private approaches
succeed remains to be seen; my hope is we will get some government
support to move all these things forward just a bit faster. But
either way, I’m convinced lunar industrialization will happen
over the next couple of decades; sooner than most people expect.