By apsmith, Section Reviews Posted on Tue Aug 31, 2004 at 04:04:17 AM PST
With Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" announcement at the start of the year, with all the excitement about Mars rovers, Saturn probes, launch of Mercury Messenger and the return of Genesis, and of course with the X Prize heating up, 2004 has definitely been an exciting year for space. The new "VSE" and the resulting Aldridge Commission report, released in mid June has already spawned two new books about the impending return to the Moon - Dennis Wingo's Moonrush, and Sietzen and Cowing's New Moon Rising. The latter book is all about the politics that led to the new vision and some of the likely political obstacles still in its path - NASA is in a process of transforming remarkably quickly, but there's a long way to go.
Wingo's book, in contrast, is about WHY we should go. And his answer is a little different from the traditional ones. Read on for my review, a version of which also just came out in the Huntsville Times.
One of these days somebody will write a wildly popular book that
demolishes the mental boundaries our civilization has adopted
by ignoring space as a solution to Earthly problems. Dennis Wingo's new book has many of the
ingredients such a book would need. Unfortunately, as the name
suggests, the book was rushed into print with too many glaring
errors to make the case convincingly.
Wingo, an engineering physics graduate of the University of Alabama
at Huntsville and founder of Skycorp, shows
his ambitions clearly in the cover illustration: 2 Skycorp astronauts and
a robot, prospecting together on the lunar surface.
The book's focus is on the potential for, almost literally, a gold-rush
to the Moon that parallels the ones which helped settle the West.
In this case the precious metal is not gold, but platinum and its
relatives. These metals are critical to fuel cells, and Wingo spends
half a dozen early chapters tracing energy sources and our need to
replace oil as a transportation fuel; recent oil price spikes are
all the more relevant to his argument.
Drawing on recent studies of asteroid impacts and using an interesting
argument about relative impact velocities on the Moon, Wingo asserts
that plentiful quantities of platinum and related metals will be found
near a few percent of lunar craters. When (if) the hydrogen economy
hits full swing, lunar platinum may be critical to making it work.
Platinum isn't the only reason people are interested in a lunar return.
To his credit, Wingo presents the case for a handful of other
justifications, from lunar solar power to scientific explorations.
One can question the credibility of the case for precious metals, but
this panoply of reasons for renewed lunar interest is in itself clear
motivation for us to return.
Perhaps the most valuable part of the book is a several-chapter
review of past efforts at lunar transport and mining architectures.
Ideas from the 1950s to the present day, including sections from the
June 2004 report of the presidential commission, demonstrate a variety of
practical approaches and the basic infrastructure requirements.
Wingo has his own lunar architecture of course. Unfortunately
it is already slightly out of date since the very recently
announced availability of Bigelow's $100 million inflatable modules.
Moonrush has no bibliography or index, and only scattered footnotes.
The numerical tables and graphs would warm the heart of any
engineer, but are marred by the many grammatical and numerical
errors in tables and text. All the ones I found were minor, but jarring nonetheless.
Both author and publisher are acquaintances of mine - they promise
the problems will be fixed in a second printing. The book's tone is
at times much more polemical than necessary, a fault that will
be harder to fix.
Wingo has adopted a slogan reprinted on the back cover: "We go to Mars to
take our civilzation there. We go to the Moon to save our civilization here."
The author who will write the world-changing book we still need
would do well to read Moonrush first.
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