The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of my favorite Heinlein novels along with Stranger in a Strange Land. Its about a revolt of a moon colony and their reorganization as an anarchist society. One of its characters Manny a technician worker who is an communist (well a Cold War Russian at least).

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is similar to Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) in that both describe social upheavals, and both contain a strong streak of irony. In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the irony is that although the lunar colony is, at the beginning of the story, theoretically a kind of prison ruled by a tyrannical Warden, in reality the Warden seldom interferes in lunar society, which is portrayed as a kind of libertarian utopia. When the revolution succeeds, the new lunar government succumbs to its own worst instincts to regulate society to the hilt. The novel is notable stylistically for its use of an invented Lunar dialect consisting predominantly of English words but strongly influenced by Russian grammar (cf. Nadsat slang from Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess).

Well today Russia announced is planning to build a base on the moon for industrialization rather than weaponization of space.

Russia plans to put a mine on the Moon to help boost energy supply
Independent -
Russia has staked out plans to recapture its Soviet-era space-race glory and start mining the Moon for a promising energy resource that scientists say could meet the Earth's power needs for more than a thousand years.

Russian Rocket Builder Aims for Moon Base by 2015, Reports Say Space.com


Bloody well about time too. That someone used the space race for something other than weapons systems, spy sattelites and 500 channels on TV.

We should have had a viable space station orbiting in the L5 years ago, with regular missions to the moon, ala 2001 A Space Odessy.

But the Space Race was part of the Cold War and after that it was part of the American privatization of NASA at any cost program around the Space Shuttle. A cost which was measured in lives lost rather than missions accomplished.

After the umpteenth mission we know the space orbiter works, now do something with it like build a space station, one that won't come crashing down after a decade. But that opportunity is lost too. Won't be no more Space Shuttle missions, the point of which was what? Waste in space.

Really once the Reagan regime got the Space Weapons bug thats all the Space Shuttle missions were for, but seeing that no Weaponization systems could be put up well the Space shuttle went up and down, sometimes with horrendous accidents.

We should have one global space agency always should have. NASA the EU Space Program, the Japanese, Canadian, and all the other space programs and yes the Russians and Chinese should be part of a global space program. But sigh that is too much Star Trek for the liking of the Star Wars mentality around the Pentagon.

Now the Russians are onto something. Mining the moon, just like in the Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. One word of advice, from the novel, don't rely on prison labour for the miners or they may revolt and that would be Anarchy in space.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Wikiquote


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The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

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THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS

Whoever Controls the Moon Controls the Solar System

Passant Rabie
Sat, February 26, 2022

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway and Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

In 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy declared that his nation would be the first to land a man on the moon. That ambitious goal would later be fulfilled as two NASA astronauts took wobbly steps across the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, much to the dismay of Russia’s own space program leaders.

More than 60 years later, a new space race to the moon has begun, albeit with much higher stakes and brand new players ready to make the 238,855-mile journey. This time, the race to the moon is about much more than just planting a flag on its dusty surface. Getting to the moon first could also mean calling dibs on its limited resources, and controlling a permanent gateway to take humans to Mars—and beyond.

Whether it’s NASA, China, Russia, or a consortium of private companies that end up dominating the moon, laying claim to the lunar surface isn’t really about the moon anyway—it’s about who gets easier access to the rest of the solar system.
Everyone’s Got an Agenda

James Rice, a senior scientist at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, remembers growing up with the Apollo program and getting bitten by the space bug as he watched the 1969 moon landing unfold on television.

“As a kid, I saw that happening and I wanted to be a part of it,” Rice told The Daily Beast. “That’s basically why I’m in this career today.”

As Rice reflected on the current space race, he recognized some key differences. “Things have really changed dramatically in terms of the technology and the players that are out there,” he said. “This is not the moon we thought of during the Apollo days.” Scientists have learned so much more about the moon through more detailed analysis of lunar samples, as well as several missions that have probed exactly what might be sitting on the moon’s surface and remain hidden deep underground.

Though we have known for over a decade that the moon is probably teeming with reserves of water ice, NASA announced just last year that it had found the best evidence yet that water trapped in icy pockets were far more spread out across the lunar surface than previously believed. The discovery further fueled the idea of building a permanent base on the moon, which astronauts could then use to reach Mars and other celestial destinations.

Conceptual art for a NASA-led astronaut base involving water ice prospecting and mining.
NASA

Why is this such a big deal? Water is a precious resource for space travelers—not just for astronauts to drink, but also to turn into rocket fuel to use to blast off.

Remember your grade-school science here: Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is known to be the most efficient rocket propellant whereas oxygen can be combined by fuel to create combustion. The ability to break down all that water ice on the moon means you have access to both of its constituent elements—an enormous supply of rocket fuel. (And as an added bonus, you can use any excess oxygen as breathable air for astronauts.)

Finding these resources on the moon is much better than transporting them from Earth. Packing resources to space comes at a hefty price—it costs about $10,000 just to launch a payload weighing a single pound into Earth’s orbit, according to NASA. It could be far less costly to use what the moon has to offer to build a lunar pitstop to cosmic destinations.

“I think the moon has been placed as this midpoint, or first step towards Mars,” Casey Dreier, senior space policy adviser at The Planetary Society, told The Daily Beast. “It’s not an end destination.”

In other words, going back to the moon is not really about the moon, at least not entirely. It’s a gateway to truly larger space ambitions. That’s why Artemis—NASA’s new lunar exploration program—has been consistently touted not as simply a redux of Apollo, but rather the initial foundation for a permanent presence on the moon.

Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk, left, and Rick Gilbrech, director of NASA's Stennis Space Center, right, watch as the core stage for the first flight of NASAs Space Launch System rocket undergoes a second hot fire test in the B-2 Test Stand on March 18.
NASA/Robert Markowitz via Getty

Martha Hess, the director for human exploration and spaceflight at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit for technical guidance on space missions, echoed those sentiments. “This time, the moon is a training ground, and Mars is the destination,” she told The Daily Beast.

Today’s space race is also not merely between competing nations and political ideologies. It also involves private companies trying to pursue profits. “We are at a unique point in time where our economy and technology are aligned, allowing for private and commercial investment in space based capabilities,” said Hess. “This investment takes the pressure off government agencies to sustain the industry.”

Private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are also looking beyond the moon. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has an obsessive vision of going to Mars and terraforming the planet to make it suitable for human colonization. Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos is looking to be a dominating player in the field of commercial space travel, transporting (probably very wealthy) citizens to the moon or beyond.

“Private companies have their own long term goals that exist outside of the national space program,” Dreier said. “They’ll do whatever NASA asks them to do, they don’t care whether NASA is going to the moon or Mars.”
A fight over resources

Something that will define the upcoming moon race is the fact that not every region on the moon is equal in value. “There are limited places to go, and it’s all about location,” Rice said.

Just as the California gold rush of the 19th century was defined by where the gold was found, so too will the water rush to the moon be defined by where the water is stored. The U.S. is looking to build its lunar base at the moon’s south pole, where there is thought to be a wealth of water ice reserves.

Moreover, the south pole is a wellspring for fulfilling energy needs: It’s exposed to more sunshine than anywhere else on the moon, which would fuel solar panels and supply power to the base.

Li Xianhua, China Academy of Sciences academician and Institute of Geology, speaks during a press conference in Beijing on Oct. 19.
Noel Celis/AFP via GettyMore

And with no clear space laws currently in place over ownership of objects in space, lunar resources may very well come down to whoever calls dibs first.

Who else wants to build a base on the moon’s south pole? For starters, there’s China, which recently announced long-term plans to build a base on the moon with Russia. Its more distant goal, of course, is to send a crewed mission to Mars by the year 2033.

The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, or the Chang’e Project, is relatively new to the scene but has already made great strides. In Jan. 2019, the country’s Chang’e-4 lunar probe was the first spacecraft in history to safely land on the far side of the moon. In Dec. 2020, the Chang’e-5 mission returned samples from the lunar surface. Those new moon rocks are already paying off in new scientific revelations. .

China’s space agency recently approved three more missions to the moon, targeting—you guessed it—the lunar south pole. The nation’s space program is hoping to land astronauts on the moon by the year 2030. Down the line, we may see Chinese and American astronauts hanging out on the moon at the same time.
The finish line

Nevertheless, China and Russia don’t pose much competition to the U.S. as long as NASA doesn’t dawdle on its way back to the moon. “China is absolutely working on building up its capability,” Dreier said. “But I’d say they’re at least a decade behind, if not more, compared to the U.S. capability.”

First up on NASA’s agenda is Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight to the moon that is meant to debut the brand new Space Launch System (the biggest rocket system ever built) and the Orion crew capsule that will eventually take astronauts back to the moon. Launching tentatively in April, Artemis I will simply orbit the moon and come back to Earth. It won’t be until Artemis III, set to launch in 2025 (if you’re an optimist), that we’ll finally see human boots make it to the lunar surface.

Hess does believe, however, that China has one advantage over the U.S. that it could exploit to make speedy progress.

“China has the benefit of being able to establish a long-term plan and funding, which allows them the ability to chip away at their 30-50-100 year vision,” Hess said. “We don’t have that luxury; our plans are good for a presidential term, and our budgets are appropriated annually so our programs start, stop and starve.” Long-term exploration of the solar system isn’t actually something that’s crystallized in U.S. budgets for decades to come.

NASA estimates that the Artemis program will cost $86 billion by 2025. The current U.S. administration has made a $24.8 billion fiscal 2022 budget request for NASA to cover the return to the moon.

During the first space race, the agency spent $28 billion to land the first humans on the moon, which is about $280 billion when adjusted for inflation, according to The Planetary Society.


As the space program for each of the space race participants begins to take shape, policy makers are realizing that they need to update the laws at hand to better govern the new era of space exploration that’s about to launch.

Regardless of who gets to plant space boots on the moon next, there is an overarching benefit to human exploration as a whole.

“There's more to it than that because there's an inspiration to it that you can't put a price tag on,” Rice said. “It does something to you when you walk out there and look at the moon and now there are people out there doing something, that just resonates.”

So why haven't astronauts been back to the moon in 50 years?
Dave Mosher,Hilary Brueck
Wed, December 14, 2022 


Apollo 11 astronauts planted a flag on the moon on July 20, 1969.NASA

The last time a person visited the moon was in December 1972, during NASA's Apollo 17 mission.

Astronauts say the reasons humans haven't returned are budgetary and political, not scientific or technical.

It's possible NASA will be back on the moon by 2025, at the very earliest.

Landing 12 people on the moon remains one of NASA's greatest achievements, if not the greatest.

Astronauts collected rocks, took photos, performed experiments, planted flags, and then came home. But those stays during the Apollo program didn't establish a lasting human presence on the moon.

Fifty years after the most recent crewed moon landing — Apollo 17 in December 1972 — there are plenty of reasons to return people to Earth's giant, dusty satellite and stay there.

NASA has promised that we will see US astronauts on the moon again soonish — maybe by 2025 at the earliest, in a program called Artemis, which will include the first women to ever touch the lunar surface.

Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who ran the agency during the Trump administration, said it's not science or technology hurdles that have held the US back from doing this sooner.

"If it wasn't for the political risk, we would be on the moon right now," Bridenstine said on a phone call with reporters in 2018. "In fact, we would probably be on Mars."

So why haven't astronauts been back to the moon in 50 years?

"It was the political risks that prevented it from happening," Bridenstine said. "The program took too long and it costs too much money."

Researchers and entrepreneurs have long pushed for the creation of a crewed base on the moon — a lunar space station.

"A permanent human research station on the moon is the next logical step. It's only three days away. We can afford to get it wrong and not kill everybody," Chris Hadfield, a former astronaut, previously told Business Insider. "And we have a whole bunch of stuff we have to invent and then test in order to learn before we can go deeper out."

A lunar base could evolve into a fuel depot for deep-space missions, lead to the creation of unprecedented space telescopes, make it easier to live on Mars, and solve longstanding scientific mysteries about Earth and the moon's creation. It could even spur a thriving off-world economy, perhaps one built around lunar space tourism.

But many astronauts and other experts suggest the biggest impediments to making new crewed moon missions a reality are banal and somewhat depressing.
It's really expensive to get to the moon — but not that expensive

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A tried-and-true hurdle for any spaceflight program, especially missions that involve people, is the steep cost.

NASA's 2022 budget is $24 billion, and the Biden administration is asking Congress to boost that to nearly $26 billion in the 2023 budget.

Those amounts may sound like a windfall, until you consider that the total gets split among all the agency's divisions and ambitious projects: the James Webb Space Telescope, the giant rocket project called Space Launch System (SLS), and far-flung missions to the sun, Jupiter, Mars, the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, and the edge of the solar system. (By contrast, the US military is on track for a budget of about $858 billion in 2023.)

Plus, NASA's budget is somewhat small relative to its past.

"NASA's portion of the federal budget peaked at 4% in 1965," Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham said during congressional testimony in 2015. "For the past 40 years it has remained below 1%, and for the last 15 years it has been driving toward 0.4% of the federal budget."

A 2005 report by NASA estimated that returning to the moon would cost about $104 billion ($162 billion today, with inflation) over about 13 years. The Apollo program cost about $142 billion in today's dollars.

"Manned exploration is the most expensive space venture and, consequently, the most difficult for which to obtain political support," Cunningham said during his testimony.

He added, according to Scientific American: "Unless the country, which is Congress here, decided to put more money in it, this is just talk that we're doing here."

Referring to Mars missions and a return to the moon, Cunningham said, "NASA's budget is way too low to do all the things that we've talked about."
The problem with presidents

Former US President Donald Trump wanted to get astronauts back on the moon in 2024.Reuters/Carlos Barria

President Biden may — or may not — be in office the next time NASA lands astronauts back on to the moon in 2025, or later.

And therein lies another major problem: partisan political whiplash.

"Why would you believe what any president said about a prediction of something that was going to happen two administrations in the future?" Hadfield said. "That's just talk."

The process of designing, engineering, and testing a spacecraft that could get people to another world easily outlasts a two-term president. But incoming presidents and lawmakers often scrap the previous leader's space-exploration priorities.

"I would like the next president to support a budget that allows us to accomplish the mission that we are asked to perform, whatever that mission may be," Scott Kelly, an astronaut who spent a year in space, wrote in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" thread in January 2016, before President Trump took office.

But presidents and Congress don't often seem to care about staying the course.

In 2004, for example, the Bush administration tasked NASA with coming up with a way to replace the space shuttle, which was set to retire, and also return to the moon. The agency came up with the Constellation program to land astronauts on the moon using a rocket called Ares and a spaceship called Orion. NASA spent $9 billion over five years designing, building, and testing hardware for that human-spaceflight program.

Yet after President Barack Obama took office — and the Government Accountability Office released a report about NASA's inability to estimate Constellation's cost — Obama pushed to scrap the program and signed off on the SLS rocket instead.

Trump didn't scrap SLS. But he did change Obama's goal of launching astronauts to an asteroid, shifting priorities to moon and Mars missions. Trump wanted to see Artemis land astronauts back on the moon in 2024.

Such frequent changes to NASA's expensive priorities have led to cancellation after cancellation, a loss of about $20 billion, and years of wasted time and momentum.

Biden seems to be a rare exception to the shifty presidential trend: he hasn't toyed with Trump's Artemis priority for NASA, and he's also kept Space Force intact.

Buzz Aldrin said in testimony to Congress in 2015 that he believes the will to return to the moon must come from Capitol Hill.

"American leadership is inspiring the world by consistently doing what no other nation is capable of doing. We demonstrated that for a brief time 45 years ago. I do not believe we have done it since," Aldrin wrote in a statement. "I believe it begins with a bipartisan congressional and administration commitment to sustained leadership."

The real driving force behind that government commitment to return to the moon is the will of the American people, who vote for politicians and help shape their policy priorities. But public interest in lunar exploration has always been lukewarm.

Even at the height of the Apollo program, after Aldrin and Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, only 53% of Americans said they thought the program was worth the cost. Most of the rest of the time, US approval of Apollo hovered below 50%.

Most Americans think NASA should make returning to the moon a priority at this point. More than 57% of nationwide respondents to an INSIDER poll in December 2018 said returning to the moon is an important goal for NASA, but only about 38% said that living, breathing humans need to go back. (Others who want the US to land on the moon say robots could do the lunar exploring.)

Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Support for crewed Mars exploration is stronger, with 63% of respondents to a 2018 Pew Research Center poll saying it should be a NASA priority. Meanwhile, 91% think that scanning the skies for killer asteroids is important.
The challenges beyond politics

Many space enthusiasts have long hoped to build a base on the moon, but the lunar surface's harsh environment wouldn't be an ideal place for humans to thrive.NASA

The political tug-of-war over NASA's mission and budget isn't the only reason people haven't returned to the moon. The moon is also a 4.5-billion-year-old death trap for humans and must not be trifled with or underestimated.

Its surface is littered with craters and boulders that threaten safe landings. Leading up to the first moon landing in 1969, the US government spent what would be billions in today's dollars to develop, launch, and deliver satellites to the moon to map its surface and help mission planners scout for possible Apollo landing sites.

But a bigger worry is what eons of meteorite impacts have created: regolith, also called moon dust.

Madhu Thangavelu, an aeronautical engineer at the University of Southern California, wrote in 2014 that the moon is covered in "a fine, talc-like top layer of lunar dust, several inches deep in some regions, which is electrostatically charged through interaction with the solar wind and is very abrasive and clingy, fouling up spacesuits, vehicles and systems very quickly."

Peggy Whitson, an astronaut who lived in space for a total of 665 days, previously told Business Insider that the Apollo missions "had a lot of problems with dust."

"If we're going to spend long durations and build permanent habitats, we have to figure out how to handle that," Whitson said.

There's also a problem with sunlight. For about 14 days at a time, the lunar surface is a boiling hellscape that is exposed directly to the sun's harsh rays; the moon has no protective atmosphere. The next 14 days are in total darkness, making the moon's surface one of the colder places in the universe.

NASA is developing a fission power system that could supply astronauts with electricity during weeks-long lunar nights — and would be useful on other worlds, including Mars.

"There is not a more environmentally unforgiving or harsher place to live than the moon," Thangavelu wrote. "And yet, since it is so close to the Earth, there is not a better place to learn how to live, away from planet Earth."

NASA has designed dust- and sun-resistant spacesuits and rovers, though it's uncertain whether that equipment is anywhere near ready to launch.
A generation of billionaire 'space nuts' may get there

An illustration of SpaceX's Starship vehicle on the surface of the moon, with Earth in the distance.Elon Musk/SpaceX via Twitter

Another issue, astronauts say, is NASA's graying workforce. These days, more American kids polled say they dream about becoming YouTube stars, rather than astronauts.

"You've got to realize young people are essential to this kind of an effort," Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt recently told Business Insider. "The average age of the people in Mission Control for Apollo 13 was 26 years old, and they'd already been on a bunch of missions."

Schweickart echoed that concern, noting that the average age of someone at NASA's Johnson Space Center is closer to 60 years old.

"That's not where innovation and excitement comes from. Excitement comes from when you've got teenagers and 20-year-olds running programs," Schweickart said. "When Elon Musk lands a [rocket booster], his whole company is yelling and screaming and jumping up and down."

Musk is part of what astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman has called a "generation of billionaires who are space nuts," developing a new, private suite of moon-capable rockets.

"The innovation that's been going on over the last 10 years in spaceflight never would've happened if it was just NASA and Boeing and Lockheed," Hoffman told journalists during a roundtable in 2018. "Because there was no motivation to reduce the cost or change the way we do it."

The innovation Hoffman was referring to is work of Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, as well as by Jeff Bezos, who runs aerospace company Blue Origin.

"There's no question: If we're going to go farther, especially if we're going to go farther than the moon, we need new transportation," Hoffman added. "Right now we're still in the horse-and-buggy days of spaceflight."

Many astronauts' desire to return to the moon aligns with Bezos' long-term vision. Bezos has floated a plan to start building the first moon base using Blue Origin's upcoming New Glenn rocket system.

"We will move all heavy industry off of Earth, and Earth will be zoned residential and light industry," he said in April 2018.

Musk has also spoken at length about how SpaceX's forthcoming Starship launch system could pave the way for affordable, regular lunar visits. SpaceX might even visit the moon before NASA or Blue Origin.

"My dream would be that someday the moon would become part of the economic sphere of the Earth — just like geostationary orbit and low-Earth orbit," Hoffman said. "Space out as far as geostationary orbit is part of our everyday economy. Someday I think the moon will be, and that's something to work for."

Astronauts don't doubt whether or not we'll get back to the moon and onto Mars. It's just a matter of when.

"I guess eventually things will come to pass where they will go back to the moon and eventually go to Mars — probably not in my lifetime," Lovell said. "Hopefully they'll be successful."

NASA's SOFIA discovers water on sunlit surface of Moon

Date:October 26, 2020

Source:NASA

Summary:NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.

FULL STORY

Moon (stock image).
Credit: © taffpixture / stock.adobe.com

NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.

SOFIA has detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon's southern hemisphere. Previous observations of the Moon's surface detected some form of hydrogen, but were unable to distinguish between water and its close chemical relative, hydroxyl (OH). Data from this location reveal water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million -- roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water -- trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface. The results are published in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy.

"We had indications that H2O -- the familiar water we know -- might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon," said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration."

As a comparison, the Sahara desert has 100 times the amount of water than what SOFIA detected in the lunar soil. Despite the small amounts, the discovery raises new questions about how water is created and how it persists on the harsh, airless lunar surface.

Water is a precious resource in deep space and a key ingredient of life as we know it. Whether the water SOFIA found is easily accessible for use as a resource remains to be determined. Under NASA's Artemis program, the agency is eager to learn all it can about the presence of water on the Moon in advance of sending the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 and establishing a sustainable human presence there by the end of the decade.

SOFIA's results build on years of previous research examining the presence of water on the Moon. When the Apollo astronauts first returned from the Moon in 1969, it was thought to be completely dry. Orbital and impactor missions over the past 20 years, such as NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, confirmed ice in permanently shadowed craters around the Moon's poles. Meanwhile, several spacecraft -- including the Cassini mission and Deep Impact comet mission, as well as the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 mission -- and NASA's ground-based Infrared Telescope Facility, looked broadly across the lunar surface and found evidence of hydration in sunnier regions. Yet those missions were unable to definitively distinguish the form in which it was present -- either H2O or OH.

"Prior to the SOFIA observations, we knew there was some kind of hydration," said Casey Honniball, the lead author who published the results from her graduate thesis work at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in Honolulu. "But we didn't know how much, if any, was actually water molecules -- like we drink every day -- or something more like drain cleaner."

SOFIA offered a new means of looking at the Moon. Flying at altitudes of up to 45,000 feet, this modified Boeing 747SP jetliner with a 106-inch diameter telescope reaches above 99% of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere to get a clearer view of the infrared universe. Using its Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST), SOFIA was able to pick up the specific wavelength unique to water molecules, at 6.1 microns, and discovered a relatively surprising concentration in sunny Clavius Crater.

"Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space," said Honniball, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Yet somehow we're seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there."

Several forces could be at play in the delivery or creation of this water. Micrometeorites raining down on the lunar surface, carrying small amounts of water, could deposit the water on the lunar surface upon impact. Another possibility is there could be a two-step process whereby the Sun's solar wind delivers hydrogen to the lunar surface and causes a chemical reaction with oxygen-bearing minerals in the soil to create hydroxyl. Meanwhile, radiation from the bombardment of micrometeorites could be transforming that hydroxyl into water.

How the water then gets stored -- making it possible to accumulate -- also raises some intriguing questions. The water could be trapped into tiny beadlike structures in the soil that form out of the high heat created by micrometeorite impacts. Another possibility is that the water could be hidden between grains of lunar soil and sheltered from the sunlight -- potentially making it a bit more accessible than water trapped in beadlike structures.

For a mission designed to look at distant, dim objects such as black holes, star clusters, and galaxies, SOFIA's spotlight on Earth's nearest and brightest neighbor was a departure from business as usual. The telescope operators typically use a guide camera to track stars, keeping the telescope locked steadily on its observing target. But the Moon is so close and bright that it fills the guide camera's entire field of view. With no stars visible, it was unclear if the telescope could reliably track the Moon. To determine this, in August 2018, the operators decided to try a test observation.

"It was, in fact, the first time SOFIA has looked at the Moon, and we weren't even completely sure if we would get reliable data, but questions about the Moon's water compelled us to try," said Naseem Rangwala, SOFIA's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "It's incredible that this discovery came out of what was essentially a test, and now that we know we can do this, we're planning more flights to do more observations."

SOFIA's follow-up flights will look for water in additional sunlit locations and during different lunar phases to learn more about how the water is produced, stored, and moved across the Moon. The data will add to the work of future Moon missions, such as NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), to create the first water resource maps of the Moon for future human space exploration.

In the same issue of Nature Astronomy, scientists have published a paper using theoretical models and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, pointing out that water could be trapped in small shadows, where temperatures stay below freezing, across more of the Moon than currently expected. The results can be found here.

"Water is a valuable resource, for both scientific purposes and for use by our explorers," said Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "If we can use the resources at the Moon, then we can carry less water and more equipment to help enable new scientific discoveries."

SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center. Ames manages the SOFIA program, science, and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and the German SOFIA Institute at the University of Stuttgart. The aircraft is maintained and operated by NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center Building 703, in Palmdale, California.

Learn more about SOFIA at: https://www.nasa.gov/sofia


Related Multimedia:
YouTube video: SOFIA Discovers Water on a Sunlit Surface of the Moon


Journal Reference:
C. I. Honniball, P. G. Lucey, S. Li, S. Shenoy, T. M. Orlando, C. A. Hibbitts, D. M. Hurley, W. M. Farrell. Molecular water detected on the sunlit Moon by SOFIA. Nature Astronomy, Oct. 26, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01222-x

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

Fly me to the Moon, let me swim among the stars

Mon 26 Oct 2020 // 21:32 UTC

Katyanna Quach 

Water molecules have been detected in soil in one of the Moon's largest sunlit craters, NASA announced on Monday, which means permanent bases on the natural satellite may be potentially a lot easier to support.

The discovery was made using a telescope onboard NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) – a modified Boeing 747 capable of flying 45,000 feet above our planet. The airborne 'scope spied what may well be water in the Clavius crater, which is visible from Earth, located in the southern hemisphere, and, coincidentally, the site of mankind's first Moon base in Arthur C. Clarke's classic science fiction novel 2001.

“We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate.

“Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”

An illustration of water molecules in lunar beads and the location of the crater in the southern hemisphere of the Moon ... Source: NASA/Daniel Rutter

NASA doesn’t know exactly how much water in total is present in the crater. Initial readings, published in Nature Astronomy, show the Clavius regolith contains about 100 to 412 parts per million of water – that’s roughly a 12-ounce bottle of water, or about 355 ml of the liquid, per cubic metre of lunar soil.

In other words, the Moon is still pretty dry. The Sahara desert, for instance, contains 100 times more water than the amount found in the Clavius crater.

The water molecules are spread so thinly that they do not form liquid water or solid ice, said Casey Honniball, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, during a press conference today. Instead, they are trapped within tiny beads, each one measuring about the size of a pencil tip. She believes the water is formed from solar wind and micrometeorite impacts.

Radiation from the Sun frees hydroxy (OH) from chemical compounds in the lunar soil, and tiny meteorite impacts provide the heat needed to merge two hydroxy particles to ultimately form water. This energy also melts surrounding material to form the glass beads that act as a protective casing to allow the water molecules to survive and persist despite the Moon’s lack of atmosphere.

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Scientists know that some water is tucked away as icy deposits, known as cold traps, in the Moon's polar regions that are permanently covered in shadow. This is the first time water has been found in sunlit areas.

"Water is critical for deep space exploration,” Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist at NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems Division, told reporters during the press briefing. “It can be turned into oxygen to breathe, water to drink, or be used for fuel supply.”

The American space agency hopes to land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, and wants to eventually set up a lunar base [PDF]. If water can be extracted from the surface, it’ll make living on the natural satellite much easier, and provide a way for future generations of astronauts to restock and refuel on their way to more distant locations, such as Mars.

But the idea is purely speculative at the moment. Bleacher said scientists don’t yet know how accessible the water is, though finding it in sunlit areas is good news for upcoming lunar missions.

Naseem Rangwala, SOFIA’s project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, said the data was recorded when its 747 flew over Nevada in 2018. It was the first time the airborne telescope had been directed at the Moon. The results are only now being released after months of analysis.

The team is planning more observations using SOFIA next year. In order to work out if the water is accessible, NASA will need to send spacecraft to collect and study samples of the lunar surface. Its next Moon rover, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), is designed to hunt for water at the Moon's south pole and is expected to launch in 2023.

Interestingly, in a separate study also published on Monday, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado predicted that the total area of cold traps on the Moon is some 15,000 square miles, double the amount in previous estimates. ®

Water found in new locations on the Moon, may be trapped in glass

Water is present in more places but won't be equally accessible.

JOHN TIMMER - 10/26/2020, 2:39 PM

Enlarge / The instrument used to detect the water flies on a 747.
NASA/Jim Ross

Despite its proximity to a very blue planet, the Earth's Moon appeared to be completely dry, with samples returned by the Apollo missions being nearly devoid of water. But in recent years, a number of studies have turned up what appears to be water in some locations on the Moon, although the evidence wasn't always decisive.

Today, NASA is announcing that it has used an airborne observatory to spot clear indications of water in unexpected places. But the water may be in a form that makes accessing it much harder. Separately, an analysis of spots where water could be easier to reach indicates that there's more potential reservoirs than we'd previously suspected.
Up in the air

With no atmosphere and low gravity, the Moon can't hang on to water on its surface. The first time that sunlight heats lunar water up, it will form a vapor and eventually escape into space. But there are regions on the Moon, primarily near the poles, that are permanently shadowed. There, temperatures remain perpetually low, and ice can survive indefinitely. And, to test this possibility, NASA crashed some hardware into a shady area near the Moon's south pole and found water vapor amidst the debris.

In fact, water liberated from elsewhere on the Moon can condense there before it escapes into space, potentially creating a growing pile of ice. Since water is going to be delivered by impacts with asteroids and cometary material, it's likely that this is an ongoing process.

But we wouldn't expect this to be happening in any areas exposed to sunlight. There, any water should be heated enough to drive it into the atmosphere, which would explain why samples returned from the Apollo missions show little water.

But there was a certain ambiguity in the data. Studies had indicated that some water-like material was present but couldn't differentiate between water and a hydroxyl group (OH), which could exist in some minerals. So, we weren't really sure what we were seeing there.

To figure this out, NASA turned to an infrared observatory that it's stuck in the back-end of a 747 with a hole cut out of the side. Known as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy or SOFIA, the 747 brings the hardware up above much of the atmosphere. From there, there are far fewer molecules that would happily absorb some of the infrared light that the telescopes on SOFIA are designed to observe.

One of SOFIA's instruments is sensitive to wavelengths in the area of six micrometers (the Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope, or FORCAST). And that's critical because, while water can absorb and emit at this wavelength, hydroxyl groups cannot. So, anything detected here is definitively water.
Where’s the water?

The researchers looked at two regions of the Moon, one equatorial and one near a pole. This allowed them to use the equatorial site, which gets more sunlight and is therefore less likely to have water, as a control. The polar region, more likely to contain water, was the experimental. And it had a clear, strong signal corresponding to water. Nearly all of the areas imaged saw the water signal with a significance of anywhere from two sigma, and 20 percent of them exceeded four sigma. (For the Moon, the instrument could resolve patches of surface that are 1.5 x 5km.)

The authors of the new paper estimate the abundance of water as ranging from 100 to 400 micrograms per gram of lunar material. In a press conference, however, NASA decided to give an approachable value by mixing units: it's the equivalent of each cubic meter of Moon material having a 12 ounce bottle of water in it, on average.

And this is weird. The sunlight the area sees should be enough to cause any water to be cooked off rapidly. How is the water still there?

The authors' proposal—and it's just a hypothesis at this point—is that the water has been encased in glass. Rather than envisioning a literal 12 ounce glass bottle, you should be thinking of the disordered material that's formed by impacts. Some of the impacts on the Moon will come from water-containing materials, and that water will be vaporized by the impact. As will some of the rock and other materials, although they'll condense back to liquid quickly. As that rocky liquid cools off to form a disordered, glassy solid, it'll trap some of the water vapor.

Once trapped inside some glassy rock, the water will be impervious to the heating and cooling cycles that would normally drive the water back off the Moon's surface, which is why it's persisting at a sunny site on the lunar surface.

It also means that getting at the water will be a lot harder. Plenty of ideas about future lunar activities involve gathering water on the surface. But, if getting the water involves grinding down tiny pellets of glass, it may be significantly more trouble.
In the shade

But again, the focus on lunar water hasn't been in the sunny regions. Instead, the focus has been on the sites where shade might allow water to condense and form ice. And that's where the second paper comes in; it basically makes a catalog of all the potential sites on the Moon that are cold enough for ice to remain stable. And we mean all, even going down to considering rough surfaces that may create shady regions as small as one centimeter.

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The researchers figure out the location of large sites by looking through the images of the lunar surface and creating a 3D model that gets them the areas that would be shaded under all circumstances. For lower-volume areas, they examine images of the Moon's surface and figure out what percentage of that surface would end up shaded. They then model the diffusion of heat from the Sun-exposed sections and figure out which areas will remain cool enough to retain ice in the vacuum.

And, well, there's no shortage of potential places where water could exist without being encased in glass. The northern polar region has lots of regions with cold traps ranging from a meter up to 10 kilometers. But the southern polar region has far more that are over 10km in size. All told, this adds up to about 40,000 square kilometers of the Moon's surface that could hold water ice.

This doesn't mean that all that water is there. Some of it clearly is, based on NASA's earlier probe-crashing "experiment" that liberated some water vapor from the Moon's surface. But how much remains completely unclear. And whether it's in large, easily accessible ice deposits will remain an unknown until we get hardware to one of the locations we expect to host a large deposit.

Nature Astronomy, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01222-x, 10.1038/s41550-020-1198-9x (About DOIs).

Two Russians, American reach space station

AFP
Fri, September 15, 2023 

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut docked with the International Space Station on Friday after blasting off from Baikonur amid raging tensions between Moscow and Washington over Ukraine.

Earlier Friday Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft.

The crew docked at the ISS three hours later, the Russian space agency said.

At the orbiting station the trio will join three Russians, two Americans, a Japanese astronaut and a representative of the European Space Agency.

The liftoff took place after Russia's first lunar mission in nearly 50 years failed last month.

The ISS is a rare venue for cooperation between the United States and Russia, whose ties broke down after Moscow unleashed its offensive in Ukraine last year.

Kononenko alluded to the tensions during a pre-flight press conference on Thursday, saying that "unlike on earth" cosmonauts and astronauts took care of each other in space.

"We hear each other there, and we understand each other, and we are very sensitive to our relationships," he said. "We always take care of each other."

- 'ISS legacy' -

O'Hara praised the station's "legacy" and said it had been bringing the countries together.

"I'm excited to get on board and see the crewmates who are waiting for us," she added.

Kononenko, 59, and Chub, 39, were scheduled to spend a year on the ISS, while O'Hara, 40, was to spend six months aboard. It was the first mission to space for both O'Hara and Chub.

Chub said that travelling to space was his "childhood dream" and he had dedicated "all his life" to reaching that goal.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is looking to strengthen space cooperation with China after ties with the West broke down following the start of Moscow's offensive in Ukraine last year.

On Wednesday, Putin hosted the reclusive leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, at Russia's new Vostochny spaceport in the Far East, and the two discussed the possibility of sending a North Korean into space.

Last month Russia's Luna-25 module crashed on the Moon's surface after an incident during pre-landing manoeuvres, in a huge embarrassment for Moscow.

The Luna-25 mission was meant to mark Russia's return to independent Moon exploration in the face of financial troubles and corruption scandals, and its growing isolation from the West.

Moscow last landed a probe on the Moon in 1976, before shifting away from lunar exploration in favour of missions to Venus and building the Mir space station.

Astronauts explain why no human has visited the moon in 50 years — and the reasons why are depressing

Dave Mosher,Hilary Brueck,Maiya Focht
Fri, September 15, 2023 

Apollo 11 astronauts planted a flag on the moon on July 20, 1969.NASA

The last time a person visited the moon was in December 1972, during NASA's Apollo 17 mission.


Astronauts say the reasons why are budgetary and political, not scientific or technical.


It's possible NASA could land people on the moon again by 2025, at the very earliest.

Landing 12 people on the moon remains one of NASA's greatest achievements, if not the greatest.

Astronauts on the Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s collected rocks, took photos, performed experiments, planted flags, and then came home. But those stays didn't establish a lasting human presence on the moon.

More than 50 years after the most recent crewed moon landing — Apollo 17 in December 1972 — there are plenty of reasons to return people to Earth's giant, dusty satellite and stay there.


NASA has promised that we will see US astronauts on the moon again soon-ish — maybe by 2025 at the earliest, in a program called Artemis, which will include the first woman, Black astronaut, and Canadian to touch the lunar surface.

Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who ran the agency during the Trump administration, said it's not science or technology hurdles that have held the US back from doing this sooner.

"If it wasn't for the political risk, we would be on the moon right now," Bridenstine said on a phone call with reporters in 2018. "In fact, we would probably be on Mars."

So why haven't astronauts been back to the moon in more than 50 years?

"It was the political risks that prevented it from happening," Bridenstine said. "The program took too long and it costs too much money."

Researchers and entrepreneurs have long pushed for the creation of a crewed base on the moon — a lunar space station.

"A permanent human research station on the moon is the next logical step. It's only three days away. We can afford to get it wrong and not kill everybody," Chris Hadfield, a former astronaut, previously told Insider. "And we have a whole bunch of stuff we have to invent and then test in order to learn before we can go deeper out."

A lunar base could evolve into a fuel depot for deep-space missions, lead to the creation of unprecedented space telescopes, make it easier to live on Mars, and solve long standing scientific mysteries about Earth and the moon's creation. It could even spur a thriving off-world economy, perhaps one built around lunar space tourism.

But many astronauts and other experts suggest the biggest impediments to making new crewed moon missions a reality are banal and somewhat depressing.
It's really expensive to get to the moon — but not that expensive


The Saturn V rocket helped power the Apollo missions.Bloomsbury Auctions

A tried-and-true hurdle for any spaceflight program, especially missions that involve people, is the steep cost.

NASA's 2023 budget is $25.4 billion, and the Biden administration is asking Congress to boost that to $27.2 billion for 2024.

Those amounts may sound like a windfall, until you consider that the total gets split among all the agency's divisions and ambitious projects: the James Webb Space Telescope, the giant rocket project called Space Launch System, and far-flung missions to the sun, Jupiter, Mars, the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, and the edge of our solar system.

By contrast, the US defense budget for 2023 is about $858 billion.

Plus, NASA's budget is somewhat small relative to its past.

"NASA's portion of the federal budget peaked at 4% in 1965," Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham said during congressional testimony in 2015.

To compare, NASA's 2023 budget represents roughly 0.5% of US spending, according to a report from the Planetary Society. It has fluctuated between 0.4% and 1% since the 1970s, the report said.

Returning to the moon costs a significant chunk of that budget. A 2021 report from NASA estimated that the Artemis program to return people to the moon would cost a total of $93 billion from 2012 through 2025.

The Apollo program, for comparison, cost about $257 billion in today's dollars.

"Manned exploration is the most expensive space venture and, consequently, the most difficult for which to obtain political support," Cunningham said during his 2015 testimony.

He added, according to Scientific American: "Unless the country, which is Congress here, decided to put more money in it, this is just talk that we're doing here."

Referring to Mars missions and a return to the moon, Cunningham said, "NASA's budget is way too low to do all the things that we've talked about."

The problem with presidents

Former US President Donald Trump wanted to get astronauts back on the moon in 2024.Reuters/Carlos Barria

President Joe Biden may — or may not — be in office the next time NASA plans to land astronauts back on the moon in 2025, or later.

And therein lies another major problem: partisan political whiplash.

"Why would you believe what any president said about a prediction of something that was going to happen two administrations in the future?" Hadfield previously told Insider. "That's just talk."

The process of designing, engineering, and testing a spacecraft that could get people to another world easily outlasts a two-term president. But incoming presidents and lawmakers often scrap the previous leader's space-exploration priorities.

"I would like the next president to support a budget that allows us to accomplish the mission that we are asked to perform, whatever that mission may be," Scott Kelly, an astronaut who spent a year in space, wrote in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" thread in January 2016, before Trump took office.

But presidents and Congress don't often seem to care about staying the course.

In 2004, for example, the Bush administration tasked NASA to come up with a way to replace the space shuttle, which was set to retire, and also return to the moon. The agency came up with the Constellation program to land astronauts on the moon using a rocket called Ares and a spaceship called Orion.

NASA spent $9 billion over five years designing, building, and testing hardware for that human-spaceflight program.

Yet after President Barack Obama took office — and the Government Accountability Office released a report about NASA's inability to estimate a realistic cost for Constellation — Obama pushed to scrap the program and signed off on the SLS rocket instead.

The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission (left to right): NASA astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Reid Wiseman (seated), Victor Glover, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.NASA

Trump didn't scrap SLS. But he did change Obama's goal of launching astronauts to an asteroid, shifting priorities to moon and Mars missions. Trump wanted to see Artemis land astronauts back on the moon in 2024.

Such frequent changes to NASA's expensive priorities have led to cancellation after cancellation, a loss of about $20 billion, and years of wasted time and momentum.

Biden seems to be a rare exception to the shifty presidential trend: he hasn't toyed with Trump's Artemis priority for NASA, and he's also kept the Space Force intact.

Buzz Aldrin said in testimony to Congress in 2015 that he believes the will to return to the moon must come from Capitol Hill.

"American leadership is inspiring the world by consistently doing what no other nation is capable of doing. We demonstrated that for a brief time 45 years ago. I do not believe we have done it since," Aldrin wrote in a statement. "I believe it begins with a bipartisan congressional and administration commitment to sustained leadership."

The real driving force behind that government commitment to return to the moon is the will of the American people, who vote for politicians and help shape their policy priorities. But public interest in lunar exploration has always been lukewarm.

Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Even at the height of the Apollo program, after Aldrin and Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, only 53% of Americans said they thought the program was worth the cost. Most of the rest of the time, US approval of Apollo hovered below 50%.

Most Americans think NASA should continue leading space exploration, a 2023 Pew Research Poll found. But that doesn't mean people care about going back to the moon – only 12% of the 10,329 respondents said NASA should prioritize human lunar missions.

Support for crewed Mars exploration isn't much stronger, with 11% of the poll's respondents saying it should be a NASA priority. Meanwhile, 60% think that scanning the skies for killer asteroids is important.
Many space enthusiasts have long hoped to build a base on the moon, but the lunar surface's harsh environment wouldn't be an ideal place for humans to thrive.NASA
The challenges beyond politics include problematic regolith and eye-popping temperature fluctuations

The political tug-of-war over NASA's mission and budget isn't the only reason people haven't returned to the moon. The moon is also a 4.5-billion-year-old death trap for humans and must not be trifled with or underestimated.

Its surface is littered with craters and boulders that threaten safe landings. The US government spent what would be tens of billions in today's dollars to develop, launch, and deliver satellites to the moon to map its surface, and help mission planners scout for possible Apollo landing sites.

But a bigger worry is what eons of meteorite impacts have created: regolith, also called moon dust.

Following the Apollo missions, scientists quarantined the astronauts for two weeks after they landed, in part because they were worried about the effects of the dust, according to a 2022 NASA study. The fine powder that sits on the moon's surface stuck to their suits, vehicles, and even got inside their spacecraft.

Peggy Whitson, an astronaut who has spent 675 days in space, previously told Insider that the Apollo missions "had a lot of problems with dust."

"If we're going to spend long durations and build permanent habitats, we have to figure out how to handle that," Whitson said.

There's also a problem with sunlight and deadly solar radiation.

For about 14 days at a time, the side of the moon facing Earth is a boiling hellscape that is exposed directly to the sun's harsh rays; the moon has very little atmosphere, and therefore no protection against solar radiation.

The next 14 days that same side is in total darkness, dipping to temperatures below -200 degrees Fahrenheit, making the moon's surface one of the colder places in the solar system.

NASA is developing a fission power system that could supply astronauts with electricity during weeks-long lunar nights — which would also be useful on other worlds, including Mars.

"There is not a more environmentally unforgiving or harsher place to live than the moon," astronautical engineer Madhu Thangavelu wrote. "And yet, since it is so close to the Earth, there is not a better place to learn how to live, away from planet Earth."

NASA has designed dust- and sun-resistant spacesuits and rovers, though it's uncertain whether that equipment is anywhere near ready to launch.

"I already knew going to the moon was hard," Reid Weisman, Artemis II Mission Commander, said at a press conference in August 2023. "But boy, it's harder than I thought."

A generation of billionaire 'space nuts' may get there

Another issue, astronauts say, is NASA's graying workforce. In 2019, more American kids polled said they dreamt about becoming YouTube stars, rather than astronauts.

"You've got to realize young people are essential to this kind of an effort," Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt previously told Insider. "The average age of the people in Mission Control for Apollo 13 was 26 years old, and they'd already been on a bunch of missions."

An estimated 14% of NASA's workforce is over 40 years old, according to a Zippia analysis.

"That's not where innovation and excitement comes from. Excitement comes from when you've got teenagers and 20-year-olds running programs," Rusty Schweickart, former NASA astronaut, said. "When Elon Musk lands a [rocket booster], his whole company is yelling and screaming and jumping up and down."

Musk is part of what astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman has called a "generation of billionaires who are space nuts," developing a new, private suite of moon-capable rockets.

"The innovation that's been going on over the last 10 years in spaceflight never would've happened if it was just NASA and Boeing and Lockheed," Hoffman told journalists during a roundtable in 2018. "Because there was no motivation to reduce the cost or change the way we do it."

Hoffman was referring to the innovative work of Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, as well as by Jeff Bezos, who founded aerospace company Blue Origin.

"There's no question: If we're going to go farther, especially if we're going to go farther than the moon, we need new transportation," Hoffman added. "Right now we're still in the horse-and-buggy days of spaceflight."

Many astronauts' desire to return to the moon aligns with Bezos' long-term vision. Bezos has floated a plan to start building the first moon base using Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket system.

"We will move all heavy industry off of Earth, and Earth will be zoned residential and light industry," he said in April 2018.

Musk has also spoken at length about how SpaceX's Starship launch system could pave the way for affordable, regular lunar visits. SpaceX might even visit the moon before NASA in this century.


A picture shows Starship fully stacked on its launchpad. Elon Musk said Wednesday the rocket is 'ready to launch' on its second fully integrated flight, pending regulatory approval.SpaceX

"My dream would be that someday the moon would become part of the economic sphere of the Earth — just like geostationary orbit and low-Earth orbit," Hoffman said. "Space out as far as geostationary orbit is part of our everyday economy. Someday I think the moon will be, and that's something to work for."

SpaceX launched its complete Starship system for the first time in April.

But the rocket didn't make it to orbit as planned. Leaking propellant triggered fires in the booster, causing the system to veer off course, ultimately triggering the mega-rocket to self-destruct.

Even so, astronauts don't doubt whether or not we'll get back to the moon and onto Mars. It's just a matter of when.

"I guess eventually things will come to pass where they will go back to the moon and eventually go to Mars — probably not in my lifetime," 95-year-old retired NASA Astronaut Jim Lovell, who flew to the moon on Apollo 8 and Apollo 13, said. "Hopefully they'll be successful."

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