Lunar colony not lunacy

Moon base is not a loony idea
 
Jack Burns - Denver Post (Commentary)
 
(Burns is professor of astrophysics and director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute's Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder)
 
During last week's Florida primary campaign, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich proposed that NASA construct a base on the moon by the end of this decade. Is this a visionary, back-to-the-future kind of idea, … la John Kennedy, or, as Mitt Romney said, "a big idea but a bad idea?"
 
NASA continues to pursue a human return to the moon as a stepping stone toward exploration of the solar system. In 2004, President G.W. Bush proposed a "vision for space exploration" that included re-establishing an American presence on the moon.
 
President Obama's current NASA budget, approved by Congress last fall, includes a new rocket called the space launch system (bigger than Apollo's Saturn V) and a multiple-purpose crew exploration vehicle, called Orion, currently under construction here in Colorado by Lockheed-Martin. The moon, asteroids, and eventually Mars are all goals of the U.S. human space program.
 
Our view of the moon has changed dramatically since the final days of Apollo in the early 1970s. Then, most scientists saw the moon as a barren desert with few resources. But, as a result of recent NASA missions such as the lunar reconnaissance orbiter and LCROSS, which impacted into a permanently shadowed lunar crater, we now know that the moon has an abundance of water.
 
Water is, of course, crucial for human exploration and more valuable than gold in space. This precious resource is enormously expensive to lift off the Earth because of our planet's strong gravity. The moon has only one-sixth of Earth's gravity and, therefore, can serve as our oasis in the inner solar system. Water is essential for life. Breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen gives us air to breath and the components of rocket fuel. Furthermore, water mined from the moon can serve as a shield against high energy radiation from the sun and the galaxy to protect astronauts.
 
The moon also holds the key to humanity's history. The moon is a unique witness plate for the history of our planet over nearly 5 billion years. With no significant atmosphere for erosion, the moon has preserved the history of the sun and meteor bombardments, which have dramatically altered life on Earth through, for example, biological mass extinctions over hundreds of millions of years. Most of this history has been wiped out on Earth, but remains available for study on the moon. We simply need to spend more time on this "library of the solar system" to help us understand our past and possibly our destiny.
 
The moon's far side is a unique and mostly unexplored resource. Because of gravitational tides, one side of the moon always faces Earth and the other is not visible except via satellites. As a result, the lunar far side is uniquely quiet at radio frequencies, giving us an unobscured view of the first billion years of the universe. Astronomers are designing new radio telescopes that operate at low frequencies below the FM band, both in lunar orbit and on the far side surface, which will reveal how the first stars, galaxies and quasars formed.
 
The South Pole Aitken Basin on the far side is the oldest impact crater in the inner solar system, and will help geologists uncover billions of years of evolution of the Earth-moon system. We are working with collaborators at Lockheed-Martin to design an early mission with astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft to remotely operate unmanned rovers on the lunar far side, deploy our telescopes, and gather samples of the primordial lunar soil.
 
A lunar base, possibly at the moon's south pole, is a more costly and complex undertaking. We must first demonstrate tele-operation of robotic vehicles by astronauts aboard Orion to usher in a new era of combined human-machine exploration and resource extraction on the surface of the moon, and then asteroids and Mars.
 
The moon continues to surprise and enthrall us with possibilities for scientific breakthroughs, resource utilization, and human exploration. We only scratched the surface of the moon's potential during the Apollo program, covering an area smaller than Coors Field during Apollo 11. It's time to go back to the moon — and, this time, to stay.
 
END