There’s Water on That Thar Rock!
I didn’t get much time last week to talk about water on the moon, but I think the story is a big deal, for a couple reasons.
First, though, the really big news isn’t that the moon has water, but that it has a lot more water than we thought. When I say “water”, by the way, I don’t mean pools of the stuff from which sodden ladies can bestow kingship on passers-by by lobbing scimitars at them. I’m talking water ice, which doesn’t sound sexy. For the moon, though, it’s tres sexay.
Here’s why. If there’s conveniently-located water in sufficient quantity for us to use easily, then we can keep a small colony on the moon. From there, the rest of the solar system is our oyster. Right now, the gravity well that is Earth makes launching missions elsewhere incredibly expensive (even the relatively cheap ones like this LCROSS mission). Water is heavy, so trucking it up, even to Low Earth Orbit is a costly venture. On the other hand, water that we’ve gotten from the moon is already outside the expensive tug of Earth’s gravity, which makes it very easy to transport. Likewise, the fuel we use to get into space is heavy also (the Space Shuttle routinely carries somewhere around 3.8 millions pounds of fuel when it lifts off). Less gravity means less fuel needed, which means lighter, safer, and much less expensive missions.
And let’s not assume that we’ll keep going to the moon the same way we always have. Technology advances.
So why go into space? Well, I’ve addressed one reason before, but there are other reasons. First, we will eventually have to get off of Earth. At some point in the future, we’re going to get tagged by some chunk of metal and rock we didn’t see. It’s an awful good idea not to have all our eggs on one oblate spheroid. If we want to keep the human race going for as long as possible, we’re going to have to colonize space and the moon is an easy place to launch (heh) that effort.
Second, there is a lot of good science we can do from the moon, looking back at the Earth. Some of the things we can do with satellites can be done from a station on the moon, and those sensors are likely to be a lot more reliable than satellites. And if something does break, we’ll be able to fix it (which will drive down the cost of the science we’ll be doing).
The moon is a natural stepping-off point to the exploration of the rest of the solar system, at least. We know there is water there for the using. Let’s go get it.
Other Posts of Interest:
- I Bet the Moon Men Have No Idea We’re Coming, Either.
- The Moon Landing, One Right Cross for A Man, and Eddie Izzard
- Make Plans Now: Earth to Be Destroyed in 2049.
Category: Out in the Black, The Social Issues
-There's good science to do on the far side, as well–it's a perfect location for radioastronomy, quieter than anywhere else in the neighborhood.
-Sensors on the moon would need more sensitivity than similar instruments in Low Earth Orbit, because of the greater distance. So there is a tradeoff; it's much easier to use a lunar colony to justify science, than to use science to justify the colony. What we have right now is a bootstrapping problem; there would be plenty of economic justification for more human activity in space, if there were already some economically viable human activity in space…
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