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July 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 63

NASA (

1 ); SAUL LOEB

Getty Images

(^2 )

tory. India’s Chandrayaan­2 mission, due to launch

in July, will aim for the lunar poles. The China

National Space Administration has said that at least

its next three probes will head to the poles as well.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos is developing

its Luna­Glob program, which would touch down

near the Boguslawsky crater near the south pole per­

haps as early as 2021. That same year Japan intends

to launch the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon,

or SLIM, which could demonstrate extremely high

landing accuracy on small lunar features. nasa, the

European Space Agency and more private interests

are looking moonward as well. In May, Amazon CEO

Jeff Bezos, who founded the spaceflight company

Blue Origin, unveiled plans for its Blue Moon lunar

lander, which, he said, could be ready to carry crews

within the next five years.

Moon Express aims to land at the lunar south pole

in 2021. And if its spacecraft arrives before anyone

else, Richards says, the company wants it to count for

something. “One of our drivers is to get there first,” he

says. “And we expect our rights of noninterference

will be respected.”

THE OIL OF SPACE

there is plenty of real estate on the moon to go

around—the total surface area is about the size of

Africa—but the resources there are unevenly distri­

buted. Iron and titanium, which could be useful for

building moon habitats and technologies, are abun­

dant in different regions of the lunar surface. The heli­

um 3 deposits common in areas of the top layer of

lunar regolith could power fusion reactors. And

“resources” are not limited to extractable materials.

Some landforms, such as certain crater pits, could offer

radiation protection to astronauts, and sites on the

lunar far side that are shielded from Earth’s radio noise

would be especially well suited to hosting telescopes.

In the near term, the most desirable resource of all

is water. Astronauts can drink water, or they can break

it into its constituent elements and transform them

into rocket fuel. For the first off­planet explorers,

water has been called the oil of space.

Some of the most promising sites for water extrac­

tion are the so­called Peaks of Eternal Light at the

north and south lunar poles. These are crater peaks,

geographical features that often form at or near the

edges of impact craters when an asteroid strikes the

surface and pushes material to the side, where it rises

up to form a ridge at the rim. Because of the moon’s

orbital mechanics, the sun shines almost perpetually

at these peaks, offering a nearly constant source of

IRON concen-

tration on the

moon ( 1 ), as

mapped by

the Clementine

spacecraft in

1994. A mockup
      ( 2 ) of the Blue
      Moon lunar
      lander being
      developed by
      Blue Origin.

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