Scientific American 201907

(Rick Simeone) #1
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


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


1

2
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