All_About_Space_-_Issue_94_2020

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NASA

year, to eight years later, humans on the Moon.

I've been working in the space industry my whole

career, and we've not done anything like that. I was

saying 2024, five years away, that's challenging. It

is unbelievable what they did with the technology

that they had then, but it was that naivety, that

challenge, that risk that took them there. I still

can't believe, when you look back at it now, what

was achieved.

What’s changed since then? Have we become

more risk averse?

LJ: What drove the Apollo Moon landings was

political, and huge amounts of money went into it.

If we put that amount of money into the manned

space programme today, we could do it again, but

there are other challenges. Other things that we

want to spend – should be spending – taxpayers

money on as well. It's a question of political as

well as scientific demand, and all of these things

at different times come together. We've learnt now

how to live and work in low-Earth orbit on the

International Space Station. So really, we've had this

horizon goal of getting humans to Mars, and the

Moon is the next step on that journey.

If we get to go back to the Moon and carry on

that work, what kinds of things can we learn?

MA: One of the things that I mentioned, that in

the last ten years we didn't know about for 40

years. We had those samples in 1969, but it was not

until 2008 that it became obvious that those rocks

did contain water. Yes, and you may ask, “Why

didn't we know?”

Well we didn't know because we didn't have the

technology. Also another reason is about human

behaviour, as we are very set in our ways and the

way we do things, right? If somebody says that this

thing is this, we don't question it often. Because as

soon as the Apollo samples came back in the 1960s

and early 1970s, they didn’t know there was water

in those samples because they didn’t find them,

because they didn't have the right technologies or

they didn't look hard enough with the technology

that they had. Some people actually did find that it

looked like water on Earth. And so they said: “No,

that is contamination from somewhere in Houston

[Texas] or Pasadena [California], and Moon has no

water. It’s dead.”

It took 40 years for somebody to question

that. We could question that because we now

have much more sophisticated instrumentation,

much more sensitive instrumentation and a

better understanding of what we are looking for.

Lo-and-behold, we did find water in the Moon, and

that was a game-changer. Now we are trying to

understand where this water came from.

It also turns out that the water on the Moon is

very similar to water on Earth. So it is a surprise

that in 1960, people did find some water. They just

couldn't commit [to the idea] and they just thought

it was from Earth, so why is it that important.

Is there a practical importance in using the water

found on the Moon?

LJ: That is one of the challenges that we’ve got. In

fact, the missions, as I mentioned, at the minute

Relive Apollo 11

8 Days:TotheMoonandBack, a drama-

documentarybytheBBCwhichusesthe

declassifiedaudiofromtheApollo 11 mission

andretellstheworld’smostfamousstoryof

high-stakeexploration,isa newandinnovative

waytotellthetale.AvailableonBBCiPlayer.

Above

(clockwise):

The Lunar

Gateway is the

next major

project in

making lunar

travel more

sustainable

A lunar

sample taken

from Apollo 14

Extensive

amounts of

samples were

taken from

the Apollo 11

landing site

NASA has said it wants to put humans on the

Moon by 2024, and it's ambitious. It's got to find

the funding, but certainly the world's agencies are

going back to the Moon, and we will see that in the

coming years. It's a hugely exciting time in space

exploration, and I can't believe I get to be a part of

it either really.

Can you tell us briefly about the Lunar Gateway?

Is it going to orbit the Moon or will it be on the

lunar surface?

LJ: It’s going to be orbiting the Moon in a very

elliptical orbit. So not like we're used to now, with

the International Space Station going around

the Earth, but it's going to be much smaller than

the International Space Station. The ISS is about

100 metres [330 feet] long, and the size of a five-

bedroom house. This Gateway is going to be like a

bijou studio f lat.

The science capacity with it at the minute, we're

talking about a metre [three feet] cubed – it is tiny.

But it will allow us to be a staging post to return

humans down to the surface and to let us study

the Moon and Earth and learn how to live in that

very strange environment beyond the safety of

our magnetic field, which protects us from all the

cosmic radiation.

How far have we come in sending humans safely

into space and back home again since Apollo 11?

LJ: It blows my mind that we went from no

humans in space in 1961, the beginning of that

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