- Alan Binder would have liked to have
been an Apollo astronaut and left his bootprint in the lunar dust. At age
58, the former Lockheed engineer isn't any closer to becoming an astronaut,
but he still is intent on leaving his imprint on the moon.
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- The chief scientist for the Lunar Prospector
spacecraft now orbiting the moon, Binder hopes in 10 years to begin building
a lunar colony where he can hang the shingle for his Lunar Research Institute,
which is based, for now, in Gilroy, Calif.
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- The chances of that happening, as Binder
sees it, increased significantly earlier this month when he reported in
the journal Science that Prospector had found evidence of water ice on
the moon -- perhaps 10 billion gallons buried at its north and south poles.
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- "I believe man's destiny is to move
into space," said Binder, formerly a principal investigator for the
Viking Mars Lander program. "The moon is key to that because it has
resources we can use."
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- Lunar ice could be a source not only
of water to sustain human life or support extraterrestrial agriculture,
but also of rocket fuel -- hydrogen and oxygen -- for interplanetary travel.
Mining ice on the moon, rather than launching water from Earth, could cut
costs by a factor of 100, Binder maintained.
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- If humans are to return to the moon,
it won't be on a National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission.
NASA's sights are set on Mars and beyond, Binder said, leaving the moon
open for private exploration and commercial development, much as low-Earth
orbit and geosynchronous orbit now are used by the multibillion-dollar
satellite industry.
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- Binder is part of a still-small band
of space entrepreneurs who hope to spur exploration of the solar system
by making a buck.
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- "None of us are in this business
to get rich," Binder said. But he's convinced that the moon and planets
will be explored only if it can be made commercially feasible. "This
is just the way the world works."
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- Earlier this year, Binder agreed to be
chief scientist for Icebreaker, a $22 million mission proposed by William
"Red" Whittaker, director of Carnegie Mellon's Field Robotics
Center, to look inside lunar craters for the ice that Lunar Prospector
suggests is there.
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- Icebreaker would be a NASA-funded scientific
project that would be part of LunaQuest, a $100 million, commercial mission
to land a robot called Polaris at the moon's north pole in July 2002. LunaCorp
of Arlington, Va., is planning and raising money for the mission, which
would feature a robot designed by Whittaker and his team. Last week, Binder,
Whittaker and David Gump, LunaCorp president, met here to discuss details
of the mission.
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- But not everyone is so optimistic about
commercial prospects on the moon.
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- "I'd be thrilled to see private
exploration of the moon, but I don't expect to see it," said Robert
L. Park, a spokesman and space policy expert for the American Physical
Society. He thinks talk of setting up a colony on the moon is preposterous.
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- The energy and machinery necessary to
extract water from buried lunar ice would make the water prohibitively
expensive, Park said, arguing it would still be cheaper to launch water
from the Earth to the moon. And the idea of making rocket fuel from water
is an even wilder idea, he contended.
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- "Water is the end product of combustion,
not the start," he said. Breaking water down into hydrogen and oxygen
would require humongous amounts of power, perhaps from a nuclear reactor.
Launching a reactor to the moon is relatively safe, he admitted, but likely
would not be seen that way by the general public.
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- "I betcha NASA goes (to the moon)
before a private group does," he added.
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- It's a high-risk venture, no question
about it, Binder said. Large sums of money will be involved and, though
he is convinced that exploration and development has to be made profitable,
no one can yet be sure how to make that profit.
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- One thing that has to happen is to bring
costs down, Binder said. Lunar Prospector, which he began working on 10
years ago, will cost $63 million. "If this were a NASA mission,"
he contended, "it would have been half a billion dollars."
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- Launched in January, Prospector is orbiting
the moon at an altitude of about 60 miles. It's in a stable polar orbit
but the moon revolves slowly beneath it. "Every two weeks, I've seen
(via Prospector) every bit of the moon.
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- It will take a year of such observations
to pick up the gravitational and magnetic information Binder seeks for
mapping the surface of the moon, which is the size of South and North America
combined.
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- An instrument aboard also is analyzing
neutrons, which provide evidence of the existence of hydrogen, from which
Binder infers the presence of water.
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- Next January, Prospector will dip down
to an 18-mile altitude and do additional mapping for another six months,
at which point NASA funding runs out.
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- Binder said several more such mapping
missions would be helpful, as would missions to return samples and to set
up seismic monitors.
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- Seismic arrays set up by Apollo astronauts,
he noted, recorded moon quakes up to magnitude 4 on the Richter scale.
That's not huge, but quakes on the moon can last up to an hour. More extensive
monitoring is necessary to determine if larger quakes -- likely the result
of shrinking that occurs as the moon's core continues to cool -- might
occur, Binder said.
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- "If you get a magnitude 6 or 7 quake,
it would be devastating," for a moon base, he explained.
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- Ultimately, a robotic mission, such as
Icebreaker, will be necessary to prove that water ice exists. "You
don't build billions of dollars of lunar base next to a dry hole,"
Binder said.
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- Whittaker said Icebreaker would drill
at least three feet into the frozen lunar soil. Data from Lunar Prospector
suggests the ice is buried at least a foot beneath the surface. How deep
the ice itself may be is unknown.
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- Comets, which are 90 percent water, are
the most likely source of the lunar ice.
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- "The idea of sending robots to explore
is just wonderful," said Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland.
"That's how we should have done moon exploration in the first place."
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- LunaCorp's Gump said he expects that
a number of companies, including the giant aerospace firms, may become
interested in the moon if LunaCorp and others succeed.
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- U.S., European and Japanese space agencies
are among the obvious clients for a lunar base, as are astronomers who
would like to use the far side of the moon as a site for telescopes. Some
scientists have suggested mining the lunar soil for helium-3, an isotope
that is rare on Earth, but that may someday make controlled nuclear fusion
reactors feasible.
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- Binder said lunar tourism is another
possibility for adventurers with the wherewithal to plunk down $100 million
for a vacation.
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- "First," Gump said, "we
have to prove we can do it (conduct a private lunar mission) and that we
can do it for a price we promise."
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- The technological leap necessary for
man to return to the moon in the next 10 years is far less than the one
NASA faced in 1961, when President Kennedy set a moon landing by the end
of that decade as a goal, Binder said.
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- He's in a hurry to get on with things,
knowing it might take 10 years for private interests to send humans to
the moon. He's not getting any younger, but that doesn't mean he's given
up his dream of going there himself.
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- "If John Glenn can go into space
at age 77, then I can get up there at 67."
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