The Mysteries of the Moon. The End.

Forty years ago the Apollo astronauts first set foot on this lonely grey world. Now, NASA is preparing to go back, this time, to stay. The launch is slated for the year 2020, and engineers and scientists are hard at work trying to turn this vision of exploration into reality. But how will we get there? Where will we live? How will we get around? What will it take to stay there permanently? It’s a dangerous mission but the rewards promise to outweigh the risks.

Carl Allen said: “There’s a couple of reasons to go back to the Moon. One is to learn how to live and work again on the surface of another world and to be able to do it for longer than just the couple of days that we did in Apollo. And that is using the Moon as a place to test out our equipment, our techniques, all our systems before we try to explore deeper in the solar system”.

Larry Toups said: “The area that we’re basically responsible for are the habitats or the living spaces for the crews on a return to the Moon. You do have to take everything that you take for granted here on Earth. You have to take your breathable atmosphere, your water system. You have to bring your power system, unlike in a zero gravity environment where everyone is weightless, on the Moon we’ll actually have a resulting floor area that is going to come into play”.

But choosing the right outpost design in this wasteland is a big challenge, any structure that goes up needs to protect its inhabitants from radiation and extreme temperatures, and must be strong enough to withstand the pelting of micrometeoroids that constantly rain down on the Moon’s surface. And the question of where to set up this habitat still remains.

Larry Toups said: “One of the candidate sites at present is Shackleton Crater. On the south pole of the Moon, you get a great deal of sunlight a majority of the time. So solar power is a very feasible solution to that. So the location makes a big difference”.

But wherever they go, they’ll have to find a way to work around the harmful lunar dust which became evident during the Apollo missions.

Carl Allen said: “The scientific name for this dust and soil on the Moon is regolith, but you can think of it as very finely divided rock and glass particles so tiny it’s kind of like talcum powder, but really hard and sharp, formed by hundreds of millions of years of impacts from tiny pinhead-sized micrometeorites”.

Breathing it in can make astronauts sick and the long term affects are unknown.

Schmitt said: “Well, as soon as you take your helmet off after you’ve been outside, in the lunar module you will, there’ll be dust moving around the cabin, air circulating, and so you breathe it there. It smells like gunpowder, spent gunpowder, I had a little bit of a reaction to it in what’s called the turbinates. They were swollen. It was like pollen and that kind of thing. But that went away over the period we were on the Moon until I hardly noticed it”.

NASA scientists have made it a priority to keep the lunar dust out of the habitat and work areas.

Carl Allen said: “Almost all of it has enough iron in it that it can be attracted to a magnet, and people have advocated literally lining the doors and parts of the cabin dust out of the air. We also know how to use filters, and then we may well end up building spacesuits that don’t come into our living space”.

This time around, the suits will be easier to get into, more flexible and better to work in for long periods of time.

Joe Kosmo said: “Everything is integrated as opposed to the Apollo suit where you had to add all your elements on to the suit. Prior to going to EVA you would have this all basically together. Gloves would be on, you’d have your helmet, extra-vehicular visor. Your life support system would be part of the rear hatch, and essentially all you’d have to do would be to open up the hatch and don the suit. In the reduced gravity environment the astronaut would basically grab the torso, raise himself up and lower himself into the torso”.

Scientists are also coming up with ingenious ways of harvesting vital resources from the Moon itself so that astronauts can live off the land.

Gerald Sanders said: “About 45 to 50% of the mass of the Moon is actually oxygen in one form or another attached to silicon or metals. So there’s an abundant amount. The trick is looking at the different minerals and coming up with a way of pulling that oxygen out. And so we have designed a plant that will operate and make about 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of oxygen per day. This seems to be about the right size to handle a crew of four such that we don’t have to bring any oxygen or water from the Earth once they stay there for periods of time greater than, say, 30 days. Basically you take the bulk regolith, or lunar material, you heat it up about 900 degrees Centigrade in the presence of hydrogen. The hydrogen reacts with any iron oxide and it produces a water vapor. We would then electrolyze or break that water up into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen we would keep and the hydrogen would be recycled back to process more regolith”.

Future missions will see astronauts exploring the Moon’s surface farther than ever before. Designs for a new generation of lunar vehicles are already underway.

Robert Ambose said: “We’re looking at a number of different scales of machines with different capabilities, machines that can reach up onto a lander may be as high as six meters off the soil, pick payloads up, lift them down to the surface and then deploy them may be as far as a kilometer or two from the lander. Those are big machines. We’re also looking at some medium scale machines that can move astronauts either with them having to wear their spacesuits in something we call an unpressurized rover or being able to climb inside a cabin where they can just put on, you know, normal clothes and drive across the surface in a small pressurized rover. Those machines must last crew after crew after crew. The Apollo rovers were only designed for three days, so that’s a new challenge for us”.

Dr. Schmitt said: “We’ve bent that curve of human evolution with Apollo, so that now we are really creatures of the solar system not just of the Earth”.

Life on the Moon is no longer the stuff of science fiction, and thanks to the Japanese Kaguya orbiter, our closest neighbor is no longer a stranger.

Carl Allen said: “Why is it important? I believe that learning more about your world is always important, and in this century, this time in human history, our world is not just the Earth. Our world is now expanding for the first time ever across the solar system and out into the universe, and the Moon is the first step”.