9.17.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
will be reading National Geographic magazine dated September twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher. As a reminder, RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make a difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the first article

(00:23):
entitled the Great Moon Rush. As NASA prepares to return
explorers to the Moon, big plans are already taking shape
to develop this virtually untouched realm to suit human needs.
Here's what the lunar surface could become if we're lucky,
and what it might turn into if we're not. This

(00:46):
article by Charles Fishman, halfway through a conversation about the
state of modern astrophysics and space science, Joseph Silk says
something that makes you sputter in disbelief before realizing he's no.
Silk is one of the pillars of cosmology now eighty two.
He's been an astrophysicist since before the Apollo Moon landings.

(01:09):
He has made foundational discoveries about the origin of the
universe and about its central mystery, dark matter. He's not
prone to wild exaggerations he's talking about one of his
strong professional interests, the often overlooked potential of our own moon.
A few decades from now, Silk says, we'll have the
ability to place a telescope on the lunar surface that

(01:32):
will be so powerful that it could, for instance, photograph
a planet within the trappest Ie System about forty light
years away with the same detail we can look at Mars.
We will be able to see the forests, the mountaintops,
the glistening of the light of the oceans. He says,
it's unbelievable. Silk is talking about using a telescope to

(01:53):
take snapshots of life on another planet. If there were
cities there, we'd see the lights. The magic isn't in
the telescope. The magic is on the Moon. The Moon
turns out to be a unique place to do space science,
far better than Earth or even out in space itself,

(02:15):
because the far side is radio silent, and because the
Moon has essentially no atmosphere, giving optical telescopes nearly unlimited resolution.
The telescope that could photograph life in the trappist Ie
System would actually be a circular array of about thirty
interconnected telescopes, creating a single virtual mirror twelve miles in diameter.

(02:37):
The technology isn't hard. There are already studies and papers
describing how to design and operate it. The project has
several other imagined versions, including one built inside a Moon crater,
and it has a nickname, the Lunar hyper Telescope. What
the project lacks is the infrastructure on the Moon to

(02:58):
make it real. Deploying a hyper telescope will require rockets
to deliver all those small telescopes to land safely. The
rockets will call from lunar landing pads and a fleet
of robots to unlock the cargo. Each individual telescope of
the array will need to be positioned with absolute precision.
To operate. The hyper telescope will demand always on electricity

(03:21):
right there on the Moon, even during the Moon's fourteen
day night, and serious communication bandwidth to get to its
extraordinary images back to Earth. It will need maintenance and repairs,
perhaps from astronauts stationed on the Moon. Despite the unbelievable
scientific and meta physical charisma of a telescope that can

(03:43):
take pictures of individual planets two hundred thirty five trillion
miles away, we're not going to build and install all
those infrastructure just for a telescope, not even the coolest,
most important telescope ever created. Indeed, it's just the opposite.
The hyper telescope, along with some equally astonishing science projects,
is likely to be the bonus of a new space race,

(04:05):
which is gathering momentum with the aim of at least
establishing a permanent, functioning human presence on the Moon. There
are now more missions scheduled to land on the Moon
in the next six years than in the past six decades.
NASA is sending astronauts back to the Moon in the
Artemis program, first with a lunar flyby with Artemis III

(04:26):
scheduled for twenty twenty six, and then the first new
landing of people, now scheduled for mid twenty twenty seven.
China's Space Agency aims to put that nation's first astronauts
on the Moon in twenty thirty. India, which first put
a lander on the Moon in twenty twenty three, is
designing a mission to return lunar soil there. Those are

(04:48):
just some of the nations with lunar ambitions. Independent missions
from a dozen or more private companies are aiming robotic
missions at the Moon including a Japanese company's craft that
crash landed this past June. Here on Earth, thousands of
people go to work every day laying the foundations of
the Moon's new future, designing lunar landing pads, construction robots,

(05:12):
human habitats, a power grid, communication, satellites, even a robotic
mining operation. In trying to imagine the future of the Moon,
I spoke with dozens of people immersed in lunar development
from Nassau and Blue Origin, from Lockheed Martin and Harvard
Business School, and interlun CEOs and engineers, economists and scientists,

(05:35):
people who work at companies with one hundred thousand employees
and adventure capital back to startups with just a dozen.
Their ambition and their energy are expansive, even inspiring, for
both commercial development and scientific discovery. Success, they say will
depend on money, determination, and what surprises the Moon has

(05:55):
in store for us when we go back to explore it, speaking,
two paths are possible. If things go according to the
best laid plans. By the end of the century, the
Moon will be home to a bustling lunar economy, which
will provide jobs, profit and also the resources for ambitious
science like the hypertelescope. But if science teaches one lesson clearly,

(06:20):
it's that human settlement and development rarely go to plan
and often veer unexpectedly, sometimes into a ditch or a crater.
Today's bright vision could fade fifty years, hence to nothing
more than a threadbeer encampment left over from the optimism
of earlier decades, grudgingly sustained like a rough, isolated supply

(06:40):
stop for stagecoaches in the Old West. Without the right
conservation protections in place, the Moon could end up a
junk yard of billionaire's dreams, with abandoned robots, rovers and
landers glittering the landscape, and the world having moved on
from a whirlwind mid century lunar infatuation. Right now now,
it's clear that this is the most exciting, most creative

(07:03):
moment in the world of space since the nineteen sixties,
and Apollo filled with a promise and risk, the Moon
is the next space frontier Again. The road to a
successful lunar economy will be built on one thing. Dirt.
Moon Dirt. Lunar dirt called regolith is everywhere, blanketing the
surface to the horizon in all directions. Regolith is unappealing

(07:26):
in almost every way. It is dull, gray, gritty, sharp, dingy, electrostatic, abrasive,
damaging to equipment, and dangerous to people. It's also the
resource on which everything else on the Moon will depend.
Delivering equipment and supplies to the Moon is so expensive
when gallon of water rocketed from the Earth to the
Moon will cost anywhere from one hundred thousand dollars to

(07:48):
more than a million dollars to transport that the only
economically practically way to develop the Moon will be to
use what's there. As unpromising as it looks, rega is
loaded with what you'd want if you were thinking about
setting up a moon base. Aluminium, iron, titanium, silicon, oxygen.
If you heat regolith to twenty nine hundred degrees fahrenheit

(08:12):
so it melts, magical things start to happen. Once regolith
is molten, you can skim off its components and make
things with them. Melted regolith fortuitously canned from the basis
of landing pads. The first thing is a successful lunar
outpost will need NASA plans to land humans back on

(08:32):
the Moon with space X's Starship HLS Human Landing System
which will also be used to deliver cargo payloads to
the Moon. At one hundred sixty four feet tall, the
rocket is the height of a fifteen story building. Curing
one hundred tons landing tail down tipping over on landing
would be a disaster. During the Artemis missions, it will

(08:54):
have to make do with finding a smooth, safe landing
spot on the Moon's natural terrain for that first landing,
but future missions would be greatly aided by a landing pad.
Several companies are already working on engineering them. They are
prototyping robots that can crawl along the Moon's surface level
It then scoop up regolith, melt it shape paving bricks

(09:18):
or solid surfaces, and position them, sealing each to the
next in line to form a steam free landing apron.
Imagine inventing a machine to scoop up dirt in Ohio
and turn it into an interstate highway. A veteran of
aerospace giants Grumman and L three, Sam Hemenaise is the

(09:39):
founder and CEO of Astroport's Space Technologies, a San Antonio
based start up that aims to build moonports then operate
them as you would the port of Houston or the
airport in Memphis. Astroport wants to build the landing pads,
build roads to connect them to nearby bases, build storage
buildings to hold off loaded cargo, and charge for all

(10:02):
those surfaces. Emenes says his company's paving robot, the Lunatron,
is in testing. Astroport is connecting a fifty acre test
bed in Midland, Texas and filling it with simulated lunar regolith.
This is the foundation, Hemenes says. We can make a
business out of melted regolith. That's what's different about this

(10:24):
moon race. It's one thing to go someplace the moon
Mars touched down and retrieve some samples. It's quite another
to arrive there to create a future that sustains itself.
The first is an expedition paid for by a government.
The second is an economy which generates value and profit
and builds on itself. The rocket people need the landing

(10:47):
pad people. The landing pad people need the rover people,
and also the rocket people. Everyone needs the power people.
They all need each other. They need customers, they need suppliers.
Nothing makes much sense with the out everything else here
on Earth, This lunar economy is already weaving itself together.
Imenez Astroport is working with another Moon tech company, Astrolab,

(11:10):
on the actual rover that will move the lunatron paper around.
Astrolab is designing and building a compact Moon surface truck
called the flex Rover, which can transport two thousand pounds.
Astrolab has a reservation to ship the flex Rover on
an early SpaceX cargo mission. The idea of a lunar
economy built on dirt is so potent that one of

(11:33):
the largest companies in the new space economy, Jeff Bezos's
Blue Origin, has created an entire division devoted to turning
lunar regulis into useful products on the Moon. The sixty
person group, based in North Hollywood, California, is called the
Space Resources Program, and senior director Vlada Stemenkovich, a planetary

(11:56):
scientist who formerly worked at mit D and Nassau's Jet
propulsion Laboratory, says their job is to learn how to
make almost everything out of nothing. Their first target is electricity,
the most important element of Moon infrastructure after the rockets themselves.
Since twenty twenty one, Blue Origin says the group has
been using simulated lunar regolith to make wire and solar

(12:20):
cells relying on nothing but solar power and robotic technology.
The Moon is about to be a very busy place,
with eighty four announced national and commercial missions just between
now and twenty thirty. To start, they mixed up the
simulated lunar regolith not just with the right proportions of minerals,
but also with a realistic blend of grit size and texture.

(12:43):
Based on sample's retrieve during the Apollo missions, the company
developed a solar poward process to melt the regolith into thick,
bright molden liquid. Without providing much detail, the company says
it separated out silicon, iron, and aluminium and that blues
robotic system turn to those raw materials into working cellular cells.

(13:05):
Blue Origin released an image of a circular solar cell
about the size of your palm, with the company's feather
logo on it. The company calls the process Blue Alchemist
and says without a shred of modesty, that it is
a breakthrough process that will bootstrap unlimited electricity and power
transmission cables anywhere on the surface of the Moon. Unlimited

(13:29):
power anywhere on the Moon using just sunlight and silicon
a bonus. The process produces oxygen as a by product,
as almost any process that melts regolith will, because the
lunar dirt is almost half oxygen by weight. One of
Blue's video clips shows oxygen bubbling up through the molten regolith.

(13:50):
The oxygen, of course, could provide breathable air to astronauts.
Even more significant in economic terms, it can be used
as a critical component in rocket fuel to refuel spaceships
that have landed on the Moon and need to turn
around and head home, or to lunar orbit or off
two points beyond. We don't know the economics of this.

(14:11):
What's blues capital investment? What will the process cost on
the moon? What can you charge for lunar electricity? But
we do know this Bezos's Blue Origin isn't a charity,
and it intends to make money from regolith. We are
not playing around, says Stemenkovitch. Solar panels manufactured on the

(14:31):
Moon will be crucio to keep keeping the robots and
habitats of any Moon economy running, but they might evolve
to beam energy back to Earth. With the right infrastructure
in place, Engineers say it will be possible to collect
regolith on the Moon heat it to form bricks of
raw material and launch those off the Moon using a

(14:52):
catapult a rail gun that will hurl the bricks into orbit. There,
the bricks will be collected and towed to a space factory.
The space factory could turn the regolith, packed with silicon
and aluminum into vast solar arrays, a megavit version of
blue alchemists for deployment in Earth orbit. Because they avoid

(15:13):
the problems of night time and cloudy skies, orbital solar
arrays are seven times more productive than solar arrays on
the ground. They could generate essentially unlimited electricity with zero
climate impact without having to erect huge terrestrial solar farms
or nuclear power plants. It's possible to safely microwave that

(15:35):
electricity down to Earth and provide power even to places
currently under served, more easily than building typical power infrastructure,
and you could make money doing it. The whole operation
could be tendered by a small human staff working in
the orbital factory and watching over things on the surface

(15:56):
of the Moon. Other companies could make good money supply
moon powered ink. Think for a moment about the vast
oil infrastructure in the Ocean off the Gulf coast of
the United States. Fifty offshore platforms operate in deep water,
staffed by a small army of workers who come and
go on squadrons of helicopters, supplied by fleets of boats,

(16:18):
turning out fourteen percent of the oil produced by the
United States. If the Moon develops with imagination, persistence, and
money by twenty twenty one hundred, it could look like
the Gulf, a busy, if remote place where important and
demanding work gets dung for big profit. The sweep at
the Moon when you're standing on its surface is majestic

(16:40):
and arresting. During daylight, the Moon's surface is bright, though
way a snow covered Colorado mountain side is on a
sunny winter day. The landscape is plains and ridges, mountains
and valleys and craters, all gray dust without a perceptible atmosphere,
without the weathering effects of wind and rain and foliage.
The jackrophy is vivid and crisp. You can see a

(17:02):
long way the Earth floats in the black lunar sky,
gleaming blue, surprisingly large, four times as big as the
Moon looks on Earth. What you don't see is the
one substance that powers all life on Earth water Without water,
this vision of a booming twenty one hundred lunar economy
grows hazier. The promise of unlimited energy to Earth and

(17:24):
a telescope to spy on extra solar worlds less assured.
We know there is some water on the Moon that
was first detected by a Nassau instrument flying on the
Indian shell dry On one probe in two thousand eight,
and confirmed by a second Nassau probe the next year.
The early chantalizing data suggested there might be iceberg size

(17:47):
qualities quantities of water in the craters of the Moon's
north and south poles. The swirl of today's Moon activities
stems in part from the excitement generated by the discovery.
The indispensable appeal of water on the Moon is easy
to understand. Flying hundreds of gallons of water in from
the Earth brief and modest bases would cost millions of dollars.

(18:11):
But the real leverage for water is that it can
be easily separated into hydrogen and oxygen. If the Moon
has usable water, you have oxygen for breathing, and the
most important, you have hydrogen and oxygen with which to
make rocket fuel if there is ice in the cold,
permanently shadowed craters at the South Pole that can be
harvested and purified into usable water. It's a little like regolith.

(18:35):
It looks simple, but it's a single resource that makes
many things possible. No one has yet been able to
land a water prospecting probe in a crater of the
South Pole and see how much water is near the
surface and in what form. But orbital probe scanning the
Moon's surface since Chandryon one in two thousand eight, another

(18:56):
analysis increasingly suggests that the easy availability of water on
the Moon is illusory, if not fantastical. Chunks of iceberg
size accumulations are ruled out, says Kevin Cannon, a planetary
scientist who is one of the world's leading experts on
lunar water and now works for the space start up Ethos.

(19:18):
Cannon says that since twenty ten, the enthusiasm Moon water
has run away with itself, understandably given its value, but
it odds with a slowly accumulating science. What the decade
of continued analysis shows is that whatever water exists in
polar craters may be more in the forms of frost
frozen grains mixed into the Moon's dirt the way bits

(19:40):
of seashell are mixed into the sand at the beach.
It could also be buried well below the surface, all
much less sexy and also much less successible than some
had hoped. At best, it appears really wet Moon dirt
might contain five percent water by weight. To get one
hundred gallons of water, you need to dig up and
process eight ns of regolith. In practice, the water trapped

(20:04):
in the permanently dark South Pole craters will be insanely
difficult to mine, blocked from radio contact, with steep sides
and uneven bottoms, and interior temperatures of twenty degrees kelvin
minus four hundred twenty four degrees fahrenheit, impossible for astronauts
to explore safely, but also impossible for the moment for

(20:24):
robots to explore, let alone mine and bring up to
human baisies. A thriving lunar economy will rely on water
as much as regolith. It could well be the privet
on which the lunar future turns. The question of lunar
water is on the agenda of every company in space agency,
every Moon mission involving people is aimed at the south Pole,

(20:45):
including Artemis three, Nassau's first efforts since nineteen seventy two
to land people on the Moon. Most of the uncrude
missions to test out rovers and solar panels and robots
are also aimed at the South Pole. Many will be
looking for evidence of water as part of their work.
Finding it or not will be a powerful indicator of

(21:06):
what lunar future were likely to get. In March nineteen
sixty six, three years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
would land on the Moon, Nassau received a sobering report
from engineers and scientists at the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation,
which was building the Apollo lunar module, and colleagues at

(21:28):
Arthur D. Little, a Cambridge, Massachusetts consulting firm. The engineers
had been asked a simple question, how much would the
Apollo missions pollute the Moon just by landing there. The
two hundred six page scientific analysis contains an astonishing revelation.
Right at the start the Moon it turns out as
a naturally occurring atmosphere. It's very thin, but lunar gravity

(21:50):
is strong enough to attract and hold a tenuous veil
of gas molecules. The Apollo eleven lunar module when it
settled into tranquilquility base atop a plume of rocket exhaust,
would deliver almost as many gas molecules to the Moon
as the lunar atmosphere already contained. Indeed, it would turn

(22:12):
out that each time we sent a lunar module, we
delivered nearly an entire new atmosphere of gas molecules to
the Moon from the rocket plume of landing, along with
gases vented from the cabin and even farts vented from
the astronauts spacesuits, which is to say, the very active
exploring the Moon pollutes it. The Moon is fourteen point

(22:32):
six million square miles, or about twice the land area
of the United States and Canada. All that land is
empty now and almost completely untouched. As we know from
earthly experience, the time to plant for its protection as
a natural resource is now, or our most ambitious science
plans for the Moon may be thwarted. That's exactly the

(22:53):
problem that Caltech astrophysicists Nivedita Mahesh is worried about. But
the pollution she most worries about isn't the typical sort.
Mahsh studies star formation at the earliest moments of the universe.
It's an epoch we call the cosmic dawn, she says,
when the very first stars turned on. To understand how

(23:16):
the very first stars formed, scientists have to listen to
the signals from the universe when it was only one
hundred million or two hundred million years old, the equivalent
of understanding the life of a hundred year old by
looking back to when that person was nine months old.
In astrophysics, the only way to listen that far back
is to use advanced radio telescopes. On Earth, you can't

(23:38):
between the atmosphere and the noise all our own electromagnetic
emissions make. It's just too noisy. The quietest place in
the Solar System turns out to be the far side
of the Moon. Mahesh's part of a group of scientists
and engineers working on the design of Farview, an extraordinary
radio telescope that would take advantage of the Moon's radio

(23:58):
quiet with a high hundred thousand interlinked individual antennas to
listen to the birth of the universe. The project aims
to rely on the technology currently under development on the
commercial side to have Farview build itself on the Moon,
using robotic rovers to melt regolith and extrude antenna wires.

(24:20):
Like our colleagues at rocket and mining companies, she talks
with excitement and a sense of momentum, even inevitability. But
a vibrant commercial economy on the Moon is both the
good news and the bad news for science. It could
lay the foundation for Farview or make it impossible. Nokia
sent a rover to the Moon in early twenty twenty
five to test out how lunar's cell phone transmissions work.

(24:43):
That's great, says Mahesh. Improving communications is critical, but lunar
cell service could interfere with studying those faint primordial radio signals.
If not properly shielded, there's a danger. Mahesh says that
the radio transmissions of routine Moon up rations will spoil
or contaminate the radio quiet environment. The time to safeguard

(25:05):
that quiet is now. A hash speaks from experience. Elon
Musk's Starlanc Version two satellites, launched into Earth orbit in
twenty twenty three to beam internet service from space, have
blotted out the ability to listen to some signals from space,
literally blinding some key earth side radio telescopes. Currently there

(25:27):
are no binding international agreements for conservation on the Moon,
but new ideas are percolating to start safeguarding the Moon
against this type of degradation scientifically and culturally. The British
planetary scientist Ian Crawford has suggested an international agreement right
now to set aside the Moon's north pole permanently as

(25:48):
an area protected from human activity, a Yellowstone Park for
the Moon, so we can always return to an unspoiled
lunar region if we need to for science or spirituality
for that matter. Another idea of international rules that would
require all development on the Moon to be invasive, invisible

(26:10):
to the naked eye from Earth, so no one will
look up at night and see bright construction lights or
red mining operation strobes flashing from the Moon. As the
philosopher and space exploration ethicist Brian Greene of Santa Clara
University points out, everyone who has ever lived on Earth
who can see has seen the Moon. It captures your

(26:31):
attention from the time you're old enough to look at
it until the time you die. You can't just mess
with something like that. The Moon is also sacred to
many cultures now and historically. In twenty twenty four, the
DNAE of the Navajo Nation objected to a private company's
mission to land cremated human remains on the Moon, calling

(26:53):
that an act of desecration. As it happens that lander
failed to reach the Moon, now is the time to
put protections in place, says Crawford, because its the easiest
moment no one's commercial interests will be hurt. Mahesh is
already in meetings planning future missions where she advocates for
strong radio quiet controls, and there are slow moving un

(27:16):
sponsored talks on related topics like an near traffic control
system for the Moon so everyone knows where everyone else
is flying, and on allocating radio frequencies and establishing rules
for rescuing astronauts in danger. The press of lunar activity
will push them forward. Nations have hundreds of years of
norms and rules about managing ocean resources, and management of

(27:39):
the Moon could well look similar. The distance might seem
to impart impunity to rogue behavior. Who exactly is going
to race for the lunar north pole to issue citations
against those not respecting a park boundary? This concludes readings
from Nexttional Geographic magazine. For today, your reader has been Marsha.

(28:03):
Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and have a
great day.