TECHNOIR (9 page)

            Bruce Gagnon, the space weapons expert who runs The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, asks a rhetorical question: “Why do you think Haliburton is building a drill for Mars and the Moon?”

            To monopolize the untold resources Mars and the Moon might offer? The question nearly answers itself, says Gagnon.

            “There’s going to be a scramble for the moon by the Chinese, the Russians and the Americans. This is real. There’s going to be a conflict over it,” he says. “Who controls the Moon is going to be rich by unimaginable amounts.”

            Perhaps those cards are in the future for mankind. But certainly mankind has history on its side as a warning. History in the form of an Iraqi insurgency. The Iraq insurgency erupted, in part, over Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative (also known as neo-liberalism) plans to privatize all of Iraq’s industries, including oil, which  would be taken over by American giants such as Shell and Exxon. And while some may think that thousands of US troops and Iraqi civilians died in vain due to the Iraqi insurgency, perhaps their souls won’t allow Cheney’s legacy and his offspring to trick us again. Hopefully on this planet and beyond.

            This doesn’t mean, however, there won’t be a future when man goes to war on the very surface and within the orbits of Mars and Moon so to control the resources that can be mined and flown back to Earth. In fact, mankind has already predicted such a conflict will take place. In 1995, in a
New York Times
op-ed written by science writer Lawrence Joseph, he asks the question, “Will the Moon become the Persian Gulf of the 21
^st
Century?” And if the US does not take action in regards to the Moon, Joseph wrote, “the nation could slip behind in the race for control of the global economy, and our destiny beyond.” Coincidentally, late in 2009, a US Air Force recruiting commercial that claims their technology isn’t “science fiction,” shows US troops tactically moving across a red and barren landscape that looks too much like Mars.

            Resource wars for money, fuel and survival, will either end when the human race becomes extinct, or rage on forever and ever as humans migrate across the universe. A migration Carl Sagan predicted will undoubtedly occur because of man’s unwavering desire to survive, he theorized. But Sagan also conceded that our collective stupidity might do us in before we even migrate off the planet. The irony is it might just be a resource war that ends the human race.

            Futurists and economists predict many nations, many years from now, will wage war for fresh water. It is almost inevitable if Global Warming and the Earth’s increasing population both continue to speed out-of-control toward unsustainable proportions, they contend. In our time, the resource mankind has shed so much blood for is oil. When the Spanish and Aztecs battled in the 1520s, it was for gold and land. In America 1860s, the Civil War was fought over free labor. In the heart of Africa during 1990s, a war was waged for coltan, a black metal needed to satiate the West’s craving for personal electronics. How about 100 years from now? When oil, natural gas and coal are ancient history. When wind and solar power are unable to support billions of people. What will mankind be fighting over then? A super-fuel from the stars? If you know anything about being human, and about greed and power, it’s possible.

            The answer to what resource man will be tragically dying for long after current generations are gone, might lie in the current race for the Moon. A race many people aren't aware even started. But at the moment, nearly a dozen nations and corporations are planning to invade our nearest celestial neighbor – either with humans or robots – an invasion that could take twenty years or longer. And if mankind does make it back, we may potentially stay for years to come, and possibly as long as the Earth is around.

            Some of these future invaders have already landed research vehicles; such as India, which launched its Chandrayaan (“Moon vehicle”) spacecraft late in 2008. A week after entering the Moon’s orbit, Chandrayaan, as it soared over the South Pole, released its Moon Impact Probe. It plunged into Shackleton Crater, named after the explorer Ernest Shackleton of Antarctic fame. The crater is 2,000 feet across and could someday be the backyard to one of mankind’s future lunar bases. The Moon does not tilt like the Earth, causing the interior of some craters, such as the Shackleton, to be in a perpetual blackout because of nearby peaks situated at the rim of Shackleton crater. Opposite the crater, these “Peaks of Eternal Light” are bathed in constant sun light – thus a good site for continuous solar power. There’s more life-sustaining evidence in the neighborhood. Late in the 1990s, NASA’s Lunar Prospector, an orbiter, recorded high-levels of hydrogen within the crater, an indicator for water ice.

            NASA confirmed the existence of water late in 2009 when it sent its LCROSS or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite plummeting into a permanently shadowed region of the Cabeus crater, also near the Moon’s south pole. A plume exploded out of the impact, and the LCROSS's Centaur upper-stage rocket – circling in orbit – flew through the debris recording data. Spectrometers on the Centaur, which in this case examined light emitted by the Moon debris, measured literal gallons of the liquid. “I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit; we found a significant amount” – about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, said project scientist Anthony Colaprete.

            Meanwhile, Japan has three satellites in lunar orbit, while China has one. China put the Chang’e-1 in lunar orbit late in 2007; a year later the satellite had mapped the Moon. The Chang’e-1 is analyzing the surface, hoping to find new elements NASA's Lunar Prospector did not see. The NASA satellite ceased working in 1999. China is hoping to launch Chang’e-2 – equipped with a soft-lander lunar probe – before the end of 2011. A third Chinese lunar satellite will also have a soft-lander that will hopefully collect rock samples and bring them back to Earth, a potentially significant event. In 2005 and 2006, the European Space Agency’s Smart-1 also mapped the moon, completing extensive analysis of the “Peaks of Eternal Light.” Smart-1 ended its mission in 2006 when it was deliberately crashed into the lunar surface.

            Then there are the corporations, such as Google, which is
currently running a $30 million competition
for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel about a quarter of a mile once there, and transmit video, images and data back to Earth. The competition, sponsored heavily by missile-defense contractor Northrop Grumman, has drawn eight or more teams. In 2008, lifting-off your homemade lunar lander from Earth and moving it several hundred feet to the left, and finally landing it at a second launching pad won you $350,000. Why so interested in the Moon, Google? In a promotional video, Google calls the Moon, “Earth’s off-shore island. (And) that the Moon could become our greatest asset.”

            The one nation missing from this early-21st century effort to research the Moon from orbit or its surface is the nation that got there first. In 1959, the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 was the first satellite to plunge into the Moon’s cold, dry surface of fine gray dust and regolith. The USSR is in the dust-bin of history, as President Reagan predicted. But now that Russia has regained its economy, it’s also re-ignited its space ambitions. Russia’s federal space agency, Roskosmos, has one Moon mapping project in the making. The “Luna-Glob” was first scheduled for launch in 2011, but the time has been moved up. Reportedly, China is assisting Russia with the program; and now Russia is planning a manned Moon base by 2025.

            In 2004, President Bush declared the US is going back to the Moon and will establish a lunar outpost there by 2024. Preliminary plans from NASA stated the Moon base might be established on the South Pole, near Shackleton’s crater. The $100 billion mission – dubbed the Constellation Plan – calls for an Apollo-like craft (a massive rocket, with booster and space capsule at the tip) to bring Americans back. “Think of it as Apollo on steroids,” said then-NASA chief Mike Griffin at the time. Bush and NASA claimed the mission to the Moon was a precursor – a test-run if you will – for a trip to Mars. The Moon will become a “stepping stone” to the Red Planet, they said.

            Some analysts ask why go to the Moon? Why not just go straight to Mars? Find water on the Red Planet, or bring it, and begin the terraformation of Mars. The human race will probably need the new land and food. Land that hopefully gives back to its inhabitants considering 100 to 200 years from now the Earth’s population is predicted to triple. But there is an ominous storm moving in on any US mission to Mars or the Moon – affordability. Two wars with no end in sight, the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s, and the Bush and Obama administration's ineptitude, have come together to nearly bankrupt the US during the decade and beyond. Indeed, at the start of 2010, Obama was making plans to scrap the Moon base by 2024, and simply never go. Which is causing many NASA employees to boil in anger.

            Because of US’s financial sickness and Obama’s stance, many analysts believe NASA is now losing this second race to the Moon. The leader is China, which hasn’t officially declared a manned mission yet, but has seriously suggested one might happen. And if their robust economy, gleefully supported by US consumption and debt, continues to pump millions into their space efforts, the first communist flag may be raised on another world. Even NASA has admitted China might beat America to the Moon. An implication that could turn the US into a literal subservient to the Chinese.

            For all those involved in the second great Moon race, a curious story in 2008 went out on a well-known international newswire. The chief of Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, was dismayed the US had turned down their request to go to Moon together. “We are ready to cooperate, but for some reasons the United States has announced that it will carry out the program itself,” said Perminov on Russian television.

            Within minutes NASA was aware of Perminov’s claims and released its own statements. Saying they were unaware of any Russian proposal for a cooperative Moon mission, and perplexed by his comments. Honesty has never come easy between the US and Russia or the former Soviet Union. But then again, Perminov made his claim during the Bush years, a time when the White House, the Pentagon, and just about any federal agency out there, thought lying and deception was not just the best diplomacy, but the only diplomacy. It’s quite possible the White House, or the CIA, ordered NASA to tell the Russians go there yourselves.

            Some believe it’s another key to the mystery that surrounds the US’s Earthly motives for their Moon designs. A mystery that doesn’t point an accusatory finger just at the US. China, India, Japan and Russia, are also suspected of having similar Moon desires – money, power, and control. Desires generated by what could be the energy that replaces fossil fuels. Forever.

            In 1985, a small team of fusion researchers from the University of Wisconsin made a “rediscovery” so potentially momentous it might someday literally shatter the surface of the Moon. The holidays were nearing, and the UW fusion research team was brainstorming: They wondered where they could find large quantities of
Helium-3
, or He3, an isotope of ordinary helium. Helium-3 is a proven fuel for nuclear fusion when you add Helium-3 to deuterium at a high temperature. One kg of Helium-3 burned with 67 kg of deuterium gives us nearly 20 megawatt-years of energy. Just two hundred pounds, they figured, could power a city of one million inhabitants for one year. Their calculation was based on dozens of incredibly small-scale fusion reactions they had carried out in a basketball-sized fusion device. Proving proof of principle, but at an extremely small rate.

            “It was around Christmas. That’s when we made what I like to call our rediscovery,” said Dr. Gerald Kulcinski, part of the UW team since the beginning and now the director of the
Fusion Technology Institute
at UW. Apollo astronauts, they remembered, had found quantities of Helium-3 on the Moon, Kulcinski said. So they sought out NASA and inquired about their lunar soil samples.

            “Apollo records showed that every sample of lunar material had Helium-3 in it,” Kulcinski said. Now, nestled among NASA’s 200-point mission goals for lunar base plans is a proposal to mine the moon for this fuel. Even though so far there are no viable power plants that exist for it or efficient ways to bring it back to Earth.

            Nevertheless, UW fusion researchers believe their plan could get civilization off fossil fuels. That’s if large crews and heavy equipment could go to the Moon to mine for Helium-3, super-heat it out of a lunar ore called ilmenite, process the gas, and return it to the Earth. Also, this incredible plan depends on whether large numbers of commercial fusion reactors could be built.

            Their theory initially didn’t shear off the tops of Moon mountains. But scientists and investors have taken notice. Now, China, India, the European Space Agency and Russia are also planning on a manned lunar base. There is increasing talk of a race to control this fuel, of which one Space Shuttle load could theoretically power the United States for a year.

            Back on Earth, the UW fusion research inspired someone to become an unparalleled lobbyist. He began seeking funds from private investors and Washington. A person who has a very personal connection with the lunar surface.

           
Apollo 17 astronaut Harris Hagan “Jack” Schmitt
shares the distance record for driving a NASA rover across the lunar surface – 22 miles through the Taurus-Littrow valley. He’s also a former U.S. Senator of New Mexico. But long before being the last human to touch the Moon, he was a geologist. And for the better part of the last two decades, the visiting UW professor has tried to persuade powerful people about the potential of Helium-3. He told a Senate committee in 2003 a return to the moon to stay would be comparable “to the movement of our species out of Africa.”