Moon rush: the launch of a lunar economy | FT Film

[Music] humans are going back to the Moon right now the Moon is the target of more missions than at any time since the Apollo era the US and China have ambitious projects to build permanent bases on the lunar surface and where they go business is following they all want to share in the promised new lunar economy you'll see tourism you'll see commercialization I would say of data on the moon there will be an entertainment element of it over the next 10 years 400 missions we forecast $137 billion cumulative Market to get there first we'll need the infrastructure to support a lunar economy someone will have to build the landing pads the power stations and Communications networks needed for these permanent bases then the question will be whether there really is money to be made from exploiting Earth's cold Barren satellite Beyond relying on government [Music] contracts so what exactly are the space agencies trying to do that has excited talk of a lunar economy ditch ideas of lunar cities instead think of the International Space Station where a handful of astronauts spend months at a time learning to live and work in space or of the Polar research stations where scientists from around the world go to study in some of the toughest conditions on the planet we'll have research outposts they're going to be operated much like we might operate an outpost in the outback or say on an offshore platform so I think we'll have rotational Crews so the facility itself would be permanently occupied but the people would rotate in and out Jim free is the man leading the US effort to return humans to the Moon NASA sees it as a training ground for living and working on Mars now we can put systems close to home to 100 plus thousand miles away from home but closer than Mars and see how they operate in roughly the same gravitational environment we've had humans on the moon before but not for long duration so what is that partial gravity mean to the human system to our other systems so that we learn it now close to home relative to Mars we can also simulate a Mars mission with the moon so we're going to have a lunar orbiting station around the Moon called Gateway and we can send our crews and they can live on Gateway for six months like their transiting out to Mars for 6 months and we can send them down to the lunar surface for 30 days like we plan to do at Mars and have them have to adjust from the zero gravity micro gravity environment to a partial gravity and then bring them back to Gateway for six months and then bring them home so the Moon from our perspective touches Mars in every way except Landing through an atmosphere the first Port of coal in this new lunar Rush is going to be the moon's South Pole both the US us and China are targeting the region and sometimes even the same Landing sites but why the South Pole that's where you're going to find Institute resource utilization missions trying to find water trying to find oxygen uh trying to find hyrogen trying to find other minerals and material that will be able to make um air for astronauts to breathe estimates vary greatly on how much there might be it could be as high as 6 billion tons and so if we can first prove that it's there and then access it that water could provide our astronauts with air and water but then when we split that water into hydrogen and oxygen makes a fantastic inspace propellent NASA is turning to the private sector to help cut the costs of its missions instead of Contracting to build a rocket it wants to buy the ride from companies such as SpaceX and blue origin and this is one of the fundamental differences to the Apollo era it means that others can use those Services too takes advantage of the capital that's out there gets things done for us as a service where we're not owning all the infrastructure but then allows these other missions to happen as well for private Industries much like in low worth orbit we pay for crew to go to the space station those same capabilities are now taking people on private Astron missions to the space station or even independent missions as SpaceX did a couple years ago of launching people to low earth orbit on their own building the foundations of Al luner economy for returning to the moon are are really rooted in what NASA's always done the Partnerships that we've developed for this lunar economy start really in our uncrewed missions the commercial lunar payload Services was designed to get our payloads on the moon and encourage people to build Landers to land our payloads but then also also allow them to carry other payloads from various organizations that they raise as part of their capital and it allows us to get the data we need back to do our science which is fundamental to what we're doing on the lunar surface and also to understand the lunar environment Elon Musk SpaceX supported by billions of dollars in NASA contracts has revolutionized the cost of accessing space with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket its success has spawned a host of cap startups with over 100 companies around the world aiming to carry satellites into low earth orbit now musk's gigantic Starship promises to do the same for transport to the Moon The Genius of Starship or the genius of the principle of heavy reusable is that the cost factors compared to traditional Expendable launch could potentially Reduce by two orders of magnitude one cannot emphasize enough what a game Cher this is Starship is the railroad to low earth orbit and from there we can build out to the moon and into the solar system Starship will be the enabler that allows us to build hundreds of economically viable business models in space SpaceX and blue origin are developing Landers to carry astronauts to the Moon surface as part of NASA's Artemis program this aims to put the first woman and person of color on the lunar Surface by 2025 but the race is not just about human transport there's cargo and other services too PWC estimates that the lunar transport and Logistics Market could be worth more than $100 billion by 2040 in 2018 when the moon became of strategic interest to the United States there were no lunar Landers or lunar programs in existence in the United States today there's over a dozen Landers being built which is a new market lunar transportation is going to be the key component getting people on and off the surface and getting instruments and and capabilities on the surface is going to be the immediate need that we have over the next several years you need to get there to have human presence you need to build infrastructure ahead of the human presence being there because it's not just about staying a couple of days and then going it's about a permanent infrastructure so I would put communication and navigation ahead even of oxygen and food because otherwise you can't even go there going to the South Pole is a lot different than going to the Equator the lighting conditions at the South Pole are very peculiar so you have really low incident angle light so from a navigation perspective you can actually get very disoriented when you walk away from your Lander and you turn around around and try and get back so with that sunlight very low at you so even small Boulders can give you Long Shadows we need to give our crews every bit of safety to navigate back to the Lander our requirements of science to accurately put our scientific instruments and know where we put them is important also so that navigation piece is really important from a safety and science perspective so collaborations like Moonlight are very important to us Moonlight is the name given to the program led by the European Space Agency which plans to offer connectivity on the moon it's an infrastructure project giving exactly the same facility as Internet and Galileo would give to human on earth so today you imagine that the internet goes off you don't have any signal on your mobile phone and you don't have any navigation signal for your car pretty much every business Stu where it's the same for the moon if we want to have autonomous navigation if we want missions on the moon to be able to communicate back with us and between themselves we need to have a network of communication satellites orbiting around the Moon allowing communication between the Luna Mission and the Earth and amongst each other and including a navigation system as well other nations are also looking into contributing to a global program we're starting from scratch what we were not able to do on Earth because on Earth we didn't start with is one system and the will to all be interoperable so we are capable of saying okay well we're going to work together as the world not as a nation to provide this service as efficiently as possible setting up a Communications network is also expected to accelerate the development of Commercial Services on the moon I can put data relay and navigation satellites around the moon and now I can provide Communications for any set of users to purchase from us as a service and so we provide lunar distance or nears space network communication services to the moon and back from the Moon and even on the back side of the moon and we can sell that to anybody who wants a mission to the moon or wants to put anything on the moon so if we're building a permanent base on the moon and we've got the communications and navigation in place what else do we need well we can't do anything without power and we will need a lot of Power Nuclear is going to be critical if we're really going to live there and and work there and do science there sustainably you need a lot more power to execute more missions so we think that's very important so will there not be kind of safety and environmental considerations doing producing nuclear power on the moon it does sound scary to talk about nuclear power uh in space and on the moon uh one of the big differences uh is one of the important nuances is this is low-enriched uranium it's not high enriched weapon grade nuclear fuels so inherently it is much safer there are also a lot of regulatory and safety processes that we're going to work through with governments to make sure we can do this safely but essentially you don't launch with a nuclear reactor for example the nuclear reactor is turned off when you launch until you get to what's called a nuclear safe orbit and what do you do with the waste a lot of that still needs to be developed and worked out I would say those things are in in work can say more on that in the future I would say how the how the systems are going to going to all work and play out and how all that will be managed nuclear power on the moon is important because of its stability it also helps us survive the night we have 150 hour periods sometimes where we'll be without sunlight and we need our systems to survive obviously nuclear power is there all the time so we can take advantage of that to power our vehicles during these difficult No Light low temperature periods the safety concern obviously is there we would design around it by putting the reactor far away or building up a burm of the lunar regolith to protect the crew members and and distributing the power via long cables regolith is the name for lunar dust which actually isn't dust at all but shards of moonrock that have been smashed by meteorites over millions of years it's nasty stuff which tore into the Apollo Astronauts Moon suits and can damage lungs we had these white suits on when we started but the moon dust is very very fine like powder and so as you walk you kick it up this dust gets all over you your suit began to turn gray but scientists are hoping to be able to use that regolith to protect humans from radiation to build habitation and more there's a name for using the moon's resources such as regali or ice Inu resource utilization or isru Lots of people talk about this as one of the earliest potential markets there's people that have very big Institute resource utilization plans a big concern for us is the plume that we have from our rocket engine and how that stir up the lunar regolith down up and you can actually suspend that regolith based on the the 16 gravity you can actually suspend it just over the surface so if we had a landing pad constructed from regolith maybe something that you know compacted that regolith down into a landing pad it it allows us to land closer to our other systems so we don't have long traverses for our crew members and then when you look at living off the land from the Institue resource utilization aspect getting to that water ice our goal is to get the hydrogen and oxygen out of there to make power and obviously that ports over into life support systems too so for me that insitu resource U ization takes a lot of power but those landing pads sure would be great so if our astronauts have access to water Air and Power how can we mold the landscape to help them survive we want to take the raw material on the surface of the Moon and make that useful so we're looking at a number of different Technologies from laser centering uh to Casting when we go to the Moon we're essentially going to be back in the Stone Age our Architects and civil engineers are looking back to just after the Stone Age to what are the building technologies that our ancestors used and perfected and were able to make fantastically useful structures out of so this might be using bricks corbelling which is a technology where you can take these bricks and you can stack them in certain ways that they will stand up on their own these kinds of things are what sort of fascinate our Architects and civil engineers here because they're simple they're repeatable they're durable so we're we're attracted to that those older technolog as first use on the surface of the Moon but there are some older technologies that definitely won't be deployed on the moon at least not to paying customers dehydrated astronaut food from the 1960s isn't going to keep astronauts healthy or happy but is it possible or necessary to grow food on the moon after 6 months in space so more for longterm Mission and for Mars travel the quality of the prepackaged food degrade we are building pods inside which we recreate climates to grow plants and we do that on Earth and space so a pod is a very it's kind of a very Advanced Greenhouse you can assemble it anywhere it's composed of a base inside which you find all the hardware so the atmospheric the hydraulic system that help recreating the climate inside and on top of the hardware there is inflated bubble inside which we recreate the ideal condition for life to grow we just need like an initial tank of water and then we can use it for a very long time for the air we can have compressed hair so it's not air is not really a problem on our side a lot of the companies that we've looked at have amazing animated examples of what they plan to do but the reality is more prosaic the first pillows that were sending are actually not inflatable structure there are cubic pillows inside which we're trying to really test the watering system because the gravity is different on the moon we also want to see how the solar radiation are impacting the de vment of the plants because this is still unknown and so the first pillot will be very small cubes uh step two will be to start testing inflatable structures then step three is going to be integrate everything and eventually get a first biopod on the moon mining is another industry which many believe offers huge potential in a future lunar economy scientists think the moon May hold large deposits of helium 3 which is crucial for nuclear fusion there may be money to be made in extracting this for use back on Earth offworld is building swarms of ruggedized machine intelligent robots built on the same common platform consisting of different species of robots that do excavation extraction surveying processing uh Transportation collection and literally a myriad of other tasks and the robots then collaborate together working in a system that provides an endtoend capability for any industrial sector offworld is one of the many lunar hopefuls trying to prove its business model here on Earth before setting off for the moon we have the mining companies of our clients we're really operating here on Earth predominantly as the first planet with the most value proposition and what that means is that we can build and scale the business here we can add value to existing mining companies who can't mine particular ore or mineral from places that conventional mining cannot reach economically and that means we can then develop our robust systems reduce the risks on our learning curves and develop the intelligence and autonomy here on Earth and then deploy to the Moon being one of the world's first companies to have mining development contracts on two celestial bodies um is uh pretty cool even if these companies are able to do business on Earth making a success of that same business on or around the Moon is a giant leap not everyone believes a self-sustaining commercial economy will flourish on the moon this is a study of the potential for a lunar economy written for NASA it found that there are more than 80 companies in 12 countries aiming to offer services and products on or around the Moon by 2040 but the vast majority are counting on government contracts to keep them going rather than households or businesses consumers May book a stay in a lunar Hotel buy moon rocks or other artifacts or even choose to be buried on the moon the report suggests but that's about all that will be available and for the businesso business Market other than advertising there was nothing that could be produced on or around the moon for the private sector that was viable without government support but that is the story until 2040 lunar entreprene are looking further out space is an enormous human endeavor it will always contain a government component governments have a strategic need to be in space International governments need to be there but also there's room now for the first time in history there's room for commercial companies to be there as the economy progresses we'll see more activity around the Moon there will be satellites that will be refillable and then also Landers and Rovers that can be refueled and the idea of a logis IC supply chain around the Moon where you are able to derive resources propellants that can then be transferred to uh customers our goal is to be kind of the mid-stream downstream oil and gas company in a sense so when people say that we're never going to get a long-term outpost on the moon and that it will be very similar to what happened with Apollo I disagree because there are so many entrepreneur and very talented engineers and scientists working on making it happen there is the money there is the talent and it's going to happen let's be honest there's never been a lunar economy before it's entirely possible that the moon's commercial economy will simply be about making life a little more comfortable for those staying in the bases services like streaming Netflix or supplying coffee maybe we won't truly know what the opportunities are until we have people living on the lunar surface collectively over history we' spent two weeks of human history on the moon there's a lot of work that needs to be done to build the infrastructure to build reliable transportation not only reliable but even uh financially reliable the road needs to be paved before we can start setting up shop but NASA and its partners are not the only ones trying to pave those roads China has its own Ambitions to build a permanent base on the moon and like the US space agency it too is targeting the South Pole and encouraging its companies to participate in the new moon Rush are you worried that the greater involvement of the commercial stroke private sector in this could accidentally lead to conflict unmanaged conflict with a power like China which has its own commercial and political Ambitions for the moon I think commercial involvement only enables things I I don't worry about commercial starting any type of conflict I believe that our path back to the moon this time under the emis program is much different than we we did in Apollo in the sense that we're going as an International Coalition under a set of principles in the emis Accords which are about safe peaceful and prosperous um so from our perspective those 28 countries that have signed those aremis Accords and committed to those principles which includes our partners in the commercial world that's how we'll operate and that's how we'll live by of course China has not and probably never will sign those Accords I love the competition and the race to the moon and wanting to be first as you can tell you know first United States return in 50 years uh but we can do that in a way that's uh friendly and not adversarial I'm Not Afraid about a being conflict in the future regarding the you know the sharing of resources they will realize that to have a a better environment they need to sit together there is a challenge for this race to the moon or this war for the moon but there are underlying trends that could facilitate at least respectful and peaceful uh if not cooperation then at least distance that may allow us to work around each other rather than against each other a cold war at worst I believe is where we're headed both Endeavors are trying to get there they'll do their work independently it would not really escalate further than that we have to hope they're right very few of those we spoke to were prepared to acknowledge the risk that competition for lunar resources could spark new tension in already strained relationships back here on Earth but those tensions do exist even if there is still International collaboration on the ISS I think that the space agencies around the world have worked better than almost any geopolitical group I mean it's amazing to me now as we sit here today that we have an International Space Station that is still holding together an International Coalition I think that's a remarkable statement of what space can actually do to bring people together and I think that's that's going to be the case in the future historically space has been an area of collaboration right where countries have come together because it is so challenging and and been sort of a force for Humanity and and for good so I'd like to think that that will continue and that we can build on that and work together uh with other nations we want to see more successes for everybody participating so that we grow this whole economy and that we have a vibrant economy that's what it's about whether the moon becomes Humanity's first off-world economy will depend on many things on Starship succeeding after its early failures in cutting the price of a ticket to the moon on explorers finding and extracting valuable resources such as water hydrogen and helium 3 and on the world's space fairing Nations being able to share the moon's resources peacefully the stakes are high right now the Moon is a pristine Place largely undisturbed by geopolitical or commercial rivalries but within the next decade we expect to see the first mining of its resources and perhaps even the first tourists will we trash the moon as we have trashed so much of our home planet I don't have that concern the Moon is a uh it's a fragment and it's a rock and a baron place and so I'm not necessarily worried about contamination of the Moon itself it lives out in space in a highly radioactive environment we're looking at different sites on the moon a number of them will just be set aside as national parks some might be strictly for scientific purposes so that they're not touched by any sort of commercial activity and then probably a small fraction would be allowed for research and commercial use anytime you go somewhere new it's how can we do this in the right way maybe differently than in the past and be mindful of those things so that's not an area I worry about do you think you'll ever go to the Moon yes I will I I want to go and and uh I'm very uh determined when I want to do something it might take more time than expected but I will go I don't want to get to a moon for a very good reason I get motion sick in the car I think the thing that I look up at the Moon more than almost anything is um a certain amount of longing I want to go back I want us to go back I want us to go back and I want us to explore uh I'm not sure if I'll make it there I have a I have a 2-year-old daughter and I like to tell her she'll have the option to go to the Moon someday and uh and I think that many people [Music] will I'm Dreaming oh that somebody soon someone will spend a Long Afternoon close by me making me [Music] soon

2023-10-22 13:14

Other news