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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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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, 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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. 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and have a great day.