Artemis: Why Are We Really Going Back to the Moon?

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Ten. Eight. Today we are pitting facts against frontiers. Four. Three, two, One as we tackle the moon. And lift off. The crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins. This week, four astronauts flew around the moon, going further into space than humans ever have before.

The NASA mission is called Artemis II and they're scheduled to splash down back on Earth tomorrow. And all over the world, people have been stunned by this journey. Oh my goodness! Oh it's not just what you see and you hear as the rocket lips off. You can actually feel the force of it through your body. It's absolutely amazing what's going on right now and all I can say is wow. She is the first woman to ever see the entirety of our planet.

The world is following every moment of this mission, and that includes how the astronauts are getting by with a temperamental loo. Houston we have a toilet burning? They're seeing shadows and when you see shadows you get to see terrain of relief and you get to see the scale of the mountains. You can hear the excitement in their voice when they're talking about these craters. Um it's absolutely phenomenal. The astronauts themselves are in awe of everything they're saying.

Well, last night we did have our first view of the moon far side and it was just absolutely spectacular. Renier Gamma. Uh it's just everything and absolutely un Believable. This is incredible. Happy Moonjoy. And while these astronauts didn't land on the moon, in just two years, NASA hopes to get people to walk on the moon for the first time in over 50 years. And when that happens, when we actually see people walking on the moon again, that is sure to send our moon joy into warp drive.

Angel Abud Madrid, who studies space exploration now, remembers that moment back in 1969 and how amazing it was. He was eight years old living in Chihuahua, Mexico, and his dad woke him up to see it. And I just remember very clearly, you know, my dad shaking me, okay, come on, you gotta watch this. What do you remember from seeing on the screen? It was a small black and white TV, and it was this grainy picture. And I start watching, and I see the humans stepping out.

That's one small step per man. My dad keeps saying, this is a momentous occasion. Oh we were talking about it the day after everybody uh was talking about it and and uh my uncle, my aunts were like, Did you watch this? It was incredible. I mean we we made it to the moon, how far we had gone. And there in the corner was grandma saying, yeah. Yeah yeah. But don't we have enough problems here to be worrying about the moon? Why are we doing this? And that really stuck with me.

And not to be a moon killjoy here. But more than 50 years on, Grandma's still got a really good question here. Why are we doing this? Really? After all, back in 1969, what felt like this big day for humankind was also this huge political pissing contest between the US and the Soviet Union. And around the time the US won, they slashed NASA's budget. And for decades, no one's been that serious about going back to the moon.

That was until well, just several years ago really. Just as the US and China are getting particularly sassy with each other, here we go again. The race to the moon is back on! With some new players as well. China's lunar rover touched down last night on the far side of the moon. India is set to head to the moon. Israel, South Korea, Japan

In the last uh you know five years or so, this has ex really exploded in terms of interest. There are seventy-three space agencies and probably twenty more are being planned because every country is realizing maybe there's something in it for us. Like what? In a recent NASA report, they said that a big reason to go to the moon would be to keep the US in the leader's position. Yeah, so they can keep on winning.

And this week, President Trump posted, quote, We are winning in space, on Earth, and everywhere in between, economically, militarily, and now beyond the stars. Nobody comes close. End quote. So, is this just about winning? Today on the show, we're returning to an episode that we ran a few years ago to ask. Why are we really going back to the moon? And when you listen to politicians and bigwigs in this space talk about why we are doing this.

Two big things come up a lot, and that's what we're gonna rove through today. Okay. One is this idea of a lunar gold rush. Some say that there are trillions of dollars of resources up there in the moon waiting to be mined. And the first country to grab them will be one step closer to global domination. Thank you. The second thing is going to Mars. People are arguing that going to the moon is crucial to getting to our ultimate destination, the red planet. But is that for real?

When it comes to the moon, there's a lot of Why are we doing this? But then... There's science. Science vs the moon is coming up just after the break.

Welcome back. Today we're asking, why are we going back to the moon, really? Well, one reason is this idea of a lunar gold rush. That the moon is a treasure trove of valuable stuff just waiting for us to dig it all up. And the first country to get their hooks in Wins. Now, we know that the moon does have untapped resources in it. When the Apollo astronauts brought back moon rocks, scientists discovered that yes, they contained rare earth elements. Which are super important to our lives today.

They're part of our renewable energy industry. They are on your phones. The phone that you have in your hand right now has rare earth. They are in your cars. So it's it's part of our society right now. That's Angel Abud Madrid again. He's now the director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.

Angel told us that one of these rare earth elements is called terbium. If you haven't heard of it, it's a shiny soft metal. And it's used to make the color green on your phone. And there's a bunch of elements like this. Some of them really hard to pronounce, uh lanthanum and yetrium and Like neodymium and dysprosium. Rare Earths are also used in stuff like solar panels and electric cars.

The problem is that on Earth, mining these elements is pretty nasty. It can pollute soil and waterways. Plus the vast majority of rare earths that we use come from China. And so the idea is that if the US or other countries could get their mitts on the stuff on the moon and then mine it without polluting the earth, that would be win win. So people thought. Well, these are important elements and we found them on the moon. Would it be worth going after them?

And to you, i is it worth going after them? Uh not at this point. Not from the information that we have. So even though these things are called rare earth elements, there's actually a lot of them here on earth. And not just in China. That's just currently where most of the mining is happening. All over the globe, we're finding these elements. Even though they're called rare earth elements, they're actually not that rare. They're not actually that rare, believe it or not.

And curiously, there isn't even that much of this stuff on the moon. We know from satellite data that there's a bit of a hotspot of rare earths which happens to be on the right eye of the man in the moon. But even there, the elements aren't just sitting there like a big nugget of gold. They're diluted, mixed up with the moon dirt, and would be hard to mine.

Let me give you an analogy. It's like uh if you want to get rare earth on earth, it's like putting a bucket in Seattle or New Orleans and collecting rainwater from there, as compared as on the moon, it will be as having a a bucket on Death Valley. Uh Probably one of the driest place on earth. You're looking for droplets. Wow. This sounds really a bad idea. Uh at this point It is.

So it's sounding like we should probably work out ways to mine rare earths safely here on Earth and even get better at recycling the stuff on our phones before we resort to all the hassle and expense of going to the moon for these elements.

Now, there is another idea that's been making the rounds on the web and in science fiction. And it's that the real treasure on the moon is this thing called helium-3. One Apollo astronaut has called it, quote, the best reason to return to the moon in the 21st century. End quote. Helium-3 is a version of Helium- People say could be used as fuel for clean nuclear energy. no harmful radioactive waste. But we'd still get all this great power.

So you don't need much to generate a lot of energy. If you were to To have enough helium, uh about two hundred and twenty pounds. So that's the weight of A tall person. So 220 pounds of helium. You bring it all together, you generate energy, it will be enough to light up a city like uh Dallas for a full year. Amen. That's the amount of energy that you have from just 220 pounds of helium Wow. And that would have no waste, not like the nuclear reactors we have now.

No radioactive waste. The beauty of helium-3 is that what is the waste is just helium. The same thing that you put on balloons. Yeah, everyone at these nuclear reactors could just be like, Hello, hello We're making clean energy. Everybody working there will have that that type of voice, yeah. So this all sounds great. You might say, it sounds really, really great. He's the cat.

While it's true that the moon has way more of this special helium than we have here on Earth. If today you went all the way to the moon and grabbed some helium-three, then brought it back. You couldn't use it to power a city right now. And that's because the kind of nuclear reactor that we would use for this stuff. It doesn't exist. Right now, the way that we make nuclear power is by ripping atoms apart and using the energy for power. It's called nuclear fission.

But for helium-3, we'd need to do something called nuclear fusion. This is the opposite. Instead of splitting the atom, you bring two of those atoms together, you fuse them, and that way you generate energy. So to get this helium three working, we're gonna need to crack nuclear fusion and we have not cracked that yet.

That's exactly right. Scientists and engineers have been working on controlling fusion for years and decades. It's been really hard. It's really hard to get that initial reaction going, that fusing of the elements. I feel like because fusion sounds like fission, you're like, well you just need to change the I for a U. This is easy. But it's actually like completely different techniques. That's a whole that's quite a change of a letter. It's it takes a lot of work.

And sure, it's possible that some countries are interested in this because they wanna stake their claim on helium-3, like just in case it's useful someday and we can crack nuclear fusion. I asked Angel. So if someone said to you, g you know, say someone big big in the White House who has like a ch a massive checkbook and was like, I wanna go to the moon for this helium three. What would you tell him? That we can use that money for something else at the moment. Right.

So for now, stripping the moon for parts to use back on Earth. It's not making a lot of sense, and it is kinda feeling like going back to the moon is more for international bragging rights. But what about this idea that popping back up to the moon could help us get to Mars? that perhaps the moon could be some kind of launching pad that could catapult us into the rest of the solar system. And this idea seems to be what got President Trump on board with the Moon several years ago.

I said, hey, we've already done the moon. That's not so exciting. They said, no, sir, it's a launching pad for Mars. So we'll be doing uh the moon, but we'll really be doing Mars. So, do we really need to do the moon to do Mars? That answer after the break. Plus, we'll find out why going to the moon might help us reveal secrets about the universe. Like why you, me. And everything we know. exists at all.

Welcome back. So it's looking like the so-called Lunar Gold Rush is more like a lunar gold bus. What's the point of going to the moon? Well some people say that we've gotta go back to the moon so that we can get to Mars. And to find out if that's true, we called up Nicole Zellner. She's a professor of physics at Albion College in Michigan. And Nicole is very excited about getting us to the red planet.

Well, humans have explored for all of humanity and Mars is intriguing as just the next step in in human exploration. Now, technically speaking, you don't have to go to the moon. We can fly direct. In fact, that's what Elon must be. To do with SpaceX. But Nicole says that doesn't mean the moon is useless here. NASA released this big report about their plans for the moon, and it actually does have to do with Mars, but not to use it as a launch.

Their idea is to use it as a training ground Which Nicole says makes a lot of sense. You're not gonna climb Mount Everest on a whim, right? You're gonna climb somewhere in the Catskills first, and then you're gonna you're gonna work your way up um into higher and higher elevations. You're you're gonna train for that Mount Everest trip. And you can think about Mars being the Mount Everest. For now.

This is because Mars is so much further away than the moon. It takes just a few days to get to the moon, but at least six months to get to Mars. If you forget your wrench there, there's no Amazon Prime. Producer Meryl Horne talked to Nicole about it. You're not just gonna go there without any practice. That that's It's like a recipe for a disaster.

It's a recipe for disaster. Yeah. I was gonna say it's a fool's errand. I mean it's it's you you just don't go somewhere without practicing it first. I mean, that's common sense. Already on Artemis 2, they've learned a bunch of things. The toilet broke and they had to pee in bags at one point, but that got up and running. Mission specialist Christina Cook helped fix it. I'm the space plumber. I'm proud of to call myself the space plumber.

They've also been a bit chilly on board, and astronaut Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis II, said at one point that he'd hoped they'd pack different sleeping bags. It is quite cold and uh yeah we're wishing we had the uh the the uh lower temperature sleeping bags with us. You don't want to be shivering all the way to Mars. And NASA's longer-term plan on the moon is actually pretty fun when you look at the details.

Like I mentioned, in two years they're planning to put people on the moon. And then in the longer term, NASA is talking about building a lunar base and learning how to deal with the tough conditions that come with being on a whole new space rock. Like one thing they're gonna have to deal with is moon dust. It's like tiny bits of corrosive glass that were a huge pain in the ass for the Apollo astronauts. Nicole told us some of the things they said about it.

When I took my helmet off, I was almost blinded. Junk immediately got into my eyes. The dust really bothered my eyes and throat. I was tasting it and eating it. So when you're in an environment where you can't even go outside without putting a spacesuit on, and then you come back inside, you've got dust everywhere. You gotta figure out how to how to deal with that. And another thing that they'll be dealing with is drinking water.

At first, our moonstronauts will get their water from a spacecraft orbiting the moon, kind of like the International Space Station. Thank you. But it's hoped that these pioneers will ultimately find good water sources on the moon that they could drink and then start to fend for themselves. And eventually, the vision is that if we do find enough water on the moon, maybe we'd use it not just for drinking water, but for something else.

as fuel to power rocket ships that would venture out into the solar system. And this isn't totally bonkers. You know, water, even on the moon, is just hydrogen and oxygen. And the fuel that we usually use for rockets now is hydrogen. And we can split apart those water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. And then that hydrogen can be used as a rocket fuel. Oh, do we have all the science for that yet? Yeah, we we know how to do this.

Plus, having a gas station on the moon would be an added bonus,'cause it would be easier for rockets to take off from around there,'cause they could sidestep Earth's strong gravity.

Okay, so it makes sense that you'd want to figure out the nuts and bolts of living on the moon before you live on Mars. But maybe you're not sold on any of this. Maybe going to Mars just feels like part of the same pissing contest. And it's starting to feel like what we really need is a giant toilet roll on the moon. Well guess what? We found one.

And turns out it's one of the best reasons we've heard to go back to the moon. One of its biggest cheerleaders is Greg Halanan, a professor of astronomy at Caltech. And he wants to put a telescope on the moon, on the far side, to be specific. That's the side that's always facing away from us. And Greg and his team are so amped about this that they actually named their telescope Farside. But it's an acronym. Uh it sta it stands for Are you looking it up? Did I know that?

And a hundred percent I am guilty. I I have not memorized the horribly forced acronym we have used to name the array Farsight. It is called the Faresight Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark Ages and Exoplanets. Wait, what what is it again? It's the um Farside array for radio science investigations of the dark ages and exoplanets. And remember the first word of the acronym is the acronym. So How bad an acronym is that? As bad as the acronym is, it's gonna look great.

Greg sent me a picture. okay here we go can you see that okay Ooh, it looks real pretty. It does. So what we're looking at look, to tell you the truth, is it looks like a real space age toilet roll a little. Oh, it does. It's got that hole at the bottom. Yeah, that's right. Right. Yeah, it does. It does. It's very fa it's very fancy toilet roll. It's gold it's gold plated. I don't think it'd feel very good, but it it it it would be very expensive.

The plan is that this role will deploy a giant telescope that will cover an area that's ten kilometers across. That's over six miles. In my opinion, if we're gonna go to the moon, this is why we should go. Okay, so this awkwardly named toilet roll telescope won't feel good for wiping your bum. But this telescope is gonna do something even better. It's gonna help us understand why your bum exists at all.

to understand how, let's travel all the way back in time to a period before basically anything existed. It's called the Dark Ages. It's this huge gap in time right after the Big Bang. Scientists agree that some 14 billion years ago, the entire universe was inside this teeny, tiny, incredibly hot bubble, which went Bang! It exploded. And the universe was born. From here, hot plasma was thrown up everywhere. And when that's settled. All we have left are these dark clouds everywhere.

At that point, the entire universe was a sea of hydrogen and some helium and basically nothing else. Just a sea of neutral stuff. And then Something changes. Out of this sea of stuff. Stars formed, and then galaxies and Yada yada yada, dinosaurs, Big Macs, podcasts, everything we know. And the big mystery is What changed in the world? It caused stars and everything we know to be born. Because without We'd still be in docked? And we don't know how it happened.

And the reason that this is such a big mystery is that our traditional tools for peering back in time are telescopes that measure life. But they can't help us here. Like even if we built a giant But if you could build a space telescope the size of the planet Earth, it wouldn't be good enough because there was no light. No light, no optical light that we could see with our eyes, hence the term the dark ages.

The only things that existed back in the dark ages was this soup of hydrogen and some helium and a couple of other small, you know, uh elements. And since there was a bunch of hydrogen floating around in the dark ages, that is the key. We need to be able to measure hydrogen to know what happened. And Greg's telescope is designed to do just this. Because it turns out that that soup of hydrogen from billions of years ago, it made radio waves that we can still find today.

Greg reckons if we could hear it, it would sound something like this. On one, two, three. That's it. A quiet hiss from the universe could be what we need to reveal the secrets of our cosmic dawn. By analyzing the radio waves, Greg reckons that we could get a sort of timeline of what happened. We can play a movie that tells us how the universe evolved from that moment all the way through. to uh um when we can actually see galaxies and stars.

And Greg needs to put this telescope on the moon. It wouldn't work if we put it on Earth, because we have this rather annoying atmosphere. The signal can't get through the atmosphere. You just can't it's like looking through a brick wall, literally. You know, it's that's how that's how how much the signal is blocked by the atmosphere. So you just can't see it. And that's why we hop over the brick wall and go to the moon.

Greg hopes that his super fancy telescope will also help us solve another big mystery of the universe. Are we alone? And that's because its souped up equipment can study planets outside of our solar system called exoplanets. In particular, it'll be looking for exoplanets that have magnetic fields, also called magnetospheres, which we think are important for life.

Like, for example, Earth has a magnetosphere. Radio telescopes can pick it up. In fact, when Earth's magnetic field is converted into sound, this is what it sounds like. Merrill talked to Greg about his big plans. Let's say, you know, this is all set up, you turn on the switch and you start getting this data, and then like you find an exoplanet with a magnetosphere. How big a moment would that be?

That's my my ultimate dream. We are designing and building the space telescopes that can actually detect signatures of life of other planets. You know, that would be such a profound moment, you know, discovering life outside our solar system.

I I just I assumed that like the politicians all around the world that this is just kind of a pissing contest about who can get to the moon faster and who can put the coolest thing on the moon and then the scientists just get to kind of go, okay honey. But while while you're having a pissing contest, I'm gonna do some cool sht on the side. I mean the Apollo the Apollo missions very fundamentally The mother of all pissing contests, right? Right. Um that being said,

It's possible for national prestige projects to be fundamentally good in their application. I think the lunar landing is an example of that. The moon landing it I think really like achieved so much. It transformed our position. our view of ourselves and the cosmos. Um there there were signs done for the moon that was fundamental. So we once again, even though it was in its origin, like you said, a pissing contest.

in its eventuality, I think it was a fundamentally beneficial thing for all humanity. I think the same applies to what happens on the moon in the future. Greg and everyone we spoke to about this. Said that these literal moon shots always seemed to pay us back in spades. The technology that we developed in the first moon race eventually led to things like smaller computers, GPS, even memory foam, which, funnily enough, everyone always forgets about.

So even though in some ways going back to the moon is still a political pissing contest. At least we get some cool sight. And although this maybe isn't a science reason for going to the moon, Seeing all of these stunning images of on the moon, and this big lonely blue marble that we call home that are coming back from this mission. It's making a lot of folks have these big feelings about Earth and how fragile and small we are. Which is some feelings that you don't get from most pissing contests.

There's so much beauty and so much life and so much. What are we doing with it? For me, realize address in the universe that this is the place that we and It's free. I can really see Earth as one thing. Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special, but we're the same distance from you and I'm trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special. All of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis. Together.

That's science passes. Hi, this is Merrill again. Just a quick update. Since we originally ran this episode, there has been a newfound interest in Helium-3. And it's not just about nuclear fusion. This stuff is being used for things like quantum computing and medical equipment. And some companies have even gotten contracts from the US government to start harvesting helium-three from the moon in the next several years. Okay, back to Wendy and the credits.

What do you think? Are these good reasons to go back to the moon? Let us know. We're on Instagram, science underscore VS. I'm on TikTok at WendyZoo. There's also a comment section if you're listening to this on Spotify. So you can tell us what you think. And if you like the show, one way that you can support us is not only by giving us a five-star review, but also by writing something nice in the comments. on bad days when you have a big snotty nose like I do now. Just makes me feel a bit nice.

This episode has 121 citations, and if you want to read more about the Artemis missions, NASA's hopes for the moon, the science of anything we talked about on the show, there's a link to this transcript in the show notes. This episode was produced by Meryl Horn and Aketty Foster Keys, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.

Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Boomi Hidaka. Music written by Boomi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode. including Dr Tom Simco, Professor Jack Burns, Dr. Paul Byrne, Dr. Martin Elvis, Dr. John Mather, Doctor Jennifer Witten, Dr. Ian Crawford, Dr. Simon J. Locke,

And Dr. Greg D. Temmerman. A special thanks to Chris Souter, Jack Weinstein, the Zuckerman family, the Foster Keyes family, and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.