China On The Moon

Has anyone noticed that the Chinese government successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon three days ago and then released a rover?

It’s been over forty years now since Apollo 17, when astronauts from the United States last were on the moon. Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt spent almost three days on the moon, taking three long EVAs (over twenty-two hours) and driving 18.6 miles from location to location at the Taurus-Littrow Valley landing site. Apollo 17 returned 110.52 kilograms of samples to be studied on Earth.

It’s been thirty-seven years since the unmanned Russian Luna-24 mission soft landed on the moon, scooped up a small soil sample (170 grams), and returned it safely to Earth.

Since 1976, no country has even tried to land on the moon. There have been a handful of orbital flights, including flights by China, India, Japan, and the ESA. But no landings.

The United States has landed seven spacecraft (including four rovers) on Mars in that time. But we have not returned to the Moon (except to orbit and map).

Now, there is a new spacecraft on the moon. The Chinese Chang’e 3 lander took an absolutely awesome video during the landing, which you can find here on Emily Lakdawalla’s blog on the Planetary Society’s website.

There are great videos of the Yutu (“Jade Rabbit”) rover rolling off of Chang’e 3 (here, again from Emily Lakdawalla and the Planetary Society) and pictures the two spacecraft took of each other (here).

The Chinese space agency is to be congratulated on a job extremely well done. Chang’e 3 and Yutu are designed to operate and conduct science experiments and exploration for up to three months. I hope they get all of that time, and more.

Meanwhile, the powers that be in the United States should be paying much more attention to this than they appear to be.

We don’t need another “space race”. The original Cold War contest between the United States and Russia did put twelve men on the moon and brought about an amazing spurt in technology for the average American, but from a space exploration, space exploitation, and space colonization viewpoint, it was a dead end. We went, we brought back some rocks, we killed the program.

We don’t need to pour money into a dead end. However, we desperately need to invest in building a “highway” off of this planet, and the Moon would be an ideal second “exit” or “rest stop” off of that “highway”. (Low Earth Orbit being the first.)

Imagine where we would be today if instead we had kept going to the moon, but not as a political statement, but as actual exploration and expansion. What if we had committed to putting a permanent human settlement on the moon? What if we had also committed to the exploration necessary to find the lunar resources to build that settlement largely of on-site materials? What if we had done the exploration to find the water deposits we have evidence of at the lunar poles?

The current White House and NASA administrations don’t believe that the moon is worth anything. I think that’s a huge mistake.

We’ve done an incredible amount of necessary work on building, maintaining, working in, and living on the International Space Station. This has taught us a tremendous amount about how to manage systems in microgravity, what happens to the human body in microgravity, and how to handle problems and solve crises on the fly in microgravity. If you need an example, look at what’s happening now with the failure in a key portion of the ISS cooling system. (More at another time.)

Likewise, the moon is an excellent place to start learning about living and working on an alien planetary surface. There will be issues with intense heat during the long lunar day, as well as intense cold in the long lunar night. There will be issues with dust and lunar soil intrusions and how equipment is affected by it in the long run. There will be issues with radiation and meteorite strikes. There will be issues in how the human body reacts in the long term to a gravity less than Earth’s but more than microgravity. There will be issues with trying to find and utilize in situ resources and materials.

All of these things will be different on a planetary surface than they are in open space. We need to know as much as we can about operating spacecraft between the planets in order to go anywhere, but we also need to know as much as we can about operating a base on the planets once we get there.

The moon offers a fantastic opportunity to get this experience without being on Mars, two years away from any help from Earth. The moon is only three days away in case of an emergency.

If we (and “we” can mean either the United States, Russia, China, ESA, Japan, India, or any combination of any or all of those groups) truly intend to go to Mars and stay there, why are we completely ignoring the opportunities available by establishing a permanently inhabited lunar base?

It looks like the Chinese might not be ignoring that opportunity, even if the United States does.

Good. At least someone sees the bigger picture.