Space 2069

After Apollo: Back to the Moon, to Mars, and Beyond

David Whitehouse

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781785786471
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Space Science

'It is rare to read something that so closely mixes science fiction with reality, but Space 2069 does just that... [It's] an intelligent portrait of where we may be in the next half-century. - BBC Sky at Night Nearing half a century since the last Apollo mission, mankind has yet to return to the Moon, but that is about to change. With NASA's Artemis program scheduled for this decade, astronomer David Whitehouse takes a timely look at what the next 50 years of space exploration have in store. The thirteenth man and the first woman to walk on the Moon will be the first to explore the lunar south pole - the prime site for a future Moon base thanks to its near-perpetual sunlight and the presence of nearby ice.The first crewed mission to Mars will briefly orbit the red planet in 2039, preparing the way for a future landing mission. Surviving the round trip will be the greatest challenge any astronaut has yet faced.In the 2050s, a lander will descend to the frozen surface of Jupiter's moon Europa and attempt to drill down to its subsurface ocean in search of life.
Based on real-world information, up-to-date scientific findings and a healthy dose of realism, Space 2069 is a mind-expanding tour of humanity's future in space over the next 50 years.

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PART 1

BACK TO THE MOON

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3

EXILES

The Moon.

Shackleton crater.

Lunar latitude 90 degrees south.

Date: 2069.

At the exact moment of the centenary, the depths of Shackleton crater at the Moon’s south pole went dark, as they had been for billions of years before humans arrived. The eight giant mirrors on the crater’s rim – heliostats that rotated to keep the Sun’s light reflected into the crater – started to turn and the pools of light they cast moved swiftly across the crater’s floor, up its ramparts, disappearing into space. The mirrors turned to the precise orientation required to reflect the Sun’s light towards Earth: to a particular spot in North America. Millions on Earth were watching the southern region of the Moon’s grey disc, whether with the unaided eye, binoculars or telescope, hoping to catch the optical flare from the mirrors on the Moon.4

Wapakoneta had a population of 12,236 at the 2060 census but the town had swelled for the event. Teachers and students from the high school were waving their red-and-white school flags as well as the Stars and Stripes. All over the globe if people were not looking at the Moon, or couldn’t see it, they were watching the celebrations. They all cheered as they saw the flashes from the Moon, saluting the birthplace of the first man to walk on it, Neil Armstrong, 100 years ago. At the time of the 50th anniversary there were only four of the original moonwalkers alive and only 20 per cent of the population had been around at the time of the first Moon landing. Fifty years later no one who took part in the Apollo program was alive. Given the advances in medicine there were still many who recalled the event. But there was a letting it slip into history – the loss of the Apollo heroes and anyone who had ever known them personally. But there were moonwalkers at the centenary of Apollo 11. The thirteenth person on the Moon was in her eighties and just as sprightly as Buzz Aldrin had been in 2019.

A few minutes later attention turned to the screens and a large black-and-white image of the lunar surface. This was the view from the cameras positioned around the First Footprint sanctuary. The main cluster of cameras was stationed on the edge of West crater about 400 metres away. Nothing was allowed closer, but the view from the tower was clear. The desolate lower stage of the Apollo 11 lunar module and the flag lying on the ground. Floodlights highlighted with crisp shadows every footprint and scuff mark. The tracks leading towards Little West crater, 50 metres east of the 5lunar module, were visible. It was an unplanned excursion, when Armstrong had gone to get a look inside near the end of the two-and-a-half hours that he and Aldrin had spent on the surface. The image closed in on the lunar module leg where the very first footfall was made and mostly obliterated by subsequent boot marks. The site had been laser scanned and converted to virtual reality so anyone could walk up to the forlorn module and read the plaque: ‘Here men from the planet Earth …’

But not everyone celebrated the same way, and not everyone on the Moon was thinking back to Apollo 11. There were three sets of broadcasts from the Moon on that day of celebrations. Shackleton base scientists had answered questions from the world’s media and from schools around the world. The secondary lunar outpost positioned near the Moon’s equator took viewers on a tour of their strange underground habitat. The far larger Chinese base, in the northern polar region and as far away from Shackleton as it was possible to get on the Moon, made its contribution, but it was mainly for their own country, given the international tensions. There was no broadcast from their other base. It was also watched by the military space chiefs of both countries as they kept a watchful eye on the space around the Moon, for there had been times of conflict on and around the Moon.

The heliostats moved once more, this time to reflect the sunlight across the inner solar system towards Mars on a 28-minute journey to the red planet, and the Mars Optical Telescope – the only one on the red planet – turned its gaze towards the Moon from the dusty and desolate floor of the 6Valles Marineris. The Chinese base at Acidalia Planitia ignored the signal.

The celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon were subdued at the International Mars base despite the optimism on display in the Earth–Moon–Mars link-up and the messages from the world’s leaders. Events happening 500 million kilometres away inevitably seemed remote from the viewpoint of honorary Martians. For some it reminded them, as if they needed reminding, that they depended on Earth for their survival, being always just two resupply trips away from extinction. The Martians, eighteen of them in the International Mars Colony, eight at the Chinese base – many fewer than at the lunar colonies – called themselves Martians, though they had all been born on Earth and it was to Earth they would eventually return, even if they could never really feel at home there after their time on an alien planet. Privately some of them knew in their heart of hearts that they could not face the voyage home, and that eventually they would join the other sealed graves on Mars.

A hundred years after Apollo 11, mankind had journeyed into the solar system and faced a new barrier, one that would probably take another hundred years to overcome, if overcome it could be. From Mars we stared out towards the asteroid belt and beyond to the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn, and the ice giants of Uranus and Neptune in the cold, dark outer reaches of the solar system beyond. Then in the century after the Apollo centenary we could imagine a voyage into the asteroid belt, perhaps overseeing the artificial-intelligence 7swarms that roamed among these rocky bodies. But we could go no further. The vast distances and the long durations of the flights were too much at present, let alone the radiation. The humans that would go out there would be different. Modified, enhanced, resilient and protected in a way that space travellers had thus far not been. A human voyage to Jupiter and its remarkable moons, to Saturn’s moon Titan and the beguiling Enceladus belong to the centuries to come, and to different people. Looking inward towards the Sun, we cannot live on Venus or Mercury. For humans Earth marks the inner boundary of our reach into the solar system.

The next 50 years will see the start of our divergence. By the end of it the Moon and Mars will have their own people for whom Earth has never been their home. Some will become exiles, unable to visit Earth because its gravity would kill them. Some will become a new branch of humanity, regarding themselves liberated from the confines of the planet of their predecessors.

Encompassing the Moon and Mars will not just be about the journey, the technology of travel and survival in space. It will include all of the science we will discover in the next five decades. Better control of our bodies and brains, our new attitudes, our new and ancient fears – which perhaps are the same. Space colonists will not be the Mayflower pilgrims of the 21st century, looking for release from old ways and oppression. We will take our tyrannies with us, along with our tragedies, fears and hopes. For the next 50 years we will take our Earth thinking with us, reflecting and amplifying the politics of our home planet, perhaps acting out its battles.8

We humans begin our expansion outwards, in the first phase to the Moon and Mars. This is what concerns us here.

It is now August 2024 and two astronauts are flying over the lunar surface for the first time in many decades, travelling a course long abandoned. Passing below them is the Moon’s most prominent crater, mostly covered in shadow as the morning Sun, striking its western rim, moves down its flanks, unveiling its jumbled floor of cracks, small hills and domes. Tycho is at a lunar latitude of 43° S and is 85 kilometres wide. Its signature streaks which span the entire Moon and which are so prominent at certain Sun angles are not easily seen by the crew. The last of the Surveyor soft landers is resting just 40 kilometres from the rim, having been there since 1968 when it was landed to test the stability of the surface. It didn’t disappear into dust. Sitting on what was technically called the impact melt ejecta blanket, its cameras could see Tycho on the horizon. Apollo 20 had been due to land next to it sometime in the mid-1970s, but had been cancelled before any detailed plans could be made.

Now, the radar registers the crater’s cliff faces that are higher than the Grand Canyon, as well as the terraced and slumped terrain that guards Tycho’s dramatic heart. Neither of the astronauts looks towards its dramatic central peak, six times the height of the Empire State Building, and the enormous boulder sitting on it – one of nature’s tricks played on the Moon – but they do reference it in passing.9

‘Site of TMA-1,’ says one. Both of them know she is referring to the black monolith left behind by enigmatic aliens in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

‘We are a little late getting here,’ says the other.

The pair are part of a team nicknamed the ‘Turtles’ – NASA’s 22nd astronaut selection: twelve Americans (one subsequently resigned) and two Canadians. They were chosen from over 18,000 applicants in June 2017 and started a two-year training course. In January 2020 they were assigned to NASA’s Artemis program. Most, perhaps all of them, will walk on the Moon.

To get there the two moonwalkers will, with two others, be launched into space using the super rocket of the US Space Launch System and the Orion capsule, which looks like the Apollo Command Module but is larger, more complicated and more capable. At one time it was planned to have them boosted out of Earth orbit for a five-day trip to the Lunar Gateway – a simple space station in a very elliptical orbit around the Moon. From there the chosen two would have entered the Lunar Descent Vehicle, undocked, fired its thrusters and begun a twelve-hour descent to the surface. In March 2020 NASA changed that plan. Although the Gateway project was still to go ahead, it was decided that the landing mission would not dock with it but would head directly to the lunar surface. The change was made to save money and time, given the uncertainties introduced into the project because of the coronavirus pandemic. But the astronauts will not be going back to an Apollo landing site, or anything like it.10

In the darkness of their capsule their eyes are on their dimly illuminated instruments: altitude, rate of descent, velocity, range, fuel. The infra-red laser radar picks up its reflection from the beacon on the lunar rover already placed at the landing site.

When he came in for the first landing on the Moon 55 years previously, Neil Armstrong had nothing like the information presented to this crew. They have screens showing all the spacecraft’s vital signs, a detailed map and profile of the Moon along with their trajectory, as well as excellent comms. Back then Armstrong’s hands had been curved around two joysticks as he leant forward, peering below through the overhanging window of the lunar module. He was flying for his life, calling from memory details of the terrain before him, looking to avoid boulders, hearing mission control through the static, monitoring the fuel supply: ‘Low level,’ they said. He had Buzz Aldrin next to him calling out their altitude and descent: ‘Four forward, four forward, drifting to the right a little.’

Armstrong was landing on a very different part of the Moon – the Plains of Tranquillity. The crew of Artemis 3 are flying over the Moon’s most rugged terrain. The ground underneath them is becoming darker, more shadowed as they head poleward, exactly the opposite of what Armstrong encountered. Artemis 3 is travelling yet deeper into the shadows beneath. No one has ever been this way before.

11

DRIFTING

Someone once said – exactly who is not known for sure; it’s been attributed to movie mogul Sam Goldwyn and the physicist Niels Bohr among others – that predictions are difficult, especially about the future! It’s true about space activity. If you were celebrating the first manned landing on the Moon in 1969 you would have not predicted where we are 50 years later, with no one having been to the Moon since 1972. Back then for some it was a time of optimism. Spiro Agnew, vice-president to President Nixon, said men would be on Mars by 1984. Instead we got the first untethered spacewalk, space shuttle Discovery’s maiden voyage and the release of The Terminator. The famous movie co-written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke came out in 1968. It depicts a large spacecraft heading to Jupiter. You know when it was set – 2001. We haven’t come anywhere near where our space dreams once imagined we would be. The changes that have happened to our society, our technology and ourselves were poorly predicted. Changes have been faster in some areas, slower in many others.12

In another 50 years, many things will have changed: our environment will be different; our bodies will certainly change as the result of new medical technology; our reach may expand or contract; our optimism … well, we can hope.

When I was a schoolboy, around the time of the first Moon landing, I imagined that within a few years we would have space stations and fabulous vehicles that would make travelling to them routine, allowing many of us to become astronauts. Fifty years after Apollo we might have hotels in space, settlements on the Moon and colonies on Mars. Perhaps we would travel even further, to Jupiter and beyond, just like the Discovery One with Dr David Bowman and Dr Frank Poole, and their conscious artificial intelligence HAL. This was the future I anticipated and, as youthful optimism faded, watched slip away, my space dreams receding a little further each year.

Fifty years after Apollo fewer than 600 people had ventured into space and only 24 of them beyond Earth orbit. But there are signs that the stagnation is ending. We will be back on the Moon, tourists will dip their toes into space and the infrastructure of space will continue to grow and touch almost everyone on Earth with communications, navigation, transport.

Ever since the great speeches of President John F. Kennedy setting the US on course for the Moon before the 1960s were out, NASA – the US Space Agency – has wanted another JFK moment, another impetus to move outwards that the politicians who control the purse strings could get behind. Indeed, every subsequent president has wanted his own Kennedy moment, a speech as memorable and inspiring as JFK’s.13

Since the heady days of Apollo there have been three times when a US president has directed the nation to go back to the Moon, but none of them ever got anywhere. Presidential initiatives and administrations came and went. At times the goal was the Moon, then it was Mars, then back to the Moon, then an asteroid, and then back to the Moon again. It almost seemed as if we didn’t really want to go: we would go through the motions, make designs and spend billions building rockets and other things, but it never really felt that the end of the process would be footprints on the Moon. We resigned ourselves that each initiative would end in some sort of failure, consoling ourselves that starts and stops were part of the process, that future generations would benefit and that eventually the politicians would get it. Looking at why this happened is instructive and provides some idea of the problems those with moondust or Mars-dust in their eyes have when dealing with the political world. Neil Armstrong knew that you didn’t get to the Moon with rockets and willpower. Any Moon mission is launched from the real and messy world.

After the Apollo 11 landing a Space Task Group was created by President Nixon to look into what to do next. One thing was clear to Nixon: it had to be much cheaper than the Apollo program, in fact no more Apollos. It consisted of Vice-President Spiro Agnew, NASA A...