Return to the Moon

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0:49Hello, welcome to the Naked Scientist podcast, the show that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and talks to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology and medicine. I'm Chris Smith and today we are turning our attention to the science that is driving the race back to the moon.

1:12That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Absolutely remarkable and still is every time you hear it, isn't it? But the race to the moon isn't just grainy archive from the Apollo missions. It is happening right now again between, this time, the United States and China, with both superpowers pushing the limits of technology, engineering and human innovation in a bid to get there first. The missions are expensive and they require mastering rockets, navigation and pinpoint landings. And things won't get much easier once we are on the lunar surface, where astronauts will need to build habitats that shield them from radiation, temperature extremes and even sharp sand.

1:58They'll also need food to fuel crews to keep them healthy and low gravity. Today, we're going to explore the science of getting to, living on and even farming on the Moon and why we'd even want to go there at all. And with this latter question in mind, this is where our first guest, Megan Argo, podcaster and reader in astrophysics at the University of Lancashire comes in. There was this big space race between America and the Soviets who would get there first and we're now in a new epoch of that space race. There are minerals on the moon which could be commercially useful if we can figure out a way to extract them simply and there's also water deposits up there as well so if you're going to send humans up there to have a long-term base for resource extraction you're going to need to keep those astronauts safe so they're going to need a habitat that's going to protect them from the harsh radiation environment of space there's no atmosphere on the moon so our atmosphere protects us here on the earth from a lot of the the nasty stuff coming from space you don't have that on the moon so you have to protect your astronauts in a different way but if we can extract those resources if you can extract the water you've got water for your astronauts but you can also manufacture rocket fuel and that's much much cheaper than sending fuel from the earth to replenish what your astronauts need up there so you're regarding the moon very much as a staging post for farther exploration and also things like science actually doing science there as well so it's not so much just because it's there we want to go and study it or we want to exploit it we can actually use it as a jumping off point if your ultimate goal is to go and send humans to mars because nobody's been to mars yet and there's a lot of people who would love to go if they got the opportunity and lots of countries would like to go there with people.

3:39If you're planning to send humans to Mars, that is a much, much more significant undertaking, both in terms of the timescales, the time it takes to get to Mars. Because remember, getting to the moon only takes a few days. Getting to Mars takes many months in a spacecraft. So you're talking about much longer mission timescales. Mars has something of an atmosphere, but it's not a very thick atmosphere. So again, a lot of those problems that you have to deal with on the moon, if you can learn to deal with them on the moon, where you're relatively close to the Earth, and you can have a rescue craft you know standing by in orbit should you need it if you can test your systems test your procedures in that relatively safe environment it's not a safe environment but relatively speaking it's safer than going to Mars if you get all of that right on the moon then when you do get the opportunity to go to Mars you know that a lot of your systems a lot of your procedures are going to work what's the environment like on the moon so if we were thinking ahead and we wanted to build base is there.

4:37What sorts of threats or risks would people living there have to live with, or would we have to make sure we'd mitigate it? There's a lot of risks. We think of the moon as a fairly static environment. It's actually not. So the moon, it goes through a day-night cycle, like we do on the Earth. Our day-night cycle is 24 hours. On the moon, it's a month. So you get two weeks of Earth time in daylight and then two weeks of darkness. And that results in temperature extremes. So you've got to make sure all of your electronics can cope with the high temperatures during the lunar daytime and the very, very, very cold temperatures of a lunar nighttime.

5:14And a lot of spacecraft die during the lunar night if their batteries just don't come back to life when daylight comes again. So you've got to make sure that everything you're sending can cope with those temperature extremes. And that includes things like the seals on your habitats. You don't want them flexing too much in this day-night cycle and then breaking. You've also got the dust. Dust on the moon is really, really sharp on the earth. If you go to the beach and pick up a handful of sand, you look at it, and that sand is rounded. It's been weathered. It's been hit. It's been moved around by waves over many, many hundreds, thousands, millions of years, and it's been eroded.

5:48So you look at it, and it's got rounded corners. It's still sharp, but it's nowhere near as sharp as the dust that you get on the moon surface, where there is no atmosphere and there is no weathering. So those little sharp bits of rock stay sharp. And what the Apollo astronauts found was that had huge problems in terms of what it did to their spacesuits. It clung to the spacesuits. It gets electrostatic. It gets charged as well. So it sticks to things in the same way that static electricity causes your hair to stick to things. And when that happens and it gets caught in things like the creases, so anywhere where your arms flex, your legs flex, so behind your knees, any of those creases in the human body, with a spacesuit, with dust gets into those creases, it can damage the fabric it can make holes in the spacesuit and again that's really not what you want in an environment where there's a vacuum outside your spacesuit it gets into velcro stops velcro working properly and it can get into seals and it can damage all kinds of tubes that flex as well and damage your electronics because of the electrostatic so it's going to be a huge problem and again something that's probably an issue on mars too so again if we can learn to deal with it on the moon then we're better prepared when we go to mars and then you've got other issues as Well, we know from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, for example, which has been taking photographs of the lunar surface for more than 15, 20 years now, that there are routine impacts on the moon's surface even today.

7:08There are small bits of rock that hit the moon's surface and cause new craters. That's something you're going to have to protect your manned base from. And then we now know also that the moon does have some seismic activity. There are some moonquakes, if you like, that happen on the lunar surface. And there is evidence, again, from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, that there are new SCARP features that open up on the moon's surface from time to time where the surface slips and we get sort of small tectonic activity. Not tectonic plates like we have on the Earth's surface, but still it's enough.

7:36If you have a new fracture that opens up near to your habitat, it potentially puts your astronauts in danger. And one last one, I guess, that's really important to factor in is that there are significant amounts of cosmic rays on the moon's surface. our atmosphere here on the Earth protects us from a lot of the most damaging cosmic rays but once you go out past the Earth's atmosphere they're going to be exposed to a lot of this high energy radiation. Talking to other space commentators and so on they all say when they were young they dreamed of being an astronaut and then when they saw the harsh reality of what it would really involve they changed their mind.

8:10Would you go? I think I would like to go I'm not sure I want to go there for six months but I certainly would like to go and visit just to appreciate the view and standing on another solar system object. I think there would be something really quite exciting about that. So would you go if offered the opportunity or would months inside an oversized baked bean tin be your idea of holiday hell? Do drop us a line and tell us. That was would-be spacefarer Megan Argo from the University of Lancashire. Now as Megan outlined there are many reasons why the moon is back on the radar both scientifically and politically but that poses the very obvious question of how to get there.

8:48The NASA-led Artemis programme is the new moonshot and Artemis 1 launched in 2022 to test the core rocket technology. Then the crewed Artemis 2 mission, which is now earmarked for April 1st, should have flown earlier this year to take humans around the back of the moon and in fact farther from the Earth than we have ever ventured before and then after another test, missions 4 and 5, earmarked for 2028 and aiming for the lunar south pole, should see human footprints on the moon for the first time in nearly 60 years. That is assuming that China don't get there first, because with Artemis 2 beset by difficulties, including engineering problems, spiralling financial costs and collaborations with US tech billionaires going off kilter, NASA has China firmly snapping at its heels, hoping to pit them to the post and fly their own mission, landing not far from where Neil Armstrong touched down many moons ago.

9:44So what's going to happen? Here's space author and former BBC science expert David Whitehouse. The problem they've had with this launch was the same as they had with the first launch of the space launch system and the Orion capsule. And that is a problem they should never have had. It's a refuelling problem. it's loading the hydrogen on and also flushing out the rocket engines with helium which is what they need to do to make sure that the hydrogen is no longer there in certain circumstances because as you know the reason hydrogen is there is because it's explosive it's a rocket fuel this should have been sorted out a long time ago but it's indicative of a problem with this hugely complicated space launch system that they're using based on old space shuttle technology revamped that the project that's been going for 15 years now, that has had one launch and is outrageously expensive per launch.

10:40So they are stuck with this legacy project, which they've built into their return to the moon, which they've tried to fit into all the other ideas they've got. So if this doesn't work, then nothing else really works in their current architecture of sending people back to the moon. When you say outrageously expensive, well, how big a price tag are we looking at? And how does that stack up against what rival outfits are doing, the commercial but also international rivals? The Space Launch System is the most expensive, low-flight-rate rocket project in the history of space travel. You're probably talking about at least$3 billion to$4 billion per launch.

11:25That and the difficulty of getting it to work really shows something wrong at the heart of America's return to the moon because you cannot have any degree of a flight rate to achieve anything and to make incremental progress on each mission when it takes so long to launch and it costs so much to launch. So there is a limit to how many space launch system launches there is going to be. And the new boss of NASA, Jared Isaacman, has come along and has reshaped the architecture, partly to get out of this problem, because not only does the space launch system have to launch the Orion capsule with its service module with a four crew inside, but in order to land on the moon, Elon Musk has to launch his starship, which is not anywhere near ready.

12:10it has to refuel itself in Earth orbit many times, which has never been done. Then it has to go to the Moon, dock with the Orion capsule, and then the starship goes to the surface and comes back. Very much a tall order. And people have been realising now for years that this is just taking too long. This is too much of a stretch. The starship could be brilliant, but it's not ready, and it's not a good fit to go back to the Moon. So this is what the problems they've been wrestling with, the legacy space launch program, the Elon Musk system with his futuristic-looking spacecraft, Jeff Bezos, who's also in on the contract and designing a lunar lander.

12:57How do you fix all these things together to have something that works to go to the moon? Because when Apollo went to the moon, it was a relatively straightforward, simple system. you go to the moon you undock your craft you land on the moon you come back and then you return to earth that is the best way to do it energetically you add in all these components that have got a future like the starship going to mars and it just makes the whole thing expensive long and complicated the current scheduled launch for the first of april though hopefully not april force day this isn't going to land on the moon but it will take people further away from the earth and beyond the moon than we've ever gone before is that part of this mission is that informing some aspects of the mission nevertheless so it's a step it's a small step for mankind but it's not far enough yet i mean is that the purpose of this current scheduled launch principally one of the main tests is of the heat shield because when you come back from the moon it's not like returning from Earth orbit.

14:02You're traveling much, much faster. And therefore, you need a very brilliant, upgraded heat shield compared to what you use if you come back from the space station. And this is one of the principal tests of this high-velocity Earth return during this mission. And they've had problems with the Orion heat shield in the past. They haven't been happy with it. So that's going to be an important test of that. But you'd have to get this working. and alongside the starship or more likely now Jeff Bezos's Blue Moon Lander, which is much more conventional. These have to be working at the same time so that sometime next year you can put all these things together and have an uncrewed test.

14:44And what Isaac Mann has done with his new timetable is say, look, the problem is we're not launching often enough. If you launch every few years, you can't make any progress. Go back to the 60s with the Gemini project. they launched every three months, and they understood the progress they were making. So they've got to get back into the frequent launch, rapid progress. It's put in an extra mission so that when they do land on the moon, in a few years' time, once they get all this architecture sorted out, there'll actually be two landings within a few months of each other so that they can make this progress.

15:20And this really is, I think, the last roll of the dice with this particular combination of systems to see if they can get back to the moon. And where do they want to land? This is a dilemma which the Chinese have sorted out. It's a tall order to land anything at the South Pole. We expected the Chinese to do that with their first crewed mission, but now they're going to the equator to a very interesting volcanic deposit, which is what Apollo did. Much more easy to land on that region. So they're saying for their first landing, they're going where it's easy. and America's now under pressure to say well that's actually a good idea not to land at the South Pole at your first crude landing because you're adding in the complications you're adding in extra danger when all you want to do is to get there and test the system and it could be another example where America has to change its plan in the future particularly if the Starship is not available because Jeff Bezos' craft looks as though it could be much more capable and available sooner So if I could make a prediction, it would be that America would say, OK, the South Pole is great.

16:28That's the future. We're even perhaps going to land back at tranquility, not far from where Apollo 11 landed, just to say we are back. We were there once. This is us returning to the moon and the South Pole subsequent missions. Space scientist and writer David Whitehouse there. Hey, it's Howie Mandel, and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie Do It gaming team take on Gilly DeKing and Wallow 267's Million Dollars Gaming in an epic Global Gaming League video game showdown. Four rounds, multiple games, one winner, plus a halftime performance by multi-platinum artist Travi McCoy.

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17:47This is the Naked Scientist podcast with me Chris Smith and this week we're exploring the race back to the moon and what we need to get us there and to live there. In a minute, scientists who are testing out lunar soil to see if plants are actually going to grow in it. But first, we've just been hearing from David Whitehouse about the challenges posed by actually getting to and then landing on the moon. But what will happen when we actually do? Well, interestingly, NASA's chief, Jared Isaacman, has just literally this week announced that he wants to build a$20 billion base on the moon, and he wants to do it by diverting funds, learning, and work already done on what would have been an orbiting lunar space station, although he doesn't take that concept off the table completely.

18:34Despite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives. It's worth pointing out that shifting NASA workforce priority to the surface, which has lots of advantages for safety, tech demonstration and science, it's really the proving ground for future Mars initiatives, does not preclude revisiting the orbital outpost in the future. NASA supremo Jared Isaacman there. So where would we live and what purpose would in fact be served by a semi-permanent human presence on the moon? Well, we put in a call to Robert Massey, who's at the Royal Astronomical Society.

19:11There are enormous challenges in, say, some kind of permanent habitation on the lunar surface as opposed to short-term occupancy. What you're talking about is an environment which is radiation harsh, so there's no atmosphere to protect you from the worst, say, coronal mass ejection, ejection of charged particles, hard radiation from the sun, or for that matter, from the cosmic rays, the energetic particles that come from deep space. It's an environment with extremes of temperature. And, you know, it's not that rich in the kind of resources we need as well. There might be little places where you can get a bit of water and elements and minerals that you can use to construct a base, say.

19:48But actually, compared with the Earth, it's a much tougher challenge. And, of course, astronauts, they're operating in spacesuits. They're operating in a hard vacuum environment. They have to protect themselves as well. So getting a habitat that's comfortable is not going to be that easy. What progress has been made already? Later on in the programme, you'll hear about some of the efforts being made to grow crops in a lunar environment. And that's one way of creating a bit of food that you need, whether it's adequate or not for a base. And for everybody to enjoy those comforts is another matter.

20:17But then there are also things like how you construct the base using some local materials. There's been the exploration of ideas of things like 3D printing lunar soil to make a kind of lunar concrete or lunacrete. One of the challenges of that, of course, is that the sort of curing temperature, the way in which concrete is hardened on Earth, it's got a narrow temperature range, so it's a bit tougher. And in a lunar environment where you've got these wild swings in temperature, none of that is going to be very, very easy. But there are people working on that kind of thing. And then I think there are also the ideas of location as well.

20:49So, for example, would you want to live in some lava tube under the lunar soil, under the regolith, deep underground? That's the kind of thinking that's going on. So it's a combination of trying things out in labs on Earth, looking at the lunar surface again for resources and locations that would be best suited to a base, and then thinking hard about the other issues associated with that. You know, how realistic is it to actually do this? How much stuff do you need to bring from the Earth? I mean, you hear people talking about the moon as being some kind of economic goldmine, that there's going to be so much in the way of resources there that it will be some enormously profitable venture.

21:21I'm very, very sceptical about that at the moment because the concentrations of the things that are there to drive that aren't there. So what we're probably talking about is something more akin to a short term habitation base that people say spend a matter of weeks or months in rather than settling there in the kind of science fiction sense. I think that's much further in the future if indeed it ever happens. I'm slightly surprised you're sceptical because you're normally so enthusiastic about anything space, Robert, that you're being slightly sceptical about the potential of the moon. because one of the arguments being made is, well, look, the lack of an atmosphere makes it really good for astronomy and it's easier to maintain stuff from a solid surface than floating around in space.

22:01Also, the launch pad potential, it costs us a fortune to get things off the Earth's surface, whether it's a satellite or a probe to go to a distant body in our own solar system. Is this not a really good place to put a launch pad? We'll save a lot of money in the long term because we're not spending a fortune on launching things on the Earth. You have to look at this case by case. I think my scepticism is mostly about it being a sort of economic bonanza place. So you sometimes see presentations, they'll talk about the cislunar economy as though it's some enormous multi-trillion dollar economy.

22:30I don't quite buy that. What I do agree with you on is that it's a good place for astronomy, for example, radio astronomy on the far side of the moon, if we protect the lunar orbital environment. For example, the kind of issues we've got satellite pollution on Earth, we actually need to be tackling that on the moon now as well if we're serious about keeping it as a pristine environment for science. it's pretty good for understanding, for sending out astronauts to look at Lunasaur, to do that kind of work, to understand the connection between the Earth and the Moon, the formation of the solar system, the history of the solar system, and so on.

22:59It's really excellent for that. Is it better for launching things into deep space? I'm not sure. Depends on where they're made, because if you have to get them from the Earth to the Moon in the first place, and then send them into deep space, you know, that seems like you're adding in an additional step. There are complicated things, I think, to factor in here. Do you think it's even worth factoring humans into the equation? Because when I spoke to Martin Rees a couple of years ago, he'd written this really nice piece which he shared with us in which he was saying, look, we spend all this time, effort and energy trying to compensate for the fragility of our biology.

23:31Why don't we just send a space rocket with a robot on it? We've got really good robots that can operate on a person from the other side of the world now, even though we don't tend to routinely do that, we can. And we can remove an appendix from across the Atlantic, you know, as a colleague of mine was saying the other day. why are we bothering sending humans to do this kind of thing martin reese makes a very good point about this i think for exploration purposes certainly for the most advanced exploration purposes there are very good arguments for just sending robots he's quite right long term i think it's this sort of distinction between science and exploration here and the different motivation i mean i suppose there is a fascination with having human beings walking around the surface of another world and that's why we're enthusiastic about the artemis program at least seen him i mean i had a brilliant conversation with the Artemis 2 crew the year before last.

24:18Absolutely great people, and I really admire them for doing it. Whether or not you have to is a completely different question. There's still the argument that human beings are very, very flexible, and even with the advent of better AI and even with better robots, your human being can make a decision that much more quickly. The argument is if you're standing sail on the surface of the moon or another world, you can look around and human beings spot things that are interesting very, very quickly. people do though i think more legitimately say well this is a useful training ground for missions and forays farther afield like mars and there's a stronger case to make for mars isn't there because it takes nine plus months to get there and it's got more to offer in terms of it's a bigger environment and it's it's a farther outpost there might be opportunities there and doing science on the ground to find things like past life and so on you can see well there's a stronger motivation to put people there so is this a useful sand pit the moon to play in yeah to get i mean look yeah the distinction between say building a base on the moon and doing it in say the antarctic for example which is a harsh environment but in antarctic you can breathe and you can you can melt the ice to get water let's see although you are dependent on resupply it's obviously vastly easier going to mars sure that the big thing there i suppose is you're right the underpinning science questions like are we alone in the universe are perhaps easier answered there or at least it's a place we can try and rule it out in a sense it's not easy because if you take people to mars then you run the risk of contamination and that that's another factor but you know yes there is a strong science case we're going there eventually Robert Massey at the Royal Astronomical Society there now Robert's skepticism aside let's say for a moment that we do find long-term life on the moon to be an appealing prospect one of the essentials we are going to need is of course food.

26:05So could we grow it there? Would moon soil, otherwise known as lunar regolith, prove to be fertile ground on which we can grow crops? Now you might think we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit here but scientists in the United States are already working on this as are scientists elsewhere around the world and they're doing it by recreating lunar soil and seeing what they can grow. So far the diet does admittedly look a bit monotonous, you have to be a big fan of chickpeas, but this is just the beginning and it does appear to work. The would-be moon farmers are Sara Santos at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and up first Jess Atkin at Texas A &M University.

26:45We wanted to see if we could use any of the material that was already on the moon and perhaps repurpose it to grow plants in because sending something to the moon is really expensive and we wanted to have some fail-safes to have some food already sourced. Do we have any idea what the soil is like up there? To have a soil on earth you have to have two major things. You have to have organic material which is made from decomposing things that were once alive and you have to have microorganisms and together those things help plants grow. But when you get to the moon, we don't have any organic matter or any microorganisms.

27:28What we have instead is basically very fine, sharp, crushed up rock, but it does have many of the essential nutrients necessary for plant growth. How are you going to get around what you haven't got then, Sara? How do you actually do this? First of all, one of the things that we won't have that the moon doesn't have right now is nitrogen. And what we've done here is we've introduced these two things that are lacking, the organic matter and the microorganisms. So our methods are that we use a derivative of warm poop called vermicompost, and we use a special fungus called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus.

28:08This fungi actually supports over 80 % of land plants. So it's something that's all around us. We decided to use those two helpers and they do a lot of work with the soil to support the plant. Did you use real moon dust that Jess was talking about or did you, because we know what it is and what its composition is, did you basically make up a facsimile of it and then mix it with your mycorrhizal fungus and the other bits and pieces you're going to put in there to make a kind of facsimile of moon soil? Yes, we use the facsimile, which is regularly called the simulant for lunar dust, because it's so difficult to get the genuine material.

28:54Some of it was brought back to Earth from the Apollo missions, but it's very difficult to get. So there's a few companies that actually specialised in making these mixtures to match the properties of certain regions of the moon. And we use the one that matches the properties of lunar highlands because that is our predicted landing spot. Jess, before you tell us what actually happened when you're trying to do this, are there not nasties in there as well? Because I'm just thinking the moon material is basically like Earth crust material, but there are some other things up there that we might not want if it were on Earth to grow crops in.

29:30Is there not a danger we're going to get contamination here? There are some things that we do worry about. While I did state that we do have some of the things necessary, we also have some things we don't want, and those are largely heavy metals. There's a high percentage of aluminum and a high percentage of iron. And although plants do need iron for healthy growth, both of those things are present in levels that could be considered toxic to plants and then potentially to astronauts eating the seed. But one of the superpowers that this fungi has is it actually exudes a protein from the fungi that can trap or reduce the metals from being uptaken into the plant.