MMM Classics Year 4: MMM #s 31-40 The First Ten Years December 1989 - November 1990
At left: a “Ramada” Conclusion of Prinzton Ramada (Ra•MAH•da): Spanish, a Rille Settlement Series free-standing canopy providing In this volume we finish up shade from the sun, common in the serialization in MMM of our U.S. southwest.(cf. Ramada Inn) design study paper presented at Illustration © 1990, Milwaukee ISDC 1991 in San Antonio. artist Dan Moynahan, an (M)LRS member in those days. Environmental Topics Vacuum is one thing; the 1990 saw Earth Day #20, and nuisances of cosmic weather are as a committed environmentalist another: intense dayspan heat, (home planet lover) and resolute cosmic rays, solar flares, and space anthusiast, we published micrometeorites. If we provided a suite of articles this year shelter from the “elements” but touching on some environmental without pressurization - for most aspects of opening up the space routine-access storage areas, and lunar frontiers: and for access to the exterior • Space Debris, p. 3 areas of pressurized modules for • Green Earth, Clean Moon p. 4 routine servicing, would those • Port NIMBY, pp. 15-17 involved in activities “shel- • The Many Space Benefits for tered” in this way be able to Mother Earth pp. 21-22 wear lighter-weight, more com- • Recycling pp. 23-26 fortable pressure suits? If so, • The Fourth “R” p. 26-28 would this reduce exertion and • Biospherics pp. 35-36 enhance productivity? See p. 42 • Moon Mining & Common Eco- Sense p. 60 The MMM Classics Effort • Cloacal vs. Tritreme Plumbing We have embarked on an pp. 65-66 effort to re-edit, re-illustrate and republish the major articles Star*bound from Moon Miners’ Manifesto In this volume, we also issues #s 1-100 - the first ten begin our Star*bound series of years. Each volume includes the articles, looking not at the articles from the ten issues of “how” of interstellar travel, one year. but at the “where to.” Volume 4 concludes the We start by taking a look hardest part of the effort, as from the outside, at where we the articles from the first are starting from: Earth and four years did not previously our “home star,” the Sun. exist in usable computer files. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 1 colloquial name, and that it should be replaced by "Luna". While overdue inter- MMM #31 - December 1989 national standardization of its name is certainly a worthy goal, "Luna" is simply Capital "M" for Moon "Moon" in another language (Latin). by Peter Kokh Most importantly, contrary to A recent letter in Ad Astra [October popular belief, there is no such thing 1989] taking exception to this writer's (and never has been) as "correct English." insistence that "Moon" be capitalized, There are only judgment calls as to what rested on several all too common miscon- is most widely "accepted" and thus "stan- ceptions. Perhaps it would be helpful to dard" usage, something subject to change. discuss the salient facts. All reputable dictionaries contain a dis- Like the Moon, Julius Caesar claimer to that effect. Living languages is an original. are continually changing because they are alive and ever regenerated by their First, from time immemorial up until speakers. 1610 when Galileo first trained a teles- We are already seeing a strong move- cope upon Jupiter and discovered it had ment from "the earth" to "the Earth" and four "moons", only one moon was known to indeed to simply "Earth" i.e. no "the". mankind. Similarly, until even more recent This evolution reflects the growing times when it became apparent that the Sun popular awareness of our planet as a and the stars were members of the same planet. Similarly, there is increased, class of celestial objects, we knew of though less pervasive, awareness that the only one "Sun". Until these recent discov- contemptibly familiar apparition in the eries, Moon and Sun had perhaps never been night sky (the moon) is in truth another used in the plural. In one language version world-to-be (the Moon) upon which to or another, since the dawn of language, continue the human drama. Newspaper editors these were their names. When we suddenly and those English teachers wistful of the needed "class" names we borrowed these prerogatives of ancient priestly classes names from the sole objects we had ever notwithstanding, the growing frequency known of each class. Ganymede, Titan, Phobos with which "Moon" is capitalized expresses and company are thus "moons" only and this new appreciation of the dawning simply by analogy or by extension. The "world" potential of the old queen of Moon remains the original, the satellite night. We might go so far as to predict of Earth. that in time, just as "Earth" is now Certainly, in such a phrase as "the doing, "Moon" will shed the archaic "the". innermost moon of Mars", "moon" is a While some may shrink in abject common noun. But it is transparent nonsense horror at the idea of such linguistic to say that even when referring to the activism, there is certainly nothing original and privileged bearer of that reprehensible about trying to guide appellation, "Moon" is a common noun. It inevitable linguistic change to suit the would be just as silly to insist that purposes of those seeking to better since there have been dozens of caesars express themselves. Language is a tool, (and kaisers and czars, all the same word) and we, not it, must be master. If we, as besides Julius, we should decapitalize space advocates, want the public to become Julius' surname. Like the Moon, Julius truly conscious of the Moon as a new world Caesar is an original. for realizing the human potential, we Nor, as some are tempted to think, ought to take the lead in capitalizing its does the presence of the definite article name, even daring to drop the "the." "the" mean that "Moon" must be a common Ultimately, this question will be noun. If so we had best use the bahamas, decided once and for all by the first the philippines, and the hague. lunar settlement government to arise. Just "Luna" is simply "Moon" as most of us have learned to say Sri in another language (Latin) Lanka instead of Ceylon, if such a govern- ment decides our neighbor world should It has been an unfortunate common henceforth be known as Luna, Selene, gripe among science-fiction authors Artemis, Diana, or [good grief!] Kennedy, (spread thereby to uncritical readers) we'll all fall into line.
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 6 [Continuing our Report on PRINZTON minimal nocturnal food production needs - a two-tier three-village 3,000 person for electricity will be easily much lunar settlement in a rille just north greater than the demands of industry and of the crater Prinz, NE of Aristarchus.] all other systems. In planning Prinzton therefore, we set as a design goal that each of the available power systems be sized so that in emergency, i.e. all the other systems down, it could alone meet these minimal nighttime agricultural need. At present, to our knowledge this minimum need has never been quantified. Nuclear winter scenarios have shown that a loss of 95% of normal sunshine would end in the cessation of photosynthesis. This is not quite to the point as we are talking about minimum hours of normal lighting, and not minimum sustained lighting. Therefore, we did not quantify the power needs for our proposed settlement, but left that open. [Milwaukee Space Studies Team (MiSST), the Part V: MULTIPLE ENERGY SOURCES chapter and SSI affiliate, will soon P. Kokh, M. Kaehny, M. Mullikin, release guidelines for home basement/ L. Rachel, & J. Suszynski (CSSS) garage gardeners wanting to help find such minimum lighting needs for food plants of A. Super Redundancy their choice. MiSST will coordinate the On Earth, rare power outages serve results as they come in. We hope this will to relieve newsfare boredom, result in be a multi-year international effort.] some work stoppages and commuting delays, occasionally spoil frozen foods, and NUCLEAR PLANT (FISSION): Our rille sited sometimes produce a temporary glitch in just north of the large mare-inundated the birth rate. While electricity has long crater Prinz, contains an uncollapsed since insinuated itself into every aspect section of the original lava-tube. It is of our daily lives to the point that it likely that the cavity it contains is some can hardly be called a luxury, temporary hundreds of meters in all dimensions and loss is something less than cataclysmic. has a roof on the order of 40 meters On the Moon where the ambient thick. We believe this is a doubly handy conditions are far more severe, no matter feature. Not only does it provide a how much attention is paid to self- natural bridge across the rille but it is adjusting thermal flywheels and biospheric about the best conceivable spot to place a ecosystems, loss of all power could large nuclear pile. Even in the event of a quickly introduce conditions from which runaway meltdown, there could be no danger recovery would be difficult. Any one power to the nearby settlement - the hot pile system is fallible: nuclear, on site- need simply be left undisturbed. solar, remote solar, chemical fuel cells. Not only would such a plant be an Redundancy is critical. everyday mainstay for those power needs At the same time, power needs differ that did not vary with the local time of between the alternating periods of lunar the "sunth" (sunrise to sunrise, 29.5 daylight and darkness, each 14.75 days earth days) but it would be an ideal feed long. Some industrial operations can be for a Laser Power Tower (see below). We polarized into energy-intensive (diurnal) did not also specify a nuclear fusion and labor-intensive (nocturnal) processes. plant, as it is problematic whether or not On the other hand, agriculture can thrive we will ever surmount the engineering on the uninterrupted two-weeks of lunar obstacles to such an elusive long-prophe- sunshine, but must also have enough sied power source. artificial light not to just simply ON-SITE SOLAR POWER: The site plan [MMM survive the equally long night periods but #28] shows three large solar array areas, to go on to produce an eventual harvest. feeding both the city and the mass driver It would seem that for a settlement of the export device. We left open whether these size of Prinzton (3,000 plus), these arrays would consist of advanced photovol- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 7 taic cells made from lunar materials or of its strategic advantage, "GEO" allows solar turbines, mirrored dish/Stirling objects to orbit in lockstep with the cycle systems. The latter would seem the Earth's rotation so that they seem to be likelier choice, barring developments permanently parked above set points on the unforeseen. We made no attempt to deter- equator 37,000 km or 23,000 mi below. mine the amount of area needed for these In contrast, owing both to the solar arrays and what is shown on the site Moon's low mass (1/81 Earth's) and to the plan is no more than artistic license. The slow rate of its rotation, once every 27.5 actual collector extent needed would be days reckoned by the stars rather than by determined by the efficiencies of the the Sun, what would be its "Clarke Orbit" nighttime storage system chosen to supply if the Earth were not present is some farming needs. The likeliest candidate 120,00 km or 75,000 mi out [B.O.E.]. In would seem to be advanced fuel cells power fact all points this far out from the Moon by oxygen and hydrogen heat-cracked or in its orbital plane are within Earth's electrolyzed from water reserves during gravity well, not its own. Instead, any the long lunar daytime by excess solar Solar Power Satellites intended to beam power, but also see B. below for a power down to the Moon will have to be possibly complementary option. placed at one of the Lagrange points where [The reader is also referred to the multi- the Earth-Moon tug of war lies in precar- contributor discussion "Electric Options" ious balance. Of these, so-called L4 and in MMM #14 and the earlier "Powerco" in L5, some 60o ahead and to the MMM #7 - See MMMC #1] rear of the Moon respectively in its orbit about Earth, are the best bets, requiring REMOTE SITE SOLAR ARRAYS: Given current little or no station keeping effort. L5 long-distance power transmission techno- would serve the eastern flank of the Moon, logy and acceptable line losses, similar L4 the western, wherein lies Prinzton. Now surface-based solar arrays could be this L4/L5-Moon distance is some ten times emplaced some 600 km (370 mi) to the east, the Earth-GEO distance. It is the feeling near the crater Lambert, which could of J. Suszynski that power beamed in the 1 provide a handy predawn boost in power mm wavelength would be best suited given same two days before the Prinzton sunrise. the much greater distance, and that the If superconducting lines manufactured from greater attenuation of the beam (100 times lunar materials are possible (current the footprint for same width beam) could pessimism to the contrary), a globe-circ- be managed. The rectenna net could either ling chain of solar power arrays, half of be slung directly over the rille or over a which would always be in the sunshine, nearby crater if preferred. This is as far would keep the grid powered to the brim as we carried the discussion. regardless of local sun time. Short of that, it might be feasible B. A Hydroelectric Storage System? to place a suitably sized array 70-some M. Mullikin and P. Kokh degrees away just over the north pole of Surely, one of the most innovative the Moon, say 2000 km or 1250 mi due ideas proposed for the Prinzton Project north-then-south of Prinzton (27°N). Using was Myles A. Mullikin's suggestion that we non-superconducting lines such a distance use the elevation differences within would involve larger line losses then MIDVALE, the central village (whose town currently deemed acceptable. However, as plan he had designed to serve as downtown such a site would be 180o out for Prinzton and all this area of the of phase with Prinzton, it would enjoy Moon) to circulate water through a modest sunlight for the entire Prinzton night hydroelectric plant. During the day weeks stretch. when abundant solar power will be avail- SOLAR POWER SATELLITES: Earth-feeding able, water reserves would be pumped from Solar Power Satellites, providing raw and a valley bottom reservoir to one just processed materials for which is likely to below the lower vault, and allowed to fall be the economic mainstay for Prinzton, through a bank of generator turbines will be concentrated in geosynchronous during the two night weeks. While appreci- Earth orbit, now the denizen of ative of the much greater power advantage communications satellites. Often called to be had from electrolyzing these the Clarke orbit after the science and reserves by day to run through fuel cells science-fiction writer who first realized by night, he was leery of the idea of Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 8 storing these volatiles (hydrogen and only its own village population, but those oxygen) within the village. in the other two villages whose work and Once on the table, this idea, rather living schedules are to be eight hours than being dismissed, was quickly enhanced. advanced or retarded. [See "Rille People" The upper reservoir could be placed full- Part III B. The Three Village System. MMM square on top of the rille shoulder. It # 28.- republished in MMMC #3, pp.41-43.] would be no problem to pump the water up HYDROELECTRIC SYSTEM: For the that high, and the greater head, some 400 Central Village of Prinzton (MIDVALE). meters, even in 1/6th gravity, would still be effectively half again as high as Niagara Falls! Furthermore, out on the rille-top, the water pumped up from below could circulate under quartz panels transparent to the Sun's ultraviolet fury. This would serve as both germicide and bactericide. And if still desired, water in the upper reservoir could still be electrolyzed to be recombined in fuel cells with the onset of night before beginning its fall down the conduits to the genera- ting station below. There would be no appreciable safety risks involved. A second set of tubes up the rille slope would carry air rushing counterflow as it is displaced by the water being pumped up or falling down as the case may be. Air pressure in the rille-top reser- voir would have to be the same as in the village below. A heat-exchange system could cool hot upper reservoir air before it flowed into the village during the day time, giving up heat to the water. The whole system would act as a thermal fly wheel to give Midvale the most equable [A] Upper Reservoir includes quartz pane climate of the three villages. covered purification pond (Solar Ultra- Meanwhile, the generating station violet in). Option would include tanks to could be placed with little sacrifice in hold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen power at the top of the Town terraces, the electolyzed from water, and fuel cell spent water then free to work its way down power plant for recombining them. a series of ponds and cascades to a [B] Slope of rille. [C] Tubes or conduits central lagoon for all to enjoy. The carrying water and counterflow displace- shallow seven acre lagoon with canoes, ment air. Day dates: water up, air down. fishermen, and pink flamingos would be Night dates: water down, air up. cantilevered over the final reservoir with [D] (Heliostats gather and bring sunshine depth maintaining overflow tubes leading into) [E] The upper Farmfield level. from one to the other. Some of the water [F] Hydroelectric station at uppermost from the Hydro station could also be terrace of lower Townfield area. shunted to pressure-fed fountains, further [ ] Decorative cascades. The spent water adding to the Metro-class character of G is put to landscaping use on way to lover this village. While the extra power to be gained by the hydroelectric scheme as reservoir. [H] Pressure-fed fountains. opposed to the straightforward fuel cell [I] Shallow 7 acre lagoon cantilevered system, is probably very modest given the over [J] Lower reservoir fed by overflow limited volume of water probably avail- pipes from lagoon above. Reservoir fills able, it might well be proportionate to during the lunar night, is pumped empty the extra lighting and energy load the during lunar day. twenty-four hour character of Midvale's Such a hydroelectric scheme uses Metro District would have, serving not solar power priming in a way surprisingly Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 9 not so different from that we are familiar Building Prinzton will require a con- with on Earth. Here, sunshine evaporates siderable fleet of construction vehicles. ocean water to fall as rain and work its To power these with petrochemical fuels is way down the drainage system. The Moon may out of the question. Far less expensive be the last place you would expect to find and quite clean would be fuel cells using a niche for hydroelectric power, but it liquid oxygen processed from the lunar will work, for what it's worth. Not jist soil and hydrogen imported from Earth or, rille slopes, but lava-tubes and larger better, Phobos and Deimos. The emission is crater slopes are potential "dam" sites. water which can flow into Prinzton's C. The Laser Power Tower reservoirs or be resplit into hydrogen and Power Tower Concept - M. Mullikin, oxygen to be used again. However, the Power Tower illustration - D. Cremer banks of fuel cells needed would be quiet heavy, though they could be put on the vehicles' roofs to double as shielding against cosmic radiation. An ingenious alternative would be to use the auxiliary nuclear power plant to broadcast power to the construction fleet via a tall laser power tower equipped with the needed dozens of laser transmitters. These would lock on and swivel to follow the slaved vehicles. A circle of guide beams would keep the power beam on target acting as a fail-safe device. If anything interrupted a guard beam, the power beam would shut off before the eclipsing object could be damaged. [IMAGE] In the Moon's light gravity, seismic quiet, and windless conditions, such a tower, without guy wires, could stand thousands of meters high, to cover the entire site, rille bottom and all. Slaved vehicles would only need minimal backup fuel cell emergency power. Only those intended to range a good distance from Prinzton, require fully autonomous power. (Vehicles built exclusively for use within the pressurized areas of the settlement will be fully electric.) NEXT: THE IMPORT/EXPORT EQUATION. PORT NIMBY. >>> MMM #32
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 10 only; and pregnant female animals only. MMM #32 - February 1990 4-VOLATILES: Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen: The import burden can be softened by some careful measures faithfully pursued: Continuing our Report on PRINZTON (a) Harvesting, by heating, of the signi- a two-tier, three-village rille-bottom ficant quantities of H, C, N, and other settlement for 3,000 - 5,000 persons gases adsorbed to the fine regolith parti- cles, thanks to eons of bombardment by the Solar Wind, during all those construction processes involving soil moving; (b) Out-sourcing to gravity wells shal- lower than Earth's e.g. Phobos and Deimos, Earth-approaching asteroids and comets; (c) Conservation of volatile-rich organic materials by religiously thorough recyc- ling efforts. In support of this goal Prinzton will need "kosher" (organics not bonded to inorganics) knock-down- friendly ("KD") assembly methods; systematically thorough and foolproof sorting clues and handy routing managements; and above all the help of ingrained second-nature good EXPORT/IMPORT EQUATION habits and expected chore assignments. (d) 'Pre-codesigning' of all single-use containers for volume-matched secondary more durable uses. (An example already attempted was the elusive "World Bottle" Part VI: TO SURVIVE, PRINCETON MUST design i.e. a bottle that could be reused EARN MORE IN EXPORTS as a brick; Effort not yet successful.) THAN IT PAYS FOR IMPORTS (e) Buttoning up pressurized areas for Nitrogen conservation by use of novel Peter Kokh airlock systems: Matchlock “intergates” A. Settlement Import Categories And to allow suitless shirtsleeve transfer Strategies to Cut and/or Avoid Them between vehicles and habitat areas; Liquid airlocks for some freight categories such 1. CAPITOL EQUIPMENT: “MUS/cle” co-manufac- as goods manufactured inside for use in ture is easily the most promising approach. vacuum and vice versa; and Turtle-back A minimal sintered iron and glass composite spacesuits that back into special mated manufacturing capacity must be imported airlocks for direct entry from suit to FIRST. Thereafter, complex lightweight habitat and vice verse. electronics-rich ("cle") "works packages" 5-RARE METALS: An elegant way to pain- from Earth are mated to Massive Unitary lessly "co-import" rare metals, and even Simple ("MUS") parts made on the Moon of some synthetics is by making all needed Lunar materials and assembled on the site shipping containers end packaging out of to make additional equipment for Energy such materials i.e. the easily forgotten Generation, Mining & Processing, Manufac- category of "Tare". [Gross - Net = Tare] turing, Construction, Fabrication & Repair, Making this standard practice could and for Food Production. [cf.: "M.U.S./C.L.E." provide a tidy "cheap" endowment of badly in MMM # 18 September '88.] needed materials hard to process from the 2-SETTLERS: "Bantamweights" will do. For Lunar soil such as copper, brass, other Prinzton will be run with brains rather precious metals, other needed alloying than brawn. Weight savings on settlers can ingredients, and even some volatiles in be applied elsewhere. the form of lightly polymerized synthe- 3-FARM PLANTS AND ANIMALS: Seeds only, and tics. Crates, Boxes, Barrels, Tanks, Cans, worms and bee colonies; Seeds packed in Bottles, and packing stuffing and dividers hot pure N2 to kill hitchhiking could all be made of such strategic pests; Unpatented non-hybrid cultivars materials. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 11 6-HABITATS: To make the Prinzton construc- on favorable terms Solar Power Satellite tion camp, an original minimum number of customer nations. tight-packed space station module type 3-LOWERING COST-ONTO-MOON. Unlike both sardine cans can be followed by locally Earth and Mars, the Moon has no handy manufactured and constructed Big Dumb atmosphere to allow aerobrake assistance. Volume Structures in which are placed But there are other more inventive alter- "Works Core Modules" made on Earth. Such natives to full retrobraking. These may cores would contain Kitchen/Bath facility, include skid-landing on prepared regolith electrical service, communications-enter- smoothways. [Lunar Bases and Space Activi- tainment center, air conditioning-heating- ties of the 21st Century, W.W. Mendell cleaning unit, etcetera. The total core Ed.r, Lunar & Planetary Institute, Houston package would be lighter (no massive hull) 1985 pp. 848-50 "The Lunar Slide Lander" and cheaper to upport from Earth and the by Kraft A. Ehricke] and the "Edportation" host habitat would be much more spacious scheme of Chicago inventor Ed Marwick. and cabin-fever resistant. Such Works Core Passengers may not line up for such wild Modules, but with an ever greater Made-on- rides, but drone "sliders" could bring in Luna "MUS/cle" content, also serves in needed bulk materials and other hardy Prinzton's Village Homes. cargoes. 7-NON SELF-MANUFACTURED GOODS: For those needed and desired items Prinztonians need C-LUNAR EXPORT CATEGORIES but are not yet capable of providing for 1-BULK MATERIALS: Liquid Oxygen; Regolith themselves, the "MUS/cle" formula is again for shielding; Enriched ores for space part of the answer. But substituting metal, processing. glass, Glax* [composites], and ceramics 2-OXYGEN CONTAINING PRODUCTS such as Water wherever possible for wood and plastics, and Foodstuffs cheaper than from Earth and doing without wherever this is imprac- even if they contain terrestrial Hydrogen tical must be Plan A. Mail order catalogs and Carbon. from Earth will be taboo and instead items from the hands of local artists and crafts- 3-BUILDING MATERIALS AND COMPONENTS: Iron men will be treasured. A paperless all- and Steel; Aluminum, Titanium, Magnesium electronic society will be a top priority alloy; Glass and Glass-Glass Composites; goal. [cf: "Paper Chase", MMM # 4 April Ceramics & Concrete. 1987, republished in MMMC #1.] 4-ITEMS MANUFACTUREDE ON THE MOON to cut imports are also marketable to LEO, GEO, B-Strategies to Lower Import Costs L5, Mars Ph/D (Phobos, Deimos): Furniture and/or Increase Import Quantities and furnishings; Tanks, Holds, Appliance 1-ALTERNATE SOURCES: Prinzton will need to Cases, other items. import considerable quantities of hydrogen, D-EXPORT DESTINATIONS carbon and nitrogen, most easily handled in the form of methane CH4 and Low Earth orbit Space Stations and ammonia NH3. Discounting the other manned facilities, Space Colony amortizable capital costs of emplacing the Oases at L4/L5 or in other orbits, and needed equipment, these volatiles can be Mars-bound expeditions are all Markets for shipped at a fraction of the total fuel Lunar Lox, Food, Water, building materials cost, from Phobos or Deimos, moons of products, and sundry finished goods all Mars, at regular 26 month intervals. Such Lunar or MUS/cle assembly). Geosynchronous shallower gravity well sources also orbit is a destination for large multi- include occasional catch-as-catch-can satellite capacity platforms and Solar Earth-approaching asteroids, comets, and Power Satellites. wildcat-worthy inactive comet-hulks. The E-STRATEGIES TO INCREASE EXPORTS Moon's deficiency is the Solar System's gain. For settlers will have a do-or-die 1-LOWERING EXPORT LAUNCH & DELIVERY COSTS: urgency in pioneering such markets. Mass Drivers, Bucket, and Pods should be upgraded to launch more profitable value- 2-LOWERING COST-OFF-EARTH will be above added goods.. 1st Upgrade: enriched bene- all a matter of developing (at last!) more ficiated ores: Fe, FeO, TiO, Al203, CaO, economical surface-to-orbit launch systems. MgO, SiO; Batch-loads of glass matrix, But our crafty settlers will also attempt glass fiber, and cement. to lower prices FOB Earth by buying goods Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 12 Second Upgrade: right-sized ingots: 4-MAXIMIZING TOURIST INCOME. Fe, Al, Ti, Mg. 3rd Upgrade: shock-proofed The lure to well-heeled sightseers pods of small manufactured parts. In addi- can be intensified in several ways. tion, goods bound for Earth's surface A "Seven Wonders" list, carefully could be shipped in no-transfer self-con- drawn up and publicized, and a variety of tained Earth-aerobrake-and-Land "dynasoar" enticing itineraries will encourage repeat capsules. trips or at least longer stays.
2-INCREASlNG MARKET DEMAND: Special ways to taste the settler Liquid Oxygen: Would-be-Prinztonians way of life can be offered to visitors. should push develop-ment of "Stage Plus" • Stays in lunar homes Earth Deep-Space Launchers designed for • working tours on-orbit LOX refueling. Food deliveries to • Art & Craft classes LEO stations and other space locales, will • special tours e.g. of factories and depend on selection, delivery, marketing. recycling systems, and Building Materials: Lunar Owned • the opportunity to actually participate Space Architecture and Space Construction in unique Lunan sports. Firms will channel a greater share of Customs regulations can entice space construction profits back to the tourists to trade all their Earth garb Settlement. Promotion of the 1/6th G lunar (for Lunar Stage/Theater Use) in exchange Gravity as a Standard for rotating space for souvenir Made-on-Luna apparel. structures will mean quicker more frequent Shopping Spree Tours for unique sales because the rotation rate linked arts, craft, and clothing pieces at the minimum size and mass of such structures Settlements cottage industry flea markets will be an order of magnitude smaller, a should be marketed. more attainable threshold.
Prinzton made Consumer Goods can be 5-TELEVISION & FILM MEDIA SALES: promoted along with Lunar-type material Advertising Revenues could be appre- culture in general as the appropriate norm ciable enough to wholly finance: for near Earth facilities in the era of • Development of Unique Lunan Spectator still expensive volatiles. Such goods Sports, which in turn could be involve material substitutions and a high televised to Earth audiences hungry for profile for Art/Craft made wares. something new and exotic. Promotion of the Moon as the "Hub" • Construction of any facilities such of the ETM (extra-terrestrial materials) sports may require economy will be an essential settler • The same goes for the "ethereal" policy. Their do-or-die motivation and Prinzton Ballet Company, probably proven know-how will drive Lunar-initiated awaiting the coming of age of the first market development of Mars and its moons, native-born generation. and of the Asteroids. Key here may be the development of Minimal Mobile Biospheres. • Documentaries about Prinzton and Lunar The larger deep-space long-cruising activities at large will vie with space vessels have to be to hold self-contained adventure films for the use of the Out mini-biospheres, the greater the obstacle Of This World film studio in Prinzton. to opening the asteroids. 6-EXPORTING KNOW-HOW: 3-MARKET TARGETING: Technology transfer is a potential Logical Earth Trading Partners for money-maker for Prinzton. Hopefully much Prinzton are those nations which are at of the technology needed to make Prinzton once a thriving reality will have been pre- developed for profitable terrestrial • Energy Importing Countries (Solar Power applications and thus served to keep Satellite sales, Helium-3 sales) and Prinzton's up front costs far lower than • Sources of elements not economically they otherwise could be. Lunar-sourceable yet strategic to But enterprising young Prinztonians Prinzton development. will develop new products and processes Many of these countries are in the “Urban saleable Greenside.
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 13 (8) How much heat is needed for operation?
DIVERSIFICATION ( ) Low - ( ) Medium - ( ) High (9) How much heat is generated by opera- tion?
$$$UB$$$IDIE$$$ ( ) Low - ( ) Medium - ( ) High (10) What is the industry’s need for vaccum? Peter Kokh
+ EXPORTS We have outlined a very ambi- ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor - IMPORTS tious picture of what a mature (11) What percentage of chemical reagents BOTTOM LINE Prinzton economy might look used can be recycled? like. But what is the logical order in ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor which such a well-rounded economy might be (12 a) To what extant can the industry be best achieved? Diversification will in set up in modular units so that production part depend on a number of things that we capacity can be easily increased as cannot accurately forecast at his time: needed? • Size of the LEO market for LOX, buil- ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor ding materials, other manufactured and processed goods (12 b) How high is the import tonnage of each module in terms of economic gains? • Progress in opening up space markets
elsewhere, e.g. Phobos/Deimos etc. ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor Different scenarios can be plotted assuming (12 c) To what extent can MUS/cle* co- various values for these unknowns. manufacturing savings be applied to additional modules needed? [* see the We can list some very pertinent ques- article from MMM #18 in MMMC 2, pp. 34-35] tions, however. Their nswers will greatly affect the strategy and game plan chosen. ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor For each industry proposed (13) What prior industrial material for Prinzton, we will want byproducts are presupposed?
to know the followsing: ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor (14) What prior processing capacities are (1) What is the industry’s capacity to presupposed? generate export tonnage?
( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor (15) What subsequent industries are (2) What is the industry’s capacity to enabled by new byproducts generated? defray import tonnage?
( ) Many - ( ) Few - ( ) None ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor (16) What subsequent industries are (3) What is the export value-added per enabled by processing capcities offered? tonne?
( ) Many - ( ) Few - ( ) None ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor (17) How “ready-to-go” is the technology (4) To what degree is the industry labor- for operation in Lunar Conditions? intensive?
( ) Little - ( ) Partly - ( ) Go! ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor (5) To what degree is the industry energy- Once we’ve done our homework intensive? on these and similarly ( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor (6) What is the industry’s pressurized relevant questions, acreage need? we will be ready to begin
( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor a serious discussion (7) How well can the industry’s operations be separated into successive diurnal (day- of long-term span) energy-intensive vs. nocurnal (night- Lunar Industrialization Plans span) labor-intensive portions?
( ) Major - ( ) Medium - ( ) Minor < M M M > Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 14 "Not In My Back Yard" - "N.I.M.B.Y." Space to the Rescue? Ahah! You say. "Space to the rescue!" Several space-involving solutions to this PORT run-away problem have been proposed. (a) Let's move the offensive Chemical Processing and Biological Engineering NIMBY Plants to LEO, low Earth orbit, where wastes can be dumped harmlessly in space. IMPORT/EXPORT SLEEPER Alas, we are now learning, LEO is a very Gross Imports that temporary place and everything parked there will eventually find a way back into Could Count as Net Exports the atmosphere. We must go well out, beyond Peter Kokh and David A.Dunlop the Van Alien Belts, to a realm ruled by IMPORTING FOR DIRECT PROFITS the Solar Wind rather than by tenuous tentacles of our atmosphere. GEO, the This may seem like a Cinderella idea. Prinzton already works toward overall net Earth-synchronous orbit that is home to communications and weather satellites, profits by putting major emphasis on most will do, as will the L4/L5 Earth-Moon importing capital equipment to help both libration points, or high-perigee Earth- lessen the need of further imports and Moon resonant orbits. The Solar Wind would increase exports by enabling ever more carry offensive exhausts well beyond the local processing and manufacturing MUS/cle outermost planets. (Heliopause smog?) (see the article from MMM #18 in MMMC2, pp. 34-35) andco-importation by clever (b) "Dump the stuff into the Sun" seems choice of tare materials. (see previous the ultimate solution to those blissfully article in this volume of MMM Classics, unmindful of common orbital mechanics Diversification/Subsidies, A.5.) facts-of-life. Of all space solutions proposed this is surely the most outra- Every Trade Czar's fairy tale dream, geously expensive in "Delta V" i.e. fuel however, is to be paid for the imports expenditure requirements. First our skull- one's people need, rather than paying for and-crossbones payload must be accelerated them. Simply put, this means agreeing to to some 25,000 mph just to reach the take something unwanted-with-desperation shoulder of Earth's gravity well. Then it off the hands (and minds) of some other must shed All of Earth's forward orbital bailiwick. Highly Toxic Chemical Wastes, speed, another 66,000 mph worth of velo- Virulent Biological Wastes, Radioactive city change. A short burn, short by any Wastes - might all fit this description. amount, would result in a highly ellipti- "Not In My Back Yard" - "N.I.M.B.Y." cal orbit, bringing our "Flying Dutchman" - is the classic universal reaction to alternately in towards the Sun and back these leprous by-products of today's out to Earth's orbit. In contrast, it advanced technology. In recent years, the would be far cheaper, in terms of fuel unwelcome reality that every where on cost, to catapult this dreaded stuff in Earth is someone's back yard, is slowly the other direction, out of the Solar sinking into the public consciousness. System altogether. Another cheaper possi- Governments continue to search for cost- bility would be to shoot for the all- effective-yet-safe ways to store or neu- engulfing depths of mighty Jupiter, as we tralize such techno-feces but it seems to hope to do with part of the Galileo probe be a hopelessly intractable problem. Prom- in December, 1995. ising solutions emerge only to be found (c) Expel it from the Solar System. An fraught with fatal flaws. even less expensive option than feeding Perhaps we need only be patient and the Sun, Jupiter, or the interstellar dust elegantly "safe-yet-cheap" solutions will and gas clouds, is available to some future present themselves. But perhaps not. Mean- Dreaded Wastes Authority. We could rocket while, problem wastes will keep on accumu- our nasty stuff into simple Solar Orbit, lating at an alarming rate so long as we tele-open the canisters, and let the Solar do not wish to face the fact that those Wind provide the Delta V, gently but desirable materials that involve such inexorably blowing the stuff out of the byproducts may not be worth the ultimate System. cost. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 15 "one person's trash Nimby is what makes such an option many is another person's treasure" orders of magnitude safer than the most ideal of storage-on-Earth schemes. Back to the drawing board But all of the above suggestions Storage in lava tube sections, which choose to ignore the bit of wisdom that have to date survived intact for nearly "one person's trash is another person's four billion years, leaves no rational treasure". basis for qualms of informed conscience. not All three of the problem waste This is case of disrespect for the categories we are discussing, Moon, anymore than it would be for the are problems because of the over- Sun. Again, toxics are not disrespectful to the Earth geo-logically considered, but context of Earth's Active Geology bio- and Encompassing Biosphere. only logically considered. That is, they disrespect Gaia (the new name for This given geo-context renders inherently Earth's biosphere) not Earth itself. In dangerous any and all methods of value contrast the Moon has no biosphere what- recovery by incineration, distillation, soever, and the totally encapsulated mini- electrolysis, precipitation, or whatever. biospheres that we will establish there, Take the stuff out of this context and the can be easily kept rigorously isolated. entire situation has changed. What’s in it for the Settlement? Toxicity = toxicity to something. Much of the salvage processing of Absent one of the two terms (bio- these "profitable imports" could be done sphere) and it becomes totally illegiti- robotically and/or by teleoperation from mate to continue to call the substances in the safety of isolated bunkers. question "toxic". Now, in this changed situ- The prizes to be gained are ation, we can talk possibilities fruit- recovered water and carbon dioxide, fully! and possibly organic feedstocks The next step is to determine where for production of those synthetics these troublesome wastes might have sal- for which the settlers are not able vage value. You guessed it! - to settlers to make inorganic substitutes, on our volatiles-impoverished Moon! To or reasonably do without, illustrate the potential of this Lunar They might also "mine" the ash Solution, we included Port Nimby on the for heavy and precious metals. periphery of the Prinzton Settlement Site. [see map hint in title art above.] Special "designer" bacteria night be of help in the process, though the sheer However, our settlers could afford variety and probable careless premixing of to pay to import such tainted volatile- wastes Earthside would tend to make this rich (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen plus impractical as a general approach. extras) shipments only if they were subsi- dized by desperate terrestrial authorities It is possible, of course, that we to the point that they would be markedly will develop safe methods of detoxifying cheaper than the alternative Phobos-Moon such wastes on Earth and/or quit producing "pipeline", with the much greater cost and them in the first place. difficulty of clean processing of the The point may never be reached NIMBY hot stuff. Of course, if the ship- where the lunar solution ments were free, F.O.B. Port Nimby, that becomes economically attractive. would be ideal. That is unlikely, however, A lot depends on when and if as one could expect custodial authorities transport costs come down on Earth to foot the bill to toss the substantially. stuff out of Earth's gravity-well but not Radiactive Wastes the additional cost of soft-landing it on What about Highly Radioactive Wastes? the Moon. Free "F.O.B. L1", on the crest This is a considerably more stubborn between the Earth's and the Moon's gravity problem. No storage site on the geologi- wells, is about all our settlers can real- cally active Earth can be safe for the istically expect. full length of time needed, excepting The biosphere discontinuity (the possibly the deep-injection of such "hot" extremely hard vacuum and the total absence wastes into active subduction zones, for of ground water) between Prinzton and Port example where the Pacific plate is slowly Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 16 diving under the advancing North and South American continental plates. By the time, MMM #33 - March 1990 if ever, such dumpings reemerged up some volcanic throat after tens or hundreds of millions of years of mixing with molten Concluding our Report on PRINZTON magma deep below the crust, no problem a two-tier, three-village rille-bottom would remain. If that solution remains an settlement for 3,000 - 5,000 persons impractical dream, then the intractability of the problem could make the lunar option very attractive. Mining Radioactives for power and water But how would settlers put such shipments to use? Perhaps they could be densified by distillation into signifi- cantly hotter concentrations, useful for generating Nighttime Power. They would be reclassified from "fuel" to "waste" when the power density they support falla below a certain level economically useful for the competitive generating stations on Earth. Yet they might still yield economi- cal power in the quite different lunar economic environment. Part VII: CONCLUSION. Any water in which these hot ship- ments are stored for shipment, once repur- A. Prinzton in a ified, would be a very welcome free addi- Multi-Site Lunar Economy tion to the settlement reserves. Further, by Peter Kokh radioactive wastes might also come in very PRINZTON CONTRACTORS: By virtue of the handy for maintaining thermal equilibrium manufacturing capacity and experience, for the settlement. And the temperatures Prinzton must possess to develop and build generated might allow continued nighttime itself, it will have contractors able to operations of some industries using con- assist in construction elsewhere on the centrated solar heat by day such as glass Moon. On this list will be know-how and and ceramics production and other "life- equipment to build similar rille-vault and blood" enterprises. crater-vault structures, including sky- There are a lot of ifs that we can panes and heliostats, funiculars (rille- not honestly resolve here in 1990. The and crater-slope elevators), regolith- realistic cost of disposing highly radio- moving draglines, people movers, and active wastes safely beyond a reasonable general biosphere set-up and maintenance dowbt may be so great that a lunar solu- capacities. tion will become attractive. CO-MANUFACTURERS: Prinzton will also But then, even if “the economics” have built up facilities for “MUDS/cle” became "right", there will be a host of assembly of works packages made on Earth public misconceptions to overcome - inclu- with casings made locally: appliances, ding the absurd pseudo-physics behind the vehicles, equipment, etc. After it meets opening “catastrophe” of the first episode its own needs, such co-manufacturing and of the mutch-watched science-fiction TV assembly production will be available for series, “Space 1999” in which a runaway transshipment to other lunar sites. reaction in just such a lunar repository As Prinzton meets of Earth’s radioactive wastes dislodges MANUFACTURED GOODS: its own needs, its factories can continue the Moon from its orbit around Earth, to to turn out furniture, furnishings, and wander through space endlessly, meeting a other household goods for other lunar host of aliens along the way, of course.. settlements. Other items it can supply to But possibly such "wastes" will be smaller communities (mining towns, etc.) the first "treasures" imported by some will be modular parts for utility systems, future Port "N.I.M.B.Y." on the Moon. service harnesses, etc.; light vehicles, < MMM > bicycles, and carts; containers and pack- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 17 aging; processed foods, cosmetics, and dyes; Such a vault would offer a blue day- clothing; arts & crafts materials and span sky without heliostats. If combined tools; recovered volatiles and feed-stocks with cottages set into the rille slopes from Port NIMBY operations; field-tested and having added shielding on their plant seed and seedlings; agriculture and individual roofs, the shield mass above biosphere equipment. the vault could be kept to the minimum EDUCATION: In addition to having schools necessary to allow the desired degree of more complete than smaller settlements can translucency. For not only would vacationers provide, plus a small university, Prinzton spend only a week or two a year in such a will be a source of Moon-appropriate text spot, call it “Lost Valley.” they would books & manuals and traveling instructors. spend perhaps a third or more of that time within the further-shielded cottages. ENTERTAINMENT AND CULTURE: Not only would Prinzton be an entertainment Mecca, its singers, dancers, actors, and story- tellers could go on periodic tours to the various out-settlements. Prinzton would be a natural media center. B. RILLE-SITE VARIATIONS: NATURE PRESERVES AND GET-AWAY RESORT COMPLEXES by David E. Cremer and Peter Kokh The Prinzton design study aimed at outlining the general features of as Vacationer barbecuing on cottage patio comprehensive and full-featured a facility Illustration by David E. Cremer as a community of 3,000 plus souls could Plus, scattered hardened shelters expect by mid-21st Century. But we also could be provided for refuge in case the sketched some variations of rille-site thinner vault was penetrated by a meteor- structures. oid, a rather remote possibility, but still NATURE PRESERVES: One of these was a one much more likely than in Prinzton. The hundred-miles-long Nature Preserve in a sky-pane could be electrically heated to sinuous rille, complete with a recycling 33 F during the nightspan and with natural river, ponds and waterfalls, pockets of drip-point texturing to allow the dayspan forest, meadowland, and marsh, herds of buildup of atmospheric water vapor to con- deer and other wild life, and a sightseer dense and fall as a gentle rain, spreading monorail for minimized interference and westward after the sunset. Earth’s many impact. This would be an inviting, soul- “rain songs” would become popular. restoring extravagance further in the Facilities for Staff future, a dream to work towards. All staff housing, grocery stores, RESORT COMPLEXES: More easily realized other shops, restaurants and nightclubs, and sooner needed would be a Resort maintenance facilities, etc., would be Complex offering safety-valve and escape placed on the rille-shoulder so that features to make life on the Moon a little within “Lost Valley” itself, there would less harsh. Starting with the assumption be only cottages, playing fields, greasy that as individuals will spend only small meadows, forest groves, floral gardens, fractions of their lifetimes in such a lagoons and trout streams, and an extra facility, we suggest that much less shiel- complement of people-hardy wildlife, etc. ding mass be used. A much stronger single Not the seaside, nor the mountains (holi- vault to hold the atmosphere with greatly day beacons on Earth) but a pastoral set- reduced compensating overburden weight ting reminiscent of the green hills of the would be an attractive possibility if forsaken home world. that overlayer were in translucent form. Casinos and Bazaars “Cracked” color-free or bluish glass above One optional lure that might have an air-tight sky-pane:? Layered thick merit is a rille-top casino with and and panels of glass with zero coefficient or all winnings in the form of vouchers thermal expansion? Decisions for R&D. cashable only at a luxury import emporium. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 18 This mecca would provide an invaluable Architecture.” in MMM #5, May ‘87 [article safety-valve for the lunar pioneers who included in MMM Classics Vol. #1.] otherwise freely but wistfully accept The price of lunar settlement will major sacrifice of luxury terrestrial remain stubbornly high if we have to use consumer paradise goods. liberal quantities of Earth-sourced org- Location could be everything anic sealants.Anything we can do to sub- Such a resort complex might be situ- stantially reduce this need will help. ated in any convenient rille. But one Fusing and glazing are certainly a first possibility, heightening the psychological step because they reduce the general poro- getaway effect and offering extra out-vac sity at least to mere hairline cracks. excursion activities would be a just- Then, instead of an overall painted or beyond-the-limb site. For lunar farside sprayed coating, we can hot-pressurize the nights offer eye-filling, mindboggling habitats with a sodium salt that will Earthless skies, dominated by the Milky vaporize and seek out all the cracks, Way shining with a brilliance and wealth sealing them. Sodium will eventually be of star cloud detail such as we Earth- extractable from the regolith KREEP frac- imprisoned souls can scarcely imagine. tion. How we might keep such a membrane in good repair is another question, one which To give an instance, there are some to date has received little attention by SW-NE running rilles in SW Mare Orientalis those better equipped to find an answer. or Eastern Sea (the great “bullseye” Without an answer, no type of architec- impact basin near 95 °W and 20°S about ture based on lunar materials will give us 1400 space-crow miles from the Prinzton the economic break-through we need to go site, some 40% of the route traversing beyond token outposts. It isn’t only highland terrain. Being just over the limb Prinzton that hangs in the balance. (by 5°) such a “Bullseye” site would offer the added drama of the Earth climbing just Bill Bogen, Ann Arbor (MI) Space over the horizon and then settling back Society: I don’t believe that using lunar below it. This would occur every 27.5 days regolith as a heat-sink would work very the Moon wobbles or librates from side to well. If the temperature is constant a few side slightly in its Earth-locked orienta- meters below the surface, it is because tion. As this period is somet two days the regolith or rock is a good insulator, shorter than the dayspan-nightspan cycle, and as such, will not carry away excess the timing of such events will drift. The heat from the settlement. sunlight phase of “the peek-a-boo Earth” REPLY: Our point on the temperature of the would also vary. Quite possibly honeymoon- soil is that it is significantly lower caliber stuff for future lunar pioneers. than the temperature comfort range a base It will take a thriving Lunar fron- will wish to maintain. So it is in that tier economy to support such a resort. As sense a heat sink, even if an inefficient the space-faring economy builds up, such a one. We also carefully segregated from the day will come. main village habitat structures all those C. QUESTIONS FROM THE READRS industries that would produce a lot of Replies by Peter Kokh heat. These industries would be placed on the rille-top and would have to have their Ed Marwick, Chicago Space Frontier: own heat-rejection systems. While we did I have doubts about fusing the lunar not do heat flow studies for the village rille slopes and bottoms to form an ade- habitats, we thought that the combination quate pressure/moisture membrane. This of the cold soil and choice of low-thermal would produce a vitreous (glassy) surface output activities would put us in the ball- that is susceptible to attack by water park towards overall thermal equilibrium. vapor in the air within the habitat. Bill Bogen: I presume that each of REPLY: This may be so. But if some other, the three villages will have safety presumably organic membrane such as an features in case an adjacent village is epoxy sealant were to be used, it would ruptured and loses pressure. I also still work much better over a solidified presume that the walls/ceiling of each substrate. The point you bring up is one village will have a generous safety margin of the areas in most dire need of research and could tolerate higher than average and is pointed out in our article, “Lunar pressure. On that basis, have you consi- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 19 dered using differential air pressure poles are inclined by 1.5°) with fiber between the villages to store energy optic leads would be necessary, or else during the 14 day lunar nightspan? One reflection off some high-hovering soletta, advantage of this system is that little such as the Dr. Forward idea you mention. extra mass would have to be importe for More importantly, a polar settle- energy storage. A very rough calculation ment, while it may be needed to ‘mine” seems to indicate that one village using a water-ice, will be poorly located for 10% pressure change could store about 7200 lunar processing and manufacturing, simply kilowatt hours, an amount my household because both poles are in highland areas, uses in about 20 months. If this is so, it far from basaltic maria. Any settlement would not be near enough to be the prime not on or near a highland/mare coast” energy storage means, but could act as a will be at a disadvantage for resource supplement. utilization. The highlands are rich in REPLY: Safety in case of rupture was one aluminum and calcium, the maria in iron of the reasons for choosing a segmented and titanium. Even if water ice is found, multi-village plan. (Other reasons include the poles will probably play a “supporting the ideal opportunity to stagger the work- role only.” Any lunar development limited time clocks of the three villages, so that to polar areas will be limited indeed.The everyone gets to work their day shift polar gambit is a “hare strategy.” We while the settlement’s industries and prefer the “tortoise strategy.” services function on a 24 hour basis; and Charlie Moore: How will suddenly the opportunity to encourage different appearing plant diseases be kept from architectural styles, village plans, even wiping out all the crops? Will farming be flora and fauna.) We’d expect air pressure hydroponic and sterile? to fluctuate somewhat both with temperature and with the not-quite matched cycles of REPLY: This is a problem with which any carbon-dioxide and oxygen production. But settlement design must cope, not just we’d hate to deliberately stress the system Prinzton. Admittedly, Prinzton’s use of further than that. megastructures enclosing large areas, as However, as passive thermal and power opposed to linked but separable modular systems are the ideal place to start, we’d pressurized units, makes one of the reme- be happy to have someone figure out if the dies available to a modular settlement natural pressure cycle just outlined has unapplicable: open the infected area to power storage, and release, potential. We vacuum. If the upper farmfield area was never thought of pressure fluctuation as a emptied of air, the upper vault would be an energy storage “flywheel.” Rather, we in danger of collapse from its own now- looked on the water reserves both as means unsupported weight. However, Prinzton’s of thermal equilibrium (active, by the use use of a two-tier structure might allow of heat pumps, if need be) and energy stor- the farmfield to be sterilized by baking. age (electrolysis-fuel cell cycle; hydro- Some way of relieving excess air pressure electric cycle.) from the heating would be needed. It may be possible to maintain high biological Bill Bogen: What about a polar site isolation between the farmfields of the for a rille-type settlement? three villages until the infected one was REPLY: There are no maria “seas” within brought under control. 600-some miles of either pole, and rilles We specified “raised bed” farming (as opposed to fault grabens) are exclu- over hydroponics as the latter has many sively a feature of the lava-flooded maria stubborn problems. There was no discussion aareas. But the general concept of a two- of keeping a sterile environment. A bal- tier, differential pressure, habitat struc- lanced microbial ecosystem that keeps ture should be adaptable to appropriately individual mircobes in check, would be sized craters. If you could find three preferable if we have learned by then how such in the same vicinity, you would be in to set one up and maintain it. Nonetheless business. Getting sunlight into such polar microbes will be the real danger. Larger craters will be a “tall’ order, but not insect and rodent pests should not be a impossible. Tower-mounted heliostats a problem as careful measures (packing seed minimum of 2,000 ft. above the crater rims in heated nitrogen) should prevent their (at the pole, other-wise higher since the importation from Earth in the first place. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 20 Charlie Moore: How will you handle population growth beyond design limits? MMM #34 - April 1990 REPLY: Many foresee only a restricted CELEBRATING EARTH DAY #20 future for lunar sur-face operations, one consisting or robotic and teleoperated mining operations coupled with a mass The Many Space Benefits driver. We see a significant role for lunar surface manufacturing to support for Mother Earth growing space markets. In time this indus- Essay by Peter Kokh trial base should diversify to employ a The sense of Earth as a fragile much larger population. Neighboring Oasis in Space has been greatly enforced village habitats can’ be built in this or by the view from space. The snapshot of other nearby rilles or in rilles in other the “Full Earth” taken by the Apollo 17 areas of the Moon. As to birth control, we crew during their return from the Moon is might expect fami-lies to size themselves quickly becoming the most popular photo of according to long-range prospects for all time. Earth-love is in. Oasis-smarts continued economic growth. < MMM > are in. The contributions of Space Technology Glass/Glass Composites to the cause of preserving what we can of Ongoing SSI-Supported Research the biological and environmental heritage of the Living Earth as we inherited it Brandt Goldsworthy, the President of from previous generations of stewards, are Alcoa Goldsworthy, reports that testing of already considerable - even fundamental to the feasibility of producing glass compo- our present attentiveness. Meteorology and sites from loose lunar regolith soils by communications satellites have played solar heating will begin sometime this supporting roles to the various national year (1990). McDonnell Douglas has a spare Landsats. In their starring roles, these parabolic solar concentrator able to pro- latter multi-spectral thematic mappers duce temperatures above 3000 °F (1650 °C) have not only afforded us an ever-updated needed to melt the raw material, and has real-time census of Earth’s forests, agri- agreed to lend the unit to Goldsworthy. cultural lands, deserts, and the snow Crude glass-glass composites on the cover. They have also revealed land use analogy of fiberglass reinforced plastics patterns, and sown blight, drought, silt- (RFP) would be the easiest way to build content of waterways, red tides, and many structures needed for a lunar settlement other aspects relevant to understanding using on site materials. Some further and realizing the true state of the envi- refinements could provide export-quality ronment and the rate at which it is building materials for income-yielding changing, usually for the worse. To act export to space construction sites. appropriately, we need knowledge, and Earth- Shown below is an illustration of monitoring satellites have provided us an what such a highly automated early lunar “authority to consult. industrial installation might look like - “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” goes from Popular Mechanics. the saying. The nine giant Earth Observa- tion Satellites (EOS) that will form the keystone of NASA’s “Mission to Planet Earth” in the coming decade, are necessary both to give us accurate knowledge of all the key environmental “hot spots” and the means of timely assessment of the effec- tiveness of whatever well-intentioned reme- dial measures we have taken. But the future role of Space Techno- logy in the battle to preserve - and then restore - the Earth goes will beyond its distinguished service as a vantage point from which to detect, observe, and monitor. In a somewhat belated, but extremely wel- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 21 come admission, NASA, in its report to the •a slowing of the pace in plant/animal President on Moon-Mars options, notes that extinctions by one or more of three options, “the Moon •a greatly reduced disparity in the has a role to play in the long-term supply general living standards between the of clean electricity o fill Earth’s needs.” developed and underdeveloped worlds. Those three options are: No-holds-barred economics might give • Solar Power Satellites way to an alternate game based on Eco- • Fusion power plants fueled by Lunar custodial Economics. While nations may yet Helium-3, and cling to their illusions of “sovereignty”, • Relay transmission of power form a ring various international institutions will of solar arrays on the Moon itself. channel a significant portion of their Clean electric power generation will real inter-dependency. Modeling its acro- not solve all of our planet’s environmental nym after an ancient Roman goddess of the problems. As we learn how to design the Earth, T.E.L.L.U.S. or Terrestrial Eco- valuable mini-biospheres needed to re- custodial Liaison and Logistics Utiliza- encradle our settlements of unearthly hor- tion Service, or something of the sort, izons, we will learn lessons invaluable to may work to guarantee that previously our efforts to preserve and restore bal- slippery multi-national conglomerates ances within Earth’s surviving fragmented operate responsibly. ecosystems. And as we learn to operate U.N.E.S.C.O.rather than the old U.N. uttra-efficient and through recycling General Assembly may be the one body with systems in these frontier communities, representation from all Earth and off- some of that technology will apply to situ- planet nations alike. For while much of ations below. This “Biosphere Benefit” the U.N. agenda would be irrelevant and will be major. inapplicable off-planet, shared educational, A “Healthy Earth” must also include social, and cultural concerns will always a Healthy Cultural Environment with real bind mankind’s far-flung communities. opportunities to burst out of dream-squel- A.I.D.S. may no longer refer to the ching spiritual limits and horizons. It once dread and now long forgotten fatal must express itself in a reinvigoration of STD, but rather to the Asteroid Impact education and of youthful dreams and oppor- Deflection Service, the current analog of tunities. It can do this only through military preparedness, only now aimed at continuing interaction with and endless inanimate objects capable of snuffing out frontier. The renaissance of arts and life on Earth, rather than against fellow crafts stimulated by frontier forms will humans. And, whether we will have listened be a part of this phenomenon. to “intelligent” radio signals from other Earth and the human soul will share star systems or not, a common fate. If , in misplaced concern, we will have detected we act contraceptively to “keep Earth-life the oxygen-sweet “signatures” on Earth” in search of some lost pastoral of other “Earths” Eden, we will have plunged ourselves into around some nearby star-suns a Hell of o escape instead. “Earth Day” as celebrated beyond Earth Day 2070, the 100th Anniversary Mother Earth might naturally be trans- What environmental achievements formed into a corresponding “Children of might we have realized Earthside eighty Earth Day” festival held throughout off- years from today as a benefit of space planet civilization. The matriotric toast technology? Exploiting one or a combination - “To Gaia and the Gaiacules” - sums up of the three Space-Resource-Based options the spirit of celebration of our Human- for eco-safe electrical power generation Gaian origins. Observed on a rhythm set by listed above, we could expect: the adopted calendar-variant in use in •a stabilization of the trend to global each case, this holiday will become the warming occasion for rededication to the continued • an end to acid rain eco-custodialism and further bio-enrich- • some relief on the pressure to cut ment of all the offspring Oases of Earth- forest growth for fuel and for farmlands life that we have established throughout •a spread of intensive greenhouse the Inner Solar System. - PK vegetable gardening Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 22 glass cullet and ceramic shards can be used e.g. embedded in glass matrix decora- tive panels covers, fronts, handles and RECYCLING by Peter Kokh knobs. In the case of inorganic materials [This outline of materials-management the purpose of all this effort will first systems appropriate for Space Frontier be to reduce total energy-generation settlements ALSO addresses some persis- requirements, a strongly economic motive. tent Earth-side problems.] Secondly, it will help settlers to mini- Recycling is an integral and essen-tial mize the Acreage of surrounding moonscape aspect of our "tenancy" of whatever corner that will need to be disturbed to maintain of the universe we occupy. It is custodial there a population of a given size, an common sense. And if it is becoming sound aesthetic goal. This "discipline" will economics here on Earth, it will be an allow us to tread softly and caringly on absolutely vital cornerstone of economics the magnificent desolation of an adopted on the Space Frontier. virgin world. Our strategy for realizing this ORGANIC & SYNTHETIC MATERIALS authentic way of life will have many sub- First we’ll need to recycle organic targets. Appropriate product design, easy and synthetic materials derived from such sortability, convenience, collection nodes, volatile elements as hydrogen, nitrogen, routing and route servicing, division of and carbon which will not exist in the responsibility, supply versus demand all-surrounding abundance we are accus- volume-matching, entrepreneurial opportu- tomed to on Earth, even after we are able nities, youth and school involvement, con- to supplement the vanishingly meager lunar tests, public discipline, tax incentives, sources with supplies from volatile-rich and backup systems must all be given asteroids and comets. This self-discipline special attention. will be indispensable for Lunar Settlement, RECYCLING - FOUR BASIC PATHWAYS. and highly advised for Space Colonies in near-Earth space. (1) REUSING of all refillable bottles and containers is the most obvious and most Keeping the ratio of native lunar economic. vs. exotic imported content as low as (2) RECASTING by crushing, shredding, possible will alone allow any chance for a melting, and then recasting fresh items is favorable trade balance and economic self- another. We do this with paper, aluminum, reliance. Thus priority must be given to and plastics for example. This method is our food and clothing needs in using these greatly hampered by unnecessary cross- precious elements. The purpose of such an contamination with durably-bonded unlike effort is to provide the lowest Cost of materials. As for markets for recycled living, by stretching the service life of temporary-use items, building products/ any volatiles imported at great expense furnishings best match supply. and by reserving them for uses for which there are no substitutes. (3) RETASKING or use-reassignment is a greatly underutilized third avenue. Timid INORGANIC MATERIALS examples are jelly jars designed for long Contrary to intuitive expectations, reuse as drinking glasses and butter it will also be salutary to recycle dishes designed to be reused as refriger- processed inorganic materials since they ator ware. There have been at least three embody considerable energy expense already abortive efforts to design what has been invested in extracting and processing them termed a "world bottle", a glass beverage from raw regolith soils. The more energy- bottle ingeniously shaped to serve anew as intensive a refined material is, the more a brick or building block. That is one to be gained from recycling it. Proper task worth taking up afresh! Designing pricing of virgin materials will guarantee smaller high-fashion glass bottles for this outcome. infrequently sold items, such as medicines, Tailings also embody the energy fragrances spices, etc., with a female- investment of their by-production, and threaded punt on the bottom to match the using them to make secondary building male-threaded neck would allow combining products would capitalize on this invest- these into stylish decorator spindles for ment. [See "TAILINGS" MMM # 25 p. 5. May any number of imaginative uses. Formula- '89 - republished in MMM Classics #3] Even ting packaging and packing materials to Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 23 serve as craftstuffs for artists or even INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES as fertilizer for gardeners is a promising The significant up-front role of possibility. In any such dual purpose industrial enterprises in creating a mate- design effort, it will be critically rial culture in which much more extensive important to find reassignment uses with and thorough recycling is possible than in adequate demand-potential to match, and our current American experience, is not use up, the full volume of supply. limited to proper product design. It should Otherwise any such efforts will be but be the highest priority of Frontier Govern- futile and distracting gestures. ments, to provide encouragement and incen- (4) REPAIRING is one avenue increasingly tives sufficient to ensure that the prin- being abandoned because of high labor costs. cipal avenue of industrial diversification involve new enterprises wins the by-product Repair costs, however, materials of those already in place. Again, could be greatly reduced this compounds the productivity of energy by more careful product design already spent. with greatly increased attention to assembly sequences and methods Properly integrated industrial parks that are take-apart-friendly. will involve suites of industries in an ecosystem of traded by-products. In one The present quest for seamless sophi- highly successful entrepreneurial effort stication in appearance is one of several in Texas a few years ago, an enterprising sirens luring manufactures in just opposite computer buff went from plant to plant, direction. asking for data an any unwanted supplies, To repairing, we might add refini- scrap, and by-products to put in his data shing and totally fresh makeover. Even bank. Within the first year, he was able where repair or refurbishing is imprac- to generate enough networking between tical, if the item in question cannot be sources of previously unadvertised supply economically disassembled, then the sundry and potential customers to take in a cool parts that would need separately recycling $5 million for himself. will end up being irretrievably trashed. "With a good system, even those Only the adoption of design and manu- will facturing methods not now in favor will who do not care, do the right thing. Without a good system, even make all this viable. Lunar manufacturers do care, can’t will need to sing this new tune. And those who do the right thing." frontier settlements cannot in the long run afford Given goods that are separable, sort- to import Earth-made items able, and economically recyclable, the not knock-down friendly. consuming citizen will at last have an honest chance to do his/her part. But it The extra cost of meeting these new is not enough to know what should be done. requirements will be minor in comparison Both citizens and government must also with Earth to Moon up-the-deep-gravity- realize that without proper organization, well freight charges. on several levels, it won’t happen. INSTITUTE FOR MOON-APPROPRIATE SORTING INDUSTRIAL DESIGN "A place for everything and every- No amount of recycling discipline on thing in its place" is not only an unbeat- the part of our hardy pioneers will work able philosophy for managing one's base- without such a wholesale redesign of ment, attic, and closets. It also applies consumer goods. For this reason, we really to the home and business recycling corners. do need to start now by establishing an Instantly identifiable bins or baskets Institute for Moon-appropirate Industrial must be conveniently arranged for every Design.. While aimed at meeting demanding category to be sorted separately. There is frontier requirements, the very constric- no reason that home recycling centers have tiveness of this challenge should make to look untidy, a hodgepodge of Rubber such an Institute the prestige Alma Mater Maid baskets and paper bags. A top priority of choice for industrial design students household product should be some sort of the world over, regardless of whether they bin-susan or bin-rack setup. Why entrepre- had any intentions of ever leaving their neurs aren't turning such things out here comparatively soft Earth lives behind. and now is beyond my comprehension. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 24 On the Space Frontier we'll need a the supply exceeds demand in the hope of greater number of different bins than we stimulating would-be entrepreneurs and do here, where the economy is only organ- artisans to discover fresh unsuspected pos- ized to take in paper, glass, aluminum and sibilities in such over-available stuffs. some plastics. [Milwaukee's Pollyanna Demonstration classes in artcrafts using Plastics is now negotiating with area recycled and discarded items would be in recyclers to take all the vinyl bottles order. and (!) polystyrene foam packaging they In Space Frontier pioneer towns, can buy back from the public, in addition "recycling" may finally to PET and HDPE plastics.] Glass and 'come out of the Alley" glax*, ceramic shards, and the various Farm-Mart Centers, wherever grocery metals; refillables and tradables, used shopping is done, should not only take in cotton cloth, fiberglass fabrics, thermo- the appropriate refillable containers but plastics, paper stuffs, dye stuffs, plus also buy/sell sundry categories of compost various compost categories all need sepa- and composting accessories such as paper rate bins. stuffs (e.g. corn husks) and garden and A collection system with convenient kitchen scrap dye stuffs, bone, and fat nodes to see that all these items find could be handled separately from any their way back to the industries that can compost that exceeds home garden needs. use them, is the next equally critical and Jailed inmates could do the heavy indispensable element in the recycling duty labor intensive disassembly work; triangle. Perhaps the electric delivery pardons might be in order for those demon- vans of the settlement could belong not to strating their capacity to function as individual merchants but to useful citizens by entrepreneurial develop- materials circulation enterprises. ment of markets for orphaned and high sur- They would pick up appropriate plus sort categories clogging the network. categories of disowned goods even as they deliver, a prerequisite for a Primary and Secondary School involve- license. ment will be crucial in making the system ALTERNATIVES AND OPTIONS work. This is the subject of the next article. [see "The 4th R" just below] But there must be many alter-native routings to make a system work. If ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITY containers and packages in which shoppers Finally, the frontier University has bring things home are designed to collapse a role to play as orchestra leader. or nest compactly, they could be reused The University, not government conveniently. It might even be bad taste bureaucracy, must assess how well to leave home empty handed! Drop-off the system is working, and develop Centers could be conveniently central to needed improvements. each shopping area. Properly arranged and A University office would maintain the managed (a place for every-thing, computerized current inventory of various remember?) they needn’t be unsightly. depositories with a disciplined materials Featuring lockers, public toilets, cafes, accounting system monitoring supply/demand they could include floral gardens, stalls imbalances, and circulation efficiency, for artists and craftsmen, repair and make- assign identifying sortation logos and over shops etc. And why not arts & crafts routings for new classes, and maintain classes, street music, dress-up fashion updated guidelines on a utility cable and bauble shows, and even a "soap box" channel (or website). for those eager to share their concerns? The University should supervise and COTTAGE INDUSTRIES assist entrepreneurial experimentation in "Scavenge and Trade" licenses could its labs and shops to develop new mater- be given preferentially to those with ials and products that will take advantage cottage industries based an giving new of various kinds of discard stuffs that life to cast-off materials and items. Art are in excess supply. As such it will be a du Jour, serendipitous temporary sculp- principal incubator of new businesses and tures made from collected items, could be economic diversification. a major draw. Such creations might feature The University’s Institute of Indus- those items and sort categories for which trial Design would work to find new ways Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 25 to implement such philosophies as "whole sheet" scrapless design of product/acces- sory combos, "kosher" assembly of unlike materials for later ease of separate recy- THE FOURTH 'R' by Peter Kokh cling, "honest surfacing" that utilizes Here on Earth, we imagine we can the design advantage and character of afford the luxury of continued general materials undisguised by surface treat- ignorance of the way our Biosphere works ments that make proper sorting identifica- and what may be necessary to maintain its tion anything but easy. health. We allow our young people to drop out of school, and allow those who do VOLUME REDUCTION STRATEGIES Not only must we provide for proper complete their courses to graduate with sorting and routing of items to be recy- empty heads. We assume Mother Earth will cled, we must take care that the system is go on taking care of itself as it has from not overwhelmed. Volume reduction strate- time immemorial. Those that want to worry gies are in order. - that's fine, let them do their thing. The rest of us - let's party! In the USA, 40% of trash In the miniature oases of life that is packaging materials. Ecotects design, build, and seed with life
In MMM # 4 April '87 "PAPER CHASE" on the Space Frontier, we will have no such [republished in MMM Classics #1] we pointed luxury of aloofness or ignorance. Whether out that wood, paper, and plastics will be we prefer to live in space colonies, in prohibitively expensive. This whole fasci- lunar settlements, in pioneer Martian towns nating topic of how to service the diverse or elsewhere, the carefully set-up enve- packaging, labeling, and even the adverti- lopes of Earth-life, water, and atmosphere sing needs of the settlement with minimum we'll need to coddle our existence beyond reliance on precious volatile-rich mater- our native womb-world, will have minimum ials, that should be reserved to increase tolerances for healthy functioning. The the mass of the biosphere "flywheel", will ecological facts of-life in the fragile be the subject of a separate article in a exclaves of Gaia-Humanity will be imme- later issue of MMM. diate in their critical importance. SUMMING UP: A Space Frontier Biosphere or We must not allow either Lunar or Oasis might be described as a Space Settlements to be "born addicted" to closed mini-world where everyone a technology and culture of abundance and "lives downwind and downstream waste. All those elements needed to make from themselves". this ambitious program work must be This means relentless vigilance in keeping developed beforehand, pretested and pre- the water and air clean beyond any stan- debugged before lunar settlement begins. dards set on Earth. Food chains will be It would be best if as much of this short or telescoped. And waste biomass and as is appropriate could even be ready to organic materials must be efficiently and go for the first NASA/International Moon quickly recycled. Base. Those of us interested in off-planet To keep low both energy consumption settlement must begin the cooperative and the need to radiate excess heat, we'll addiction-treatment program that will need to get the most product per energy- enable such a propitious fresh start, as input/heat-output as possible. Recycling, well as create spinoffs that will aid in which recycles the energy of original pro- Earth's own environmental struggles. cessing as well as goods themselves, will Beating this addiction, from which be essential for all classes of materials. we all suffer, will require a "wartime" Back on Earth, environmental cons- dedication and inventiveness. Only to the ciousness is rising and is now the highest degree we succeed will we prove ourselves we've ever known. Yet, polls show people worthy citizens of Earth's con-solar only care enough to want "someone else" to hinterland. < MMM > take care of the problem, and to do so “The Environment” - without causing any personal inconvenience whether on Earth or on the Moon or forcing unwelcome changes in lifestyle. it’s a question of pay now, It should be clear that if any such or pay much more later. attitudes were common within a Space Frontier Biosphere, an environmental cata- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 26 strophe most likely without hope of reco- fying clues, and routes by which they are very, would follow all too swiftly. Nor cycled back into the system, and of the will it be enough to have "a high level" current market uses of recycled items can of individual responsibility. Everyone all be gradually introduced. In art classes within such frontier communities has to be the students would use only oasis-wise "oasis-wise". It must be Second Nature to media and craftstuffs, coloring agents, and the Pioneers to live as if the dawn of the finishes. next day depended upon their rigorous In frontier homes children could respect for the Biosphere-Facts-Of-Life. For gradually be entrusted with the responsi- indeed, we'll survive one day at a time. bility to monitor and manage the recycling The only way to guarantee an oasis- chores within their households. They wise citizenry, is to teach "Eco-Sense" to should be introduced to kitchen and garden the children, not as an elective, nor as a composting, learning which food or garden mere requisite for graduation that can be scraps need to be treated separately. They put off to the last minute, but as one can be encouraged to make things of pride backbone of their education. Recycling - from materials and discarded items. of the air, water, and biomass; of organic, No small part of early education synthetic, and inorganic materials - must would be to equip youthful vocabulary with be as important as Reading, (w)Riting, and sets of keywords and phrases having strong (a)Rithmatic. Children must be taught positive connotations. "Trash" and "Wastes", Recycling as the Fourth "R"! Eco-responsi- words of ill-repute, could be replaced bility has to become second nature. For if with "Freed" used as a noun i.e. stuff it is something we have to "remember" to relieved of previous service and ready for do, we'll only do it when it's convenient reassignment. ("Tommy, please drop off the or when someone else is looking. freed on your way to school.") The rehabi- Space Frontier Schools will have litation of "alley economics" must start then a major role to play in guaranteeing with the young. the survival of the settlements they serve. HIGH SCHOOL The pioneer youth must learn not merely At the High School level the entire how to sort discarded items properly, but curriculum should reflect Biosphere-Facts- have a good understanding of how used air, Of-Life. In the teaching of Biology, atten- water, biomass, and the various sorts of tion should be given to natural air and consumer materials are each routed back water cycles and the steps at which these into the system upon which their shared processes may need assistance within the lives depend. They should understand the mini-biosphere. The time it takes to bio- raw materials and by-products interdepen- degrade biomass waste and various types of dence of industries and the interrelated- organic materials should be covered. Not ness of all those kinds of life that make only should the Chemistry of atmospheric up their mini ecosystem. gasses be taught but also the nature of Students could be assigned recycling toxins, how they are produced both-in nature chores appropriate to their grade level to ad industry, and they can be neutralized give then hands-on appreciation of how or prevented. things work. The goal is not merely to In teaching Import/Export Economics, produce good consumers and insure oasis- the very critical role of recycling vola- wise home-economics, nor merely to produce tiles and already embodied energy must be good entrepreneurs, industrial managers stressed. An honest "Materials Accounting and workers, but to ensure that each System" ought to be taught with its cor- citizen has sufficient appreciation of the rective affect on Financial Depreciation Biosphere-Facts-Of-Life on which community and Expense Accounting. And as an ongoing survival depends, to vote intelligently class chore/project, the economics class and support only responsible political could maintain a Computer Database on some efforts. For while "lunacy" can be toler- subset of recyclables under supervision of ated on Earth, there's no place for it on the University. the Moon itself, or elsewhere in space. In industrial arts the concept of PRIMARY SCHOOL Whole-Sheet Scrapless Design can-be-brought In Primary School, rote learning of home with school contests ad competitions. the types of things to be sorted and recy- Entrepreneurialism in the service of recy- cled separately, of their names, identi- cling can be encouraged by the J.C.s and Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 27 in Junior Achievement projects, stressing the use of recyclables for which the MMM #35 - May 1990 market is slow. Industry could provide school art classes with access to slag Asteroid Theme Issue type sources of "accidental art" to be mounted or set for sale. A very useful Extracurricular Acti- vity, with supervision, would be to take in worn, broken, parts-missing, and cast- PORTS OF PARDON - by Peter Kokh off small durable items, especially inclu- ding toys. These could then be repaired Bring up the idea of using convicts and rehabilitated. And where this is to open up the less attractive and more impractical, the items could be disas- remote reaches of the space frontier, and sembled so all materials needing to be you are likely to get immediate and mixed recycled separately, can be. Time can be reactions. Some will shrink in horror at allotted for "Serendipity" ephemeral the "cruel and unusual punishment" seem- sculptures from such parts. ingly implied. Others will be more open, invariably citing the origins of New South UNIVERSAL CIVIC SERVICE Wales in Australia, back in 1788. Nor should this "immersion" in the spirit and process of oasis-wise recycling In that instance, the "Sirius" was stop with graduation from high school. In the flagship of a fleet that included an space frontier communities, where there armed trader, three store-ships and six will always be more to do than people to transports. Aboard were 202 marines of do-it, a Universal Civic Service after various ranks, five doctors and a few high school might not be a bad idea. mechanics, 40 women, and 756 convicts. Manning and maintenance of streetside They landed at Botany Bay at first, then recycling nodes, with care for their moved to Port Jackson, the heart of modern attractiveness and efficiency, operating Sydney. Later other convict ships arrived. other nodes in the recycling system, and The first "free settlers" arrived five other "schleping" chores such as accident years later in 1793. cleanups and maintenance of Parks and However, that is not exactly the alleys are one way a “Citizen-Candidate” sort of situation whose applicability to might pay his/er dues to frontier society. the space frontier we wish to examine. It Biosphere Maintenance is another would be prohibitively expensive to use appropriate dues-paying activity: i.e. space destinations of whatever kind as manning the water-treatment and air-fresh- "prison sites" far Earth's unwanted crimi- ening facilities, various yeoman farming nals. The ultimate Alcatraz or Devil's duties such as sorting spoiled produce and Island is not our topic here. other biomass "freed" into mushroom matrix, Quite the contrary! First, we propose animal fodder, and general compost. to send there, not criminals from Earth, Apprenticeships in the trades using but those from Space and Lunar Settlements recycled materials might also be consi- who prove to be resistant to reform. Second, dered for citizen-candidates if there are we are looking at "Quarantine Sites" not not enough of the above-listed job slots prison sites. Unlike the situation at available. Cleaning refillables and other Botany Bay, these "convicts" would have labor-intensive duties in the various neither wardens nor guards. Once on their recycling chains may also be in order. way, unable to return or to change course, The grand result of this thorough they would no longer be convicts, but three step education process (primary and freed men (and women in more nearly equal secondary schools followed by a stint of proportions - another difference from New universal civic service) would produce South Wales) in collective charge of their Space Frontier Citizens who fully appreci- own destinies. Those readers who have ated the fragility of their particular read the essay by Louise Rachel [in Moon oasis of life and who forever remained Miners' REVIEW # 4, January 1989] entitled deeply predisposed to live and act in a "Ruminations On The Uses of a Frontier" oasis-wise manner. We might even put some will recall one of her well-taken points of these education ideas to use right here that many persons who inevitably become on our home planet. < MMM > misfits in a settled and highly structured Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 28 society are able to function quite health- footing with everyone else. For this fully and productively in a wide open settlement would be started from scratch frontier. socially as well as physically. The stub- A hypothetical Gallup Poll might show born would quickly find themselves exam- most people to be of the impres- ples of harsh frontier justice. sion that "the guards" keep the Yes, the society that would order in any prison. But that is emerge would be rough and crude at no more than a superficiality. first. What may pass for justice From time immemorial, in prisons might seem a parody of what we hold throughout the world, it is the dear. But that would all change. prisoners themselves who both Contrary to the doctrines of some, structure and maintain what-ever criminal behavior is not "in the real semblance of order there is genes" at least not in a sense that in such places. Like chickens or wolves, such behavior is necessarily inherited. any group of felons will quickly find its own system or "pecking order". No, Revisit such a "Port of Pardon" a generation or two later, and no guards or wardens need stand by, you will find a society with so long as escape is unlikely increasingly genuine legitimacy, with deserved civic pride, For example - and for sake of argu- and real achievements, ment - a one-way settlement expedition both industrial and cultural, could proceed for Ceres or some other worth boasting about. potential Regional Belt Center, wholly crewed by convicts "pardoned" for freely Convict settlement opportunities accepting the option. They would have on need not be restricted to those already in board all the equipment and the knowledge serious repeated trouble with the law in stores needed to set up a self-sufficient lunar or space colonies. Those still oper- settlement that will not need resupply ating within the law - just, and chaffing other than by drone freighters for the at the bit, could apply to join such near term. When it comes to opening up endeavors. They'd need to sign releases boondock areas of the space frontier holding harmless established authorities having all the popular appeal of some for untoward personal consequences of latter-day Siberia, such a scheme might joining such groups. not be an unacceptable way to get the job Such a proposal achieves these three done. goals in the most economical fashion: In such a situation, not only would 1. Establishment of badly needed settle- the "convicts" be legally pardoned, they ments in unattractive locales without would tend to cease acting "like crimi- the lure of very expensive inducements. nals". Up against a hostile and barren 2. An alternative to building and main- environment, their survival would depend taining expensive traditional prisons on mutual cooperation, a lesson that would in space or on the Moon. sink in at the earliest inevitable oppor- 3. A sure-fire way of rehabilitating those tunity. Nor need they be pre-trained for who just don't fit in, while protecting the mix of jobs and tasks needed to mainstream society in the process. guarantee the settlement's survival. So The alternatives of traditional imprison- long as the necessary knowledge ment are not only considerably more was stored in libraries on board, expensive but also rather unpro- individuals would quickly self- ductive in comparison. Nor are select their niches in the do-or- customary ooptions more just by any die community-to-be, highly standards that will bear scrutiny. motivated to learn all they could It’d be a costly mistake for all to make themselves valuable if not concerned to dismiss such kill- indispensable (the one sure means three-birds-with-one-stone options of individual self-protection) without an honest trial. during the long months of the outbound passage. The bottom line is that there may be Never again, would they have a like no way to attract volunteers to the solar opportunity to enter a society on an equal boondocks in numbers enough. < MMM > Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 29 One already popularized scheme for recovering such volatiles would begin with identifying mountain-sized carbonaceous chondrite astrobits. A mass driver would be attached, using the unwanted "dirt cheap" silicates for mass to be ejected at WILDCATTING COMET CRUDE velocity. This means would kill two birds with one stone: bring the asteroid chunk SEARCHING FOR IMPOSTOR ASTEROIDS into handier proximity to the Earth-Moon
by Peter Kokh system; and begin the process of volatile THE STAGE IS SET extraction. The Moon, whaving been formed “hot” While many are excited about such is relatively depleted in the volatiles prospects, we wonder if there are not much necessary to support life: hydrogen, richer caches of ice in similarly near- carbon, and nitrogen. We do not know yet Earth orbits, promising much more of a whether the permanently shaded areas of reward. The unexamined common viewpoint is the Lunar Poles harbor comet-derived ice, that asteroids are asteroids and comets or whether, if so, how feasible it will be are comets, the latter being principally to tap. It could be that Lunar Settlements volatile in content so that if they can make do. If not? approach the Sun much closer than Jupiter, The Thirst For Volatiles, those they begin to outgass producing the fami- elements in short supply on bodies like liar comae and tails. Harvesting active the Moon that may have formed "hot" and comets may seem a very tricky business; have been able to hold on only to those we'll leave that for a future article. elements with high melting and boiling The one salient comet-fact almost points, will be the organizing driver for universally overlooked is that as comets opening and settling the space frontier. lose more and more of their mass with each Included are water/ice (or at least the orbital swing in towards the Sun, some of hydrogen needed to make water from scratch the less volatile, and possibly more with abundant lunar oxygen), carbon, and viscous stuff, does not get carried away nitrogen, and other elements needed in as gas and dust in the tail, but accumu- considerably less quantities. lates in an ever thicker blanket of "slag" Thanks to our harvest of the meteor- on the surface. ites that have fallen to Earth (i.e. the The amazing photographs taken of ground), we have found that a considerable Comet Halley - no thanks to Congress! - proportion of their parent source bodies revolutionized our picture of what comets contain economically recoverable amounts are like. Yes, we still see them as great of such elements. Matching the laboratory dirty snowballs, but now we know that they spectra of these meteorites to those accumulate slag crusts, and that all the obtained at the end of a telescope trained great outrushing of vaporized materials on various asteroids, we are able to clas- comes not from the surface in general, but sify many of the latter, according to only from the few open pores that the mineral content, with a fair degree of slowly growing slag layer has not yet confidence. succeeded in plugging! Carbonaceous Chondrites offer us the Prior to this discovery it was the prize we seek, a volatile content in the common belief (and still is for those who 20% range "soaked" in comparison to the have yet to make the paradigm switch these Moon! Among the best known of such bodies photos call for) that comets continue to are Ceres (far and away the largest aste- outgas, getting ever smaller, until they roid), Pallas, and possibly the Martian just waste away, to nothing. That is prob- moonlets: Phobos and Deimos. ably not their common fate. Instead it now Some of their volatile content may seems far likelier that comets eventually be in ice form, but some is also chemi- suffocate themselves, plug their flash- cally loosely bound, molecule(s) to mole- pores and "turn off", retiring into a cule as "water of hydration". Examples of cocoon of slag that they have gradually hydrates (which feel dry, not wet despite spun for themselves. They await a metamor- their content) are gypsum, soapstone, con- phosis, a butterfly transformation into crete, and blue vitriol (copper sulfate). rich water reservoirs for thirsty "homo Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 30 circum-solaris". For the vast bulk of the original endowment of dusty ice/snow remains "dormant" inside. Comets, in general then, do not die. They fall into a FEUDALISM IN THE ASTEROID BELT deep coma, awaiting some future "resur- By Peter Kokh. rection" and final justice. A life prospecting and mining "off The only article coming to our atten- the beaten track" out in the Asteroid Belt tion that hints at such a pregnant end to is an appealing future for many. Out there active comet life was written by Sheboygan in all that vast empty space, is escape (WI) NSS member Harald Schenk and appeared from the sometimes suffocating and choking early last year in Shores beyond the inde- pressures of life in those highly struc- pendent newsletter (now part of MMM) he tured and more densely populated regions edits for the Sheboygan Space Society. We of the familiar human range. reprinted the article in the August '89 Such a romantic vision, as effective Moon Miners REVIEW. In "Transition Comets', as it has been in inspiring the research Schenk reviews work done by Brian Marsden necessary to make it possible, bears and others which indicates that some closer examination. Our purpose here, is bodies classified now as asteroids may be not to rain on anyone's parade, but to indeed "impostors", dormant comet hulks. make sure we take an umbrella along. The evidence that gets behind their incog- Yes, all that vast empty space! It's nito masks does not come from ground-truth far far emptier than most of us would penetrators, nor from tele-spectral expect, given the Science-Fiction image of studies, but from orbital analysis. Asteroid Belt crossings as fraught with Most comets have characteristically the peril of imminent collision with wilder orbits than asteroids, not clus- closely spaced astrochunks. So we continue tered within 10° to 30° of the common to be amazed that none of the two Pioneer plane of the Solar System (the Earth- craft, or of the two Voyager probes even orbit-defined ecliptic continues to be the "noticed" that they were passing through inappropriate standard in use), indeed as this infamous zone. often as not orbiting in a direction oppo- Astronomers have identified, numbered, site to the otherwise system-wide common and calculated orbits for 3000-some aster- one (anti-clockwise viewed from the north oids, “minor planets”, as they are more by arbitrary convention). Thus asteroids accurately called. We have caught fleeting in highly inclined or retrograde orbits, glimpses of another 2000 or so, and now and those in extremely eccentric orbits, suspect that there may be as many as should be under suspicion as pretenders. 50,000 mountain-size or larger bodies The next step (with the highest pri- orbiting the Sun between the orbits of ority and urgency!) will be to do thorough Mars and Jupiter. spectrographic, photometric, and radar Seem like a lot? Let's roughly calcu- studies of such non-conformist asteroids late typical random spacing in the belt and see if they have a common tell-tale between asteroid neighbors orbiting in signature. We suspect this will be the formation or passing by in various criss- case. Once so armed, we can then turn our crossing orbits. attention back to the vast majority of For sake of argument, lets stake out asteroids with more commonplace orbits and the region from 180 to 380 million miles examine them one by one for the same give- out from the Sun and with a thickness away quirks in the light they reflect above and below their mean orbital plane towards us. of a combined 100 million miles. That For luckily not all comets have gives us about 3,500,000 million million orbits wildly askew from asteroidal norms. million cubic miles or 700 million million Comet orbits are statistically random, and million cubic miles for each. Take the a definite percentage of them will have cube root of that and you have an average the "delta-V reachable" orbits of Earth- close pass of 9 million miles. Limit the approaching asteroids. And these too must survey to larger asteroids, and their real eventually grow comatose. It will be this mutual isolation becomes even more apparent. cluster of Sleeping Beauties that become Now remember that for the foreseeable targets for the adventurers wildcatting future, the percentage of this "horde" for comet crude. < MMM > that will bask in the new-found warmth of Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 31 human attention will be rather small. Now possible forced cancellation or permanent IF the driving force of that activity is interruption of one's travel course or "Economic", there can be no possible otherwise expending precious fuel reserves; effective source of law and order to dropping one's own important duties and police such a vast beat! Whether we are projects for a lengthy rescue mission; etc. dealing with lone prospectors, homestaking In truth, Belters will prudently families, large roving rival companies, or minimize the risks by choosing from suit- a scattered few settlements engaged in able asteroids within tolerable range of service, repairs, and supplies, this "legal" full service centers (like Ceres, Vesta, void will be inescapable. Even with a etc.) or those within fair range at least horrendously expensive thousand unit temporarily. To do otherwise would be to asteroidal police force, average response tempt fate rashly. time to even the most dire emergencies HELP, AT A PRICE would be hopelessly slow. Prudence will also give rise to co- It would be naive to imagine that in operative mutual assistance pacts. These such raw frontier conditions there would will have to spell out terms for compensa- be no claim-jumping, no piracy, no extor- tion for economic consequences of going to tion, or no rape and plunder. High reward another's rescue. Even such pacts cannot has always been associated with high risk. be expected to offer anything approaching Opportunities for hermit-like freedom to full coverage of one's exposed butt. do one's own thing will come hand in hand Suppose some disastrous equipment with unimaginable material hardships (the failure in your mining camp threatens not nearest K-mart may be a year's journey only operations but the lives and safety away!) of your employees and possibly the families Crimes of opportunity may well be a they may have been allowed to bring along. problem. But, even allowing for some There is no one within range or who can magical angellification of the human come to your rescue without accepting species between now and then, other life critical financial harm to himself. Mercy and death emergencies are sure to arise - and compassion aside, what gain could and dialing 9-1-1 won't help much. possibly drive anyone to jeopardize his "Belters" will need to face un- own probably precarious financial position flinchingly and without regret whatever by acting like a knight in shining armor? unpredictable and not-personally intended Suppose there is nothing that can be done dangers and disasters come with the terri- to save your operation and habitats and tory of great opportunity. Those who can't that all you can hope for is a lifeline? do this cheerfully are best advised to It would seem that you are doomed unless "stay in Baltimore" - or wherever life is you and your charges agree to work as more genteel. "Belting" won't be for indentured servants of your rescuers for a everyone! negotiable number of months or years. Some What can happen? Medical emergen- may choose to perish. cies, such as a disease or trauma that Certainly some sort of generally can't be handled locally; equipment break- accepted code for crisis situations will downs after one has used the last salvage- need careful consideration. It will be able spare parts; a pressurization fail- advisable to have tentative protocols ure; an imminent failure of the life- adopted BEFORE Belt development begins in support system; contamination of food earnest. These could be gradually adapted supplies; a irreversible crop failure; not and supplemented as real-life experience to mention mischievous interference from warrants. "visitors". In the face of the possibility of Most such crimes will have have to real-life situations which, through some be borne without recourse to rescue or debt of rescue or by outright piracy, outside assistance even from the willing. could result in the loss of freedom and There will be rare times, however, when influence over one's destiny, would-be aid is just barely possible from a belters will further lessen the contrary "neighbor" or from a ship cruising within odds by carrying survival pods and life- range. But more than likely, such aid will boats and by conducting periodic disaster involve extreme inconvenience for the drills. They might also carry with them would-be rescuer: changing course and courtesy drone rescue lift-rafts to toss Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 32 one another. The likelihood of concluding this idea is the fact that the asteroids a binding Mutual Aid pact with other par- each have their own orbits, differing in ties may depend upon both being so equipped. period and thus in orbital speed. As a There should also be Special Courts result, any route-logical array of mining in the full service center settlements to operations and hamlets will will only be a adjudicate any debts incurred in rescue fleeting one. The premium will be on efforts and to arbitrate the length of suitable asteroids with an orbital period agreed upon indenture service. There would and velocity as close as possible to one be courts in such centers anyway to take of the various service centers so as to care of claim conflicts, payment disputes, maintain formation with it over a period and all other ordinary judicial fare. of some decades. [See MMM # 24 April '89, To get a better grasp and apprecia- "CERES" - republished in MMM Classics #3]. tion of the challenging situations Belters Talk of wanting "to Pioneer the could find themselves in and of the social Asteroids" is perhaps somewhat dishonest consequences which would tend to follow, in the light of these realities. Or it may we would do well to study some of the be better to say that it betrays a dual loose parallels from other times in human ignorance, first of the bitter 'geograph- history. Population sizes are likely to be ical' facts of life in the Asteroid Belt, individually very small: what aspects of second of the depth of one's own readiness Hunter-Gatherer life would translate to to cope with the full intensity of the Belter experiences to come? A Belt-wide isolation that such a life may entail. A law enforcement fleet is quite impractical. bitter fruit! A similar vacuum of authority existed Saw will question this assessment, throughout the Middle Ages: what aspects leaping forward to the prospects of great of medieval feudalism are we likely to new propulsion systems that will offer find reappearing in the Belt? "easy and swift" casual travel to shrink It is not only law, order, and the great distances into irrelevancy. Or crises management that we need to get a perhaps the reader will insist that the handle on. The severely isolated situa- mineral wealth to be gained is so great tions in which Belter mining parties and that the expense of maintaining whatever small communities will find themselves has police force may be necessary will seem little real precedent in human history. minor. They may be right, and optimistic Even the earliest Polynesians in their Science-Fiction scenarios may turn out to far-flung island chains were effectively be accurate forecasts after all. much closer together, the incidence of Perhaps the truth lies in between. their interactions being higher. What The early decades for Asteroid Pioneers effect will such an extreme scattering will be ones of harsh privation and some- have on cultural continuity and or educa- times tragic hardship. But in time, any tional opportunities? tentative colonization of the Asteroids Will inbreeding be the norm? Or will will whither and die out if the conditions chance encounters be taken advantage of and quality of life do not vastly improve. for hastily arranged marriages and liai- If you still want to be on of the sons with little time left for such rela- earliest trailblazers, all the same, you tively recent luxuries as 'first falling have my respect. "May the Force Be With in love'? You." You are going to need it! And WE In Australia, serving the scattered WILL DO IT! < MMM > little railroad hamlets strung in a well- starched line across the Nullarbor (means "treeless") plain, there is a regular train affectionately called "The Tea And Sugar" which stops at each of these TEA & SUGAR - by Peter Kokh places. This train serves as the sole In the preceeding article, we made life-line for those living along this mention of the famous traveling "Grocery desolate route. One could imagine Belter Store Train” that crosses the hundreds of operations preferentially so arranged that barren miles through the states of South some sort of Catering Caravan or at least Australia and Western Australia. [An illus- single Trader Ships could service them by trated article on the "Tea and Sugar" is some reasonable route. Working against featured in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, Vol. 169, Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 33 NO. 6, June 1986, pp. 737-57]. Perhaps such Thus the T&S could sever well as a ensembles will one day service the far traveling school also, even offering certi- flung outposts of humanity on these lesser ficates, validating diplomas, etc. For worlds 'swarming' beyond the orbit of Mars. this purpose, several teachers and tutors Whether they will be mini-fleets, might be aboard, perhaps having signed up single larger ships, or perhaps variable for a tour of "public service" duty out of “consists” more on the analogy of river some home port population center on one of barge trains, they would ply ever changing the major asteroids like Ceres or Vesta. "routes of opportunity" between mining Such a chance to get away and see outposts as the host asteroids continually the worlds would provide an essential ele- shift co-location patterns in their endless ment of education that could not possibly orbit-jockeying. be offered within a lone outpost, no matter What facilities, tradesmen, and amen- how well-stocked its library and data banks. ities could such Tea & Sugars offer to the The young people would have a chance to isolated pockets of humanity they'd serve? visit other outposts at each port of call, Bear in mind that to some extent everyone to see and experience other ways of doing in an outpost will need to be a jack of and living. A spirit of kinship would grow many trades. Yet in such small and iso- that would stay with them throughout their lated samplings of humanity, there cannot lives and generate a sense of Asteroid Co- possibly be represented the full range of nationality. abilities, talents, trades, arts and pro- Friendships made on the T&S might fessions needed to stave off an inevitable well be the seeds of future marriages, cultural and social decline through sheer partnerships, and joint ventures of various malnourishment. kinds. The Tea & Sugar type caravan plying While each outpost will almost cer- these shifting Belt-lanes, would clearly tainly have a general practice physician, be more than just a nice luxury making the Tea & Sugar could have a clinic with a Belt life bearable. It would provide the pediatrician, a geriatrician, a neurosurg- glue holding all of Belt Civilization eon, an orthodontist, and other special- together. These caravans would swiftly ists. A magistrate to take care of minor become the "Mobile" Infrastructure without legal loose ends; troubleshooters in elec- which any opening of the Asteroid Belt tronics and mechanics to handle stubborn would not long succeed. problems; experts in agriculture, waste How would an outpost pay for T&S recycling, air and water quality, and services? Surely not by public taxes! A general small biosphere maintenance; diet- Belt-wide government is just as much a itians; a habitat architect - all of these wild-end impracticality as the police would be welcome visitors at what is forces needed to maintain it. likely to be irregular long intervals. Outposts will of necessity produce This visiting caravan could include their own fuel to run generators, machi- a stable of craftsman and artists who nery, and vehicles. They could refuel the would make things during the long in- T&S caravans for free, and perhaps reple- between journeys for sale at each stop. Or nish some pantry supplies. Further they conversely, the T&S could take on arts and could trade some of the mineral wealth crafts on a consignment basis at each stop they have mined. The problem does not seem to trade at the stops to follow. to be that outposts cannot afford such a Young lads and lasses in such out- service. posts might soon learn the little their Rather the problem is that outposts elders could teach them, probably far less cannot survive without the T&S caravans than their capacities and aptitudes would whose operators will have the miners at take them if they could have access to a their mercy, able to extort more in pay- larger population. So when the T&S calls, ment than is fair, reasonable profit their parents might send them off on this included. Nor will competition keep the traveling boarding school to learn from costs of outpost visits down. There may not the tradesmen, artisans, and specialists be enough of a traffic pie to divvy up. aboard and to benefit socially from the The pragmatic solution may lie in companionship of youngsters from other cooperative ownership of the T&S companies outposts before the T&S brought them back by the mining operators themselves. Time home the next trip around. will tell. < MMM > Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 34 enough to maintain most of this profit potential. MMM #36 - June 1990 Prinzton facility design criteria should favor the "low tech" approach of requiring the use of ample plant biomass [BIOSPPHERICS] to recycle carbon dioxide to fresh breath- able oxygen and to otherwise "condition" the atmosphere inside the settlement. Indoor pollution, already a concern in contemporary terrestrial buildings using synthetic construction materials, will be a critical issue in a permanently enclosed biosphere which is essentially a closed system or at least one which has highly limited output leakage and input make-up in comparison to facilities of any size within Earth's biosphere. Vegetation will also likely provide the "low tech" water filtration and purifi- cation for the closed-cycle hydrosphere envisioned, with pure water recovered by de-humidifiers from plant transpiration supplying drinking water at the "start" of the loop. by The evolution of lunar habitat design David will require a transition from the initial A. Dunlop "carry out and bring back" strategy of Shuttle missions, Space Stations like Mir DESIGN AND STRATEGY ISSUES and Freedom, and early lunar surface habi- FOR LARGE LUNAR BIOSPHERES tats, to one which introduces a sustainable largely closed-system biotechnology. The The development of a 3000 to 5000 ultimate significance of this transition person community will only be cost feasible recognizes that life itself will begin to within a 25 to 50 year time-frame, if it transform the man-habitable environment feeds itself and dependent Cislunar and just as life has transformed Earth. Indeed, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) populations. Doing the design myopia most likely to prevail this will leverage the economic advantage in our "Prinzton" scenario is the contin- of abundant lunar oxygen which can provide uing focus on human requirements in the half the mass of all plant and animal narrow sense of air, water, and nutri- tissues and 8/9ths of the mass of the tional needs. associated water. Foreseeable cost per pound, Earth surface to LEO and to cislunar The scale of Prinzton's ambitions and lunar surface locations, require such for a large human population demands a a "grow your own" strategy to save the recognition that the "best" biosphere for unnecessary import cost of this oxygen humans is also the most diversified; "best" content. Importing such high-oxygen content here defined as the most stable, self- items as food and water to the Moon would sustaining and diverse community of life be like bringing "Coals to Newcastle". forms possible. The physical security of The substantial savings (circa 95%) any large colony will require food stocks in fuel costs of similar payloads launched which are diversified and not subject to from the Moon over those launched from the catastrophic mono-crop failures. While the surface of the much more massive Earth, Moon is close enough to quickly resupply will give lunar-grown food, and water food stocks or to evacuate in the event of constituted with lunar oxygen, a 48% and a "potato famine" type of bio-catastrophy, 73% price advantage respectively, delivered a Mars base would be highly vulnerable to LEO and other cislunar space facilities. given the 26-month launch window spacing While this estimate discounts the high and long transit times. capital costs of accessing lunar resources, Early high priorities for base deve- such costs can be amortized at a rate low lopment will be the creation of lunar soils Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 35 from the raw material of the regolith, well as on the design requirements for human wastes, and wastes from food produc- storing and recycling the biological tion and processing. The micro-ecology of wastes generated by such bases. Because creating a growing soil bank for sustain- the "trashing" of the Antarctic environ- able agricultural production will require ment is already apparent even with the planned early storage of biological wastes relatively limited human intrusion there, for their ultimate transformation into this engineering prototype of a more eco- viable soils. Frozen storage in the lunar sensitive system will serve not only lunar "shade" of lava tubes or high latitude habitat goals but also provide a transition rille and crater walls should initially be to an environmental ethic requiring such adequate. This process of storage and accu- Arctic or Antarctic bases to live downwind mulation cannot continue indefinitely, how- and downstream of themselves, something ever. These wastes will necessarily become that settlers in the closed biospheres of the organic stocks of the new biosphere. the space frontier must do. The capital equipment investment The difference between such polar needed for this transformation of waste prototype research sites and such poten- stock can be kept in bounds by employing tial sites as lunar lava tubes or rille- the "M.U.S./C.L.E." strategy of Massive, bottom enclosures is still considerable. Unitary, and Simple type elements that can Possibly some differences between Earth be locally self-manufactured, married to rock soils and lunar regolith, and cer- Complex, Lightweight, and Electronic type tainly the available water and atmosphere, elements that must be imported from Earth. will make an Arctic or Antarctic experi- Such a strategy minimizes the import ment much simpler and far less costly. burden needed to sustain the growing However, construction techniques at these settlement, an incurred debt which has to temperatures, experience with equipment be paid for with income-earning exports. design, and the logistic experience with First, a sealed-atmosphere, tempera- working bases and their crews in the ture-controlled, humidity-controlled, and collection, storage and development of light-controlled environment with consider- suitable soils for sustainable agriculture able volume will be needed. Prior experi- would be exercises alone. The failures mentation with the development of viable experienced by such a prototype biosphere lunar soils from lunar regolith simulant could literally save the billions of and biowastes will have shown whether a dollars that would be wasted if serious lunar soil micro-ecology can develop from design flaws are uncovered only after these waste sources and whether or what lunar failures occur. An Antarctic proto- additional seed stocks of specialized soil type installation will thus be sound risk bacteria will be needed. management. A prototype trial of this sort might The selection of the type of biome(s) be conducted in a near-sterile Antarctic (eco-desert etc.) initially to be developed environment, such as one of the "Dry will also require closed system prototypes Valleys" near McMurdo Sound, to gain prior to any significant expansion of a engineering experience in conditioning lunar base. The strategy of Biosphere II cold soil-sheltered volumes into air-tight at Oracle, Arizona in developing several bio-spaces; and to validate the expected diverse Biomes in close proximity, appears heating and lighting requirements, ingress/ to this author to be a 'high stakes' egress provisions, etc. 'Regolith' pulver- gamble that homeostasis can be achieved ized from Antarctic rock and the accumu- and developed with a hybrid of existing lated bio-wastes from nearby Antarctic natural biomes. A more conservative bases would provide the basic ingredients approach setting up just a temperate or for creating viable soils. tropical climate agricultural biome with Because many of the international an already known ecosystem of plants, participants in Antarctic research are animals, and insects, would seem to be a also spacefaring nations, the creation of more simple initial step with a higher a simulated lunar (or Martian) biosphere chance of stability. in such a location could provide an inter- The numeric modeling of each species' esting collaboration precedent. It would consumption, excretion, and impact on the also supply economic data on both construc- other species sharing the biome, would tion costs and logistic requirements as enable the development of whatever fall- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 36 back chemical and/or mechanical component ing on Earth, will of necessity need to be may be needed to insure full-cycle bal- reconstructed on the Moon. And tending ances within lunar biospheres. A species this "garden" will be a major focus of data bank, appropriate monitoring techno- human efforts there. logy, computer software, and operations The type of high tech environment so experience, all need to be accumulated to familiar in space habitation scenarios develop confidence and sophistication in usually have an an overwhelming industrial running a sustainable biosphere. This character to them, emphasizing machinery, systems engineering problem is highly rockets, mining equipment, and power gener- complicated and will require greater compu- ation equipment, etc. Prinzton's interior ting power to track the complex interac- should more probably evoke a "hanging tions between what will inevitably become gardens" ambience than that of a(n) air- hundreds, then thousands of species. The craft) "hangar". The very propensity of strategy of developing a replication of life to intrude into all areas of its existing natural biomes and modeling them ecosphere will no doubt produce many numerically should occur well before unforeseen and unforeseeable problems of investment can be risked in a lunar appli- maintenance and equipment failure. Vacuum cation. Critical species serving as indi- seals, for example, should be designed of cators of biospheric function (a miner's materials that do not serve well as dinner canary) must be identified. for anaerobic bacteria or other denizens Because Biosphere II in Arizona is of microbial reality. essentially a proprietary enterprise, an The tenacious battles for species independent critique of its outputs, sys- dominance in biosphere eco-niches are tems engineering, and management technique dynamic balances that must be carefully is not likely to be generally available. observed and monitored. These tasks of This knowledge product may initially be bio-maintenance and monitoring will initi- affordable only to governments able to ally be labor-intensive. The ratio of purchase this technology base. I am of the settlement population devoted to biotech- opinion that additional sealed biosphere nology including growing food, harvesting, prototypes both significantly smaller in packing, storing, preparation, and general scale than Biosphere II, and also consi- bio-maintenance and monitoring will likely derably larger, will be needed to give comprise 25% to 50% of personnel responsi- confidence in the reliability of the bilities. Thus the character of the settle- biotechnology involved. This will need to ment will be as much dominated by agricul- follow a developmental progression from ture as by the other industries such as relatively simple and small biospheres to mining, oxygen-, metal-, glass-, and ceramic- larger and more complex ones. production, transportation, and research The outfitting of small Shuttle and development efforts, etc. External Tank biosphere modules for initial The cost-per-pound economics of lunar basing might progress to intact lava importing anything up out of the Earth's tubes. Such a tube could be sectioned off gravity well dictate an inevitable reli- and sealed with needed environmental ance on lunar-grown food stuffs just as controls on the much larger scale of the they do for lunar-sourced fuel and buil- Prinzton arcology of villages, horticul- ding products. The curve of off-planet tural and agricultural areas, and produc- population growth will for the next tion facilities. century be more limited by lunar agricul- Economics will not be the only pri- tural capacity than by other technology mary rational for biosphere development. constraints. Neither Earth-based or Mars- Perhaps more importantly in the long run, based agriculture are likely to have the psychological comfort and stability of economic significance outside their own the human population will be critical. The respective gravity wells. Large scale stark beauty of the lunar landscape is sustainable biosphere construction in the unlikely to wear well on the human psyche. asteroid belt will be possible only toward The "softened" environment created by the end of this hundred year time frame plant and animal life will be an essential given the probable stress on Martian and element of human expansion onto the Moon lunar development during that interval. and elsewhere off the Earth. The "Garden < MMM > of Eden" which mankind is rapidly destroy- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 37 Answers to Starfarers’ Quiz 1. A Proxima Centauri, a small red M-type star, is just a little closer than the Stardust Thou Art Alpha Centauri double sun of which it is To the Stars, Thou Shall Return! a distant companion. This system lies 60° below the celestial equator, well New MMM Exclusive Series: below the horizon from most of the USA. Not “HOW?” But “WHERE TO?” 2. A 106 million times as far as the Moon, Disbelievers, contemptuous of pop- and 9,000 times as far as Neptune. ular talk of “travel” to the stars, abound. 3. A Sirius is 8.7 light years distant, Indeed, the many hurdles are daunting! The Procyon 11.3, Altair 16.6, Fomalhaut 23, enormous distances involved challenge and Vega 26 Light Years distant. With a comprehension. Total energy expenditures small telescope, you can find Barnard’s required compare with centuries of world Star which is only 5.9 LY from here. energy consumption at current rates. 4. A Stars come bigger, brighter, and Yet the lure of the stars is hotter; and they come smaller, dimmer, “imprinted” on the very stuff and cooler. But there are far, far more that we are made of. stars smaller than the Sun, than larger. About 4% of stars are solar-type, For, excepting hydrogen, which is perhaps another 4% bigger and brighter, mostly primordial, all the atoms of our and 92% smaller. Ours is well above bodies have been forged in the nuclear average, and that often heard put down fires or violent death throes of stars is not honestly deserved. However, most that burned bright before our own Sun and of the stars visible to the naked eye its System coalesced from a cloud enriched are in fact bigger and brighter. with their collective ashes. 5. A Tau Ceti, just a bit smaller than the Many a book and article teases our Sun is 12.8 LY away. Its spectrum is G0, faith that we will one day find a way to a bit cooler and less massive than our venture to other suns and the worlds we G2 Sun. Alpha Centauri is actually a know must circle them. Little T has been double star orbiting around its common written about where to head, and most of center of mass. While the brighter of that we wish to challenge. the pair is a GO, just a little hotter We start here on Earth, with a quiz and more massive than the Sun, most and two articles, “Earth=Terra=Ga=Tellus” astronomers consider binary stars to be and “Hydro Tectonic Planets” we seek to unlikely or unfitting hosts for planets. define our own “home world” - our point of 6. A About 14 light days or 2 light weeks departure. “Planets Around Other Suns” out (80 times as far as Neptune) the Sun looks at three ongoing searches for con- would still be as bright as the Full vincing proof that other solar systems do Moon for us. At 1.84 light years, the Sun exist, and are common. [This last article would be only as bright as Sirius the is not included in this volume of MMM brightest star to us. From 4.3 light Classics: it has been superseded by events] years, the distance as Proxima and Alpha Centauri, the Sun would shine about as WOULD-BE STARFARERS QUIZ bright as Procyon, the 8th brightest 1. Q. What is the Sun’s nearest stellar star in our sky. The Sun would still be neighbor? just visible to the naked eye in ultra- 2. Q. How much further are Proxima and Alpha dark country skies 50 light years out. Centauri than the Moon? than Neptune? 7. A If Deneb and Rigel were as close to us 3. Q. What is the closest star easiy visible as Alpha Centauri, they wouldd both be to the naked eye from most of the United about as bright as the Full Moon, or States? some 10,000 times brighter than Sirius. To receive only as much sunlight as 4. Q. Is the Sun just an average star? Earth does, a planet would have to orbit 5. Q. What is the nearest Sun-like star? Deneb or Rigel more than 8 times farther . How far out must you go before it 6. Q out than Neptune from the Sun! In our appears no brighter than other stars? corner of the Galaxy, F+Deneb, Rigel, 7. Q. Of all the naked eye stars, which is and Canopus dominate all the space intrinsically the brightest? within 2,000 LY from here. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 38 versions of Terra are already in daily use for "Earth" by 600+ million users of Latin- sprung French (La Terre), Spanish (Tierra), Italian, Portuguese, and Rumanian. We could yet outsmart the mischievous astronomers either by forming a new noun working back from the adjective terres- Should we Adopt a trial, e.g, Terrestra, or by using Terra as World-wide Name for Earth? part of a compound name, as in Mariterra for Sea-Earth. After all, naming a planet
by Peter Kokh whose surface is 3/4 ocean for the 1/4 To many people it would be an unim- that is land, does betray a certain chau- portant point. But one might hope that as vinistic bias and lack of appreciation for mankind moves out into the Solar System, precisely what makes our planet so very we would do so with a common agreed-upon special! Littora, Latin for "shores", would name for our Home Planet. convey this same essential duality of our "The Earth" - is the name we give it world. Or we might simply call it Oceanus in ALL Indo-European languages. Whether we and be done with it, although the diverse use the Germanic root ERD, the romance ways in which the latter would be pro- TER, the Slavic ZEML, the Hellenic GE, or nounced around the world is a big drawback. Indic MAH, the reference to the solid Considering the problem thirty years earth = land beneath our feet is the same. ago, my answer was to turn to the Roman Around the globe, names for our home goddess of the Earth, Tellus. The genitive planet use different sounds to express the of Tellus, from which the adjective is same concept. Indeed, for other intelligent derived is Telluris, thus Tellurian. species on other worlds, the choice would "Fellow Tellurians!" - it trips off the be similar: earth=soil, sea or land+sea= tongue so lightly! This beats terrestrial shore. "Earth" seems to be a fully trans- (from terra) which is already being latable name, a vocational-relational term, commonized, both as 'mundane', and as like 'parent'. referring to the solid-surfaced inner planets in general. All the same, ought we not to agree on one internationally standard root-name The Greek tribes used several vari- to show pride in our ancestral home? What ants of Ga, Gaia, Ge, Gea from whence our are the choices? own Geo- root. What about one of these? First a phonetic observation: G followed Many science-fiction writers dislike by E is pronounced hard in some languages "Earth" because it is so provincially and soft in others. So GE, GEO, GEA, would "English". This despite the fact that not be mutually recognizable to speakers English, or Unilang as one language of diverse tongues. Further, the combinant scholar now calls it, wherever it is not geo- has lost its Earth-specificity via the first language, is the second or third. promiscuous application to the study of By far the most common suggestion, all solid-sufaced worlds by take-the-easy- taken for granted as future-fact by some way-out NASA geologists who have balked at science-fiction writers and many of their using the more correct selenology for the readers is the Latin for earth=soil=land, Moon, areology for Mars, etc. i.e., Terra. Unfortunately, astronomers The ideal Creek-derived choice would have been anything but helpful, and have have been Gaia with Gaian as the adjective, indeed been quite busy of late naming every that is, until James Lovelock and Lynn newly discovered continent-like or high- Margulis preempted the word to signify land-like region on other worlds mapped by Earth-Life in general (which is certainly our probes, "Terra This" and "Terra That" a valuable achievement in Earth-awareness (Ishtar Terra and Aphrodite Terra are now whether or not one agrees with their "Gaia the officirl names of the two continent- Hypothesis" that Earth-Life or Gaia is an like highland areas on Venus). So the astro- entity in its own right). The variant "Ga" nomical community has already unconscion- is available, but sounds like baby-talk ably turned "terra" into a common noun cut short. even though other choices such as Creek "chora" were available, and even though Terrestra, Mariterra, and Littora, could be innovative solutions. But Tellus Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 39 remains the one classic choice without lia- done, and not lumped together!) In this bilities. At the same time it is scarcely sense they use Earth-like to refer to a household word. The plus side of that, solid-surface rocky silicate planets such is that specialists wearing horse blinders as Mercury, Venus, Mars. have yet to lazily and thoughtlessly But for those who yearn for the genericize it. But how could such a new- promised era when humanity will venture to-the-public name be agreed upon the world- beyond the Solar System and reach for the around? It would probably take an interna- stars, "Earth-like" conjures up worlds of tional campaign and a near unanimous continents and oceans, sweet oxygen rich United Nations resolution before Tellus air, teeming plant and animal life. In would start showing up in science fiction contrast to the first example, this use of novels, newspapers, and textbooks. the term goes much too far in the other Besides picking a name for our direction. For Earth itself would only planet to be shared by all forevermore, we have met this test of "Earth-like" in the might pick another name for Earth-as-trans- last current fraction of its long history! formed by the emerging human planet-wide We must get to the heart of the question civilization or technosphere, or for this to find an altogether different, less "planetization" itself, even as "Gaia" has ambiguous, phrase. been pressed into service to refer to the Until the second half of the 20th evolving biosphere of Earth. We could coin century, it was the common belief that the "Anthropa" from the Greek word anthropos continents formed in their present posi- (= man, gender not specified) to serve tion. There was no attempt to explain why this purpose. this continent had this shape, that one Having a shared name for Earth, will another. These were taken as factitious help foster the co-operative pride we need givens. True, many of the more inquisitive to renew our planet and keep it "whole". had wondered about the teasing near match Still, Earth, by any name, will ever be of coastlines on both sides of the Atlantic. THE most beautiful world (and word!) known In 1905 the German meteorologist Alfred to her far-scattering children. Your Wegner proposed a comprehensive picture of comments are welcome. < MMM > how the continents may have all been one and slowly drifted to their present scat- tered positions. But for lack of evidence, his theory was widely dismissed. In of the most dramatic and exciting of scientific paradigm shifts since Darwin, a sudden flood of evidence from matching mineral deposits, fossils, and traces of paleomagnetism pouring in during the sixties, confronted unprepared scientists with the incontrovertible proof that Wegner was right in general, though he had many of the particulars wrong. It was not necessarily whole continents that drift, but great plates of oceanic crust on which the continents, or rather different sec- What is an “Earth-Like Planet”? tions of them, rest. Wegner's suggestion
by Peter Kokh of continental drift gave way to modern "plate tectonics". We've all seen the phrase "Earth- Evidently, unimaginably slow cur- like Worlds" but just what does it mean? rents of molten rock deep below the surface Different things to different people, of nudge these plates this way and that, course. And that's because it is intrinsi- helped by repeated volcanic outpourings cally imprecise, since there are so many which rift continents asunder and push varying definitions of just what the apart the pieces and the plates they ride "essence of Earth" is. Some people use the upon. When something is pushed apart on a term in contra-distinction to the gas surface of set size, obviously somewhere giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, else, something has to be squeezed together Uranus and Neptune (which actually should or give way in some other manner. And so be subdivided in two pairs, just as I have Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 40 most of the great mountain ranges on Earth resolution radar imaging of Venus to know have been raised by continental and sub- that there are fundamental differences continental collisions taking millions of between the structure of her "oceanic" years. Hard to grasp at first! But India, basins and those of Earth's. It is no once clearly part of the African landmass, longer clear that now bone-dry Venus once crashing into the underside of Asia, has had oceans that boiled away. If indeed an raised the Himalayas. The Appalachian and early ocean was present, it likely did not Atlas mountains were thrust up in a prior survive long enough to be a major role- collision of North America and North Africa. player in the shaping of today's Venus. Unthinkable? A few decades ago, but no more. Role-player? Yes, for it seems that Continental collisions are not the water has acted as a lubricant in the only way pressure from spreading conti- incredibly slow movement of crustal plates nents and plates is relieved. Often in a and continents. The ocean bottom crust is confrontation, one plate surrenders, so to saturated with water, and when it is speak, diving below the other whose edge thrust below the advancing edge of a rides up on top of it. The eastern Pacific continent, drags that compliment of water ocean bottom is being thrust beneath the with it, down perhaps as far as 400 miles advancing west coasts of the two Americas. below the surface. Indeed we are likely to The coast-long deep ocean trench and find that on any world where there has not ramparts of active volcanoes are results. been a significant hydrosphere (ocean), It is understandable then that geolo- incipient tectonic activity has been an gists still bursting with the enthusiasm abortive self-snuffing episode. In con- afforded by this new onrush of insights trast, Earth is a "HYDRO-tectonic" world! into the shape of present-day Earth, are Is this the "new and improved" defini- alert for traces of plate-tectonics else- tion we have been looking for? It could where. We DO see great faults and rift well be. It is the oceans with the internal valleys on other worlds. Mars' Valles heat of the planet that have shaped and Marineris is an example - a gigantic 3000 continue to shape our world. Is this plate- mile long by 150 mi. wide equatorial canyon tectonics necessary? Well without it, we complex too often unfairly and inappropri- would not have the rich mineral deposits ately compared with Arizona's Grand Canyon that have fueled our technological cres- instead of with the equally vast, if not cendo. Nor might we BE in the first place. more vast, ocean trenches on Earth, or For it is not only the slate-clearing by better with Africa's great rift valley periodic asteroidal impacts that has system including the Red Sea bottom. allowed stalled evolution to explore new We see signs of incipient, quickly manifestations of life, but also the stalled rifting elsewhere, even on the Moon. continual separation and recombination of And as to continent-resembling features, continental chunks. And without on-going there is the great Tharsis Uplift on Mars renewal via mountain-building collisions, caused instead by eons-long continuous any original continents would long since volcanism. And there are the two suspi- have eroded away washing into the sea. ciously continental elevations on Venus, Only "HYDRO-TECTONIC" worlds can be truly Ishtar Terra near the north pole, and "Earth-like", in both the geological and Aphrodite Terra along the equator. We've biological senses of the term. photographed volcanoes caught in the act So when you next day-dream of joining of erupting on Io and Triton, and are some interstellar exploratory expedition, being teased by a growing number of searching for "M-class planets" (to use a indirect indicators of current volcanic Star Trek term), you'll know exactly what activity on Venus, such as lightning. it is you are looking for. Forget places Magellan, the powerfully equipped like Tatooine and Arrakis (Dune). We need synthetic aperture radar probe now on its to look for worlds with enough ocean, but way to Venus, will hopefully tell us the not too much, and with active plate-tec- story of our sister planet's (nearly same tonics. Life will be more than probable on size and mass as earth) past and present. such worlds and should develop in a catas- If there are "ocean-basin" trenches along trophe-punctuated way similar to that side "coastal" strings of volcanoes, that which "Gaia" (the new name for Earth-Life will reveal very much. This is unlikely, as a living system) has experienced. The however. We already have enough lower- state in which we find such worlds will Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 41 largely depend upon their age which can be estimated even from Earth via an in-depth MMM #37 - July 1990 study of its sun's spectrum and circum- galactic orbital characteristics. Some HTW's will be impetuous raw young worlds still awaiting the quickening of life. Others will be dominated by early microbial life and show signs of oxygen- “YARD” AND WORKSITE CANOPIES sweetening of the air. And there will be FOR LUNAR OUTPOSTS those on which has appeared the metazoan [Artwork on Cover Page by Dan Moynihan] multi-cellular life that has dominated our by Peter Kokh own planet the past 600 million years (but Examine a picture of an Antarctic an eighth of our total history). And there Base, and you will see a cluster of main will be some on which the plate-tectonic buildings awash in an unplanned, unkempt engine has slowly ground to a halt, bring- cluttering of fuel tanks, stockpiles of ing any such world to the final eon-long supplies, new equipment not yet installed chapter of its history. Eventually its sun and old equipment already retired, trash would shine on a world gone the way of dumps and so on. Base architects have a Atlantis as the last continental remnants, tradition of leaving to afterthought the no longer being renewed, erode away and siting of necessary external paraphernalia, wash into the thickening sea-brine. the things that make base operations work. Can Hydro-Tectonic planets be Nor is such an unsightly hodgepodge of detected from Earth? Yes and no. The next land use expediencies the only result. generation of space telescopes after Since the realities of base operations Hubble, might be able to detect planets were not taken into account, as only the size of ours, and as close to their individual structures rather than integral parent suns as ours. Next we can look for functioning of the base as a whole - or the characteristic signatures of oxygen likely patterns of growth and evolution - and methane. These gases can only appear received attention, it is an inevitable on a hydro-tectonic world on which life result that such sloppy installations has already arisen and evolved to the function rather less efficiently and less point where it can transform an original safely than they might. carbon dioxide atmosphere. The sketches available of various It would be interesting to equip a Moon Base designs, be they the product of deep space probe with instruments to NASA think tanks or of outside sources, detect such a characteristic signature, share this ivory tower penchant for neglec- and see how far out from the Sun, we can ting patterns of likely land use in the clearly detect Earth and tell what kind of immediate vicinity, in the front and back world it is. The proposed TAU mission "yards" of principal base structures. would go out one Thousand Astronomical It is inevitable in any Lunar Base Units, a thousand times as far from the operations scenario, that an appreciable Sun as Earth's orbit, not quite six light- portion of routine "out-vac" EVA activity days. (Neptune is only 30 AU, 4 lt hrs will take place in a few concentrated away.) It is the intention to use the areas, especially the immediate vicinity advantage of such distance to greatly of the Base itself, and of its component refine our parallax-based knowledge of structures and facilities. There should be star distances. An HT-signature device a very thorough effort to identify and (HTS) would make a great bus-mate for TAU. categorize the types of activities involved While it is unlikely that life can and the intensity of use of these "yard" arise in a fresh start except on a hydro- spaces. tectonic world, it should be transplant- Current planning and design provi- able to other less friendly locales. And sions make no distinction between those good transplant locations may be much more EVA activities on the base doorstep and numerous. But that's another story!
by Peter Kokh The most intense portion of a flare [For a related article, see "WEATHER", MMM onslaught can be over in just minutes or # 6 JUN 87, republished in MMM Classic #1] last a few hours. Beyond the Van Allen The Sun doer not rotate integrally Belts, the need for shelter is immediately as would a solid-surfaced body. We can pressing. Flares can occur in clusters and clock its rotation by watching sunspots, single flares can have the energy of slightly cooler areas that look black only hundreds of millions of hydrogen bombs. in comparison, slowly transit from west to The direction the torrent takes is random, east over a two week period. Spots nearer depending on the location of the source the equator are carried across the face spot on the solar surface. more quickly than those near the poles, Unless we are to limit our activi- marking one rotation in about 25 days, ties on the Moon, and throughout space in compared to 28-some nearer the poles, and general, to quiet-Sun years, two things as slow as 36 days at the poles themselves. must receive priority attention: Keep in mind that sunspots, occur- 1. developing a Flare Early Warning system ring in pairs, mark places where intense 2. developing a network of storm shelters magnetic fields project from the surface, within reach. and it becomes clear that the Sun's over- The first need is touched on briefly all magnetic field must become ever more in the earlier MMM article cited above. tortuously twisted and kinked with each The second requires multiple strategies. differential rotation until the pattern On route to Mars, we can put all the fuel finally can be maintained no more. Such a and cargo and equipment sunward of the crescendo is eleven years a-building. At passenger cabin (the "P.O.S.H." strategy: the end of the cycle, the magnetic polarity Passengers Outfacing, Sunfacing Hold). reverses, so that the overall pattern Coming home with empty holds and tanks repeats every 22 years. presents a more stubborn problem. But here Solar flares might be seen as the we want to highlight situations on the bursting of solar-energy "dams" maintained lunar surface. by great magnetic forces within these sun Lunar bases, habitats, factories, spots. As the dam bursts, a flood-surge of and whole settlements will be sufficiently energetic particles heads out from the Sun protected by the same 3-4 meter thick at an appreciable fraction of the speed of overburden of loose or bagged regolith light. Light takes 8 1/3 minutes to span shielding that shelters them from cosmic the distance between the Sun and Earth rays and micro-meteorites. Surface activi- (= 93 million miles = 150 million km = 1 ties in the immediate neighborhood of such Astronomical Unit) so when a flare is sites should present no problem even in spotted (if anyone, anything, is watching!) high flare season. But in time an outpost we have only a few moments before the or settlement will be joined by others as deadly storm hits. For the associated X- the lunar beachhead transforms into a more rays advancing at light-speed, the only "world-like" SET of human places. How do warning possible is a means of predicting we protect those traveling between such such eruptions. protected sites? On Earth we are sheltered from the Surface vehicles can be designed top- full fury of such lethal solar flares heavy with batteries, fuel cells, cargo first by the Van Allen radiation belts and other heavy equipment on top - that's maintained by the Earth's own magnetic sound practice anyway, and the center of field, and then by our atmospheric gravity problem can be handled by longer Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 44 wheelbases and wider tracks - no problem when the cost of real-estate and right-of- ways is moot. While these measures will reduce routine exposure to other hazards, they may be less than adequate during solar flares, especially when the Sun is at a low angle over the horizon. Ports in FRINGE BENEFITS the storm will be welcome. OF INTENSE LUNAR SUNSHINE
Open ended north-south facing quonset- by Peter Kokh type shells covered with a couple meters Most of the pluses of cloud-free of soil, situated at intervals along access to the undiminished strength of established routes, could harbor a number sunlight on the Moon are too obvious to of vehicle emergencies. How close will we need listing. The key words: heat, electric need to put them? Obviously that depends power, light, photosynthesis. On several on things we can't pin down as yet. First, occasions we've also mentioned a solar how much early warning time can we expect benefit easily overlooked: the considerable (= how much time do we have to take cover) endowment of gases adsorbed to regolith and how much ground can vehicles traverse fines (pulverized upper soil blanket) from while the clock is ticking. We'll want a four eons (billions of years) of bombard- reassuring margin of safety. ment by the weak but incessant Solar Wind. The need to reach shelter with time ["Helium-3" & "Gas Scavenger" in MMM # 23 to spare and the relative expense of Mar '89 - republished in MMM Classics #3] erecting such flare sheds could put a real In this writer's philosophy, anything premium on vehicle swiftness, well-graded whatsoever has only assets. Apparent liabili- roadways, or both. Excursions off-the- lities are just that, appearances things beaten track in "shedless areas" may be have when one's outlook isn't right: when limited to emergencies, during flare our knowledge is incomplete, our assessment season. The alternative is to travel immature, our attitude is not quite "game." during the 2-week-long lunar nightspan in the "lee" of any storms. This may work to The usually cited liabilities of the confine lunar "rural" outposts along Sun's unbridled stellar fury as it lashes established routes between major settle- the Moon are these: intense raw ultraviolet ments or to provide storm-cellar-equipped radiation and "fortunately rare" deadly vehicles to service the less frequented blizzards of ionized particles traveling routes. just below the speed of light, originating in solar flares. Our bias suspects both of Over time, if traffic increases being assets in disguise. warrant it, some of these flare sheds could grow into more full-featured facili- Might we not quit brooding about the ties: emergency communications, automatic dangers of UV exposure for naked flesh and self-replenishing liquid oxygen depots, plant matter, long enough to investigate drop-off points for fuel cell water to be whether or not this area of the solar automatically electolyzed by solar power spectrum has any potential as an industrial back into liquid oxygen, and hydrogen, for tool? Surely there is incentive enough to fuel cells of other vehicles, hoist- pursue the question! equipped repair ports, unstaffed hostel- For there is a seemingly endless type bedroom space and so on. Eventually, litany of chemical and industrial processes some such oases might even become the routinely used on Earth, often with unwel- first humble beginnings of whole new towns. come side-effects, that do not lend them- The way lunar development proceeds, selves at all to lunar application. Either from the placement of outposts, the design they involve materials that are too expen- of vehicles, and the preparation of road- sive to make available on the Moon, or ways - much that will shape the unique they would soon be lethal in the unforgi- character and feel of the Lunar Frontier - ving, tightly closed, quickly cycling mini will trace back to this need to cope with biospheres we'll need to cradle our exis- the occasional deadly solar flare. Storms tence on our barren neighbor. Given these do have their usefulness! - strictures an our activities, discovery of < MMM > more Moon-appropriate forms of processing would be rather welcome. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 45 On Earth we're addicted to "improving" ultraviolet on the likely stable of lunar and/or "disguising" surfaces of various materials would be a good start. materials with coatings and/or chemical The opportunity to put solar flares treatments that would be taboo for one to work will be quite sporadic. But there reason or another on the Moon. Looking for will be ways to turn that liability into alternatives, we might ask what would be an asset also. < MMM > the effect an various alloys, types of glass and ceramics etc. of various lengths of exposure to full-spectrum ultraviolet? We have no idea, but shouldn't someone endeavor to find out? (Full-spectrum UV is not yet naturally available on Earth but give the Ozone hole time to grow!) By the use of suitable resists or SHOULD “THE SUN” HAVE A NAME? stencil overlays, could some types of glass by Peter Kokh and some alloys be etched and/or textured? If so, could this become an art and craft While many could perhaps care less, method as well as a manufacturing process? it seems appropriate to this writer at If satisfactory fiberglass papers or scrim least, that all peoples of Earth share one can be developed, could we print-impreg- common name for their life-giving star. nate this with oxides that would "develop" This is hardly the case. given raw-UV exposure? "The Sun" - is one single word into which we put two quite distinct references. Perhaps these ideas are farfetched First, "the Sun" is our name for a parti- idle musings of an armchair chemist. But cular star, the one we orbit. Second, "The we would be sorely disillusioned if some Sun" is a vocational relationship which happily serendipitous results didn't come out of an honestly far-ranging set of makes this star special: it centers a experiments. Will the tests on the LDEF planetary system, which it bathes with (Long Duration Exposure Facility) finally warmth and life-giving energy. retrieved this past December by the Space In the first sense, "the Sun" is our shuttle Columbia, carry useful clues? very unique, very own star. In the Undoubtedly six years of raw-UV exposure second sense, it is a relationship of has done its work on the LDEF trays, but fostering paternity (and the origin of the it may be difficult, if possible at all, idea of "the Demiurge" with semi-divine to sort out these various effects from the co-responsibility for our existence). And smothering and masking corrosion expected this relationship is most likely not from orbit-altitude atomic oxygen. unique. Any star with planets is, for them, "the Sun". 'Sun', then is a word a We have already suggested [MMM # 31 lot like 'Father' and 'Mother', i.e. a Dec '89 "Ventures of the Rille People" title rather than a name. Part V.B. Hydro-electric Storage System?] So long as mankind's horizons and that the well known germicidal and bacter- its expectations of spreading domain do icidal effects of raw-UV be put to work in not overflow the Solar-System-of-our- waste water treatment. (Glass filters out Origin, this dual function word serves UV but quartz panes let it pass through.) reasonably well. But as we consider the Raw ultraviolet may also play a role in eventual out-migration forming a human food processing and preparation. Its tissue- diaspora that could include any number of destroying ability might be harnessed as a "solar systems", the need to come up with fine-honed tool in various other ways such a non-generic name for our Sun becomes as "sun"-printing cotton, leather, and increasingly relevant. jewelry woods. Raw ultraviolet can be Almost all science fiction writers reproduced in Earthside labs and, with who have been faced with the problem, have proper safety precautions, the fun of taken to referring to our Sun as 'Sol'. exploring such possibilities can begin now. This choice has two burdensome liabili- With so much of today's sophisticated ties. First, "Sol" is, once more, "the Sun" processing techniques unsuitable for use in another language, ancient Latin. in lunar conditions, the settler economy Second, the deri-vative, "solar", will will need all the help it can get. Investi- very likely be used generically of all gating the effects of raw full-spectrum planetary systems, and of all star-planet Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 46 relationships. In this light, "Sol" makes a rather poor and unhappy choice. Other than Latin, we could borrow from the other classic language of anti- EUROPA-LIKE WORLDS MAY ABOUND quity. In Greek, the Sun is Helios. And by Peter Kokh again, the derivative, "helio-", is also Ever since the romantic pre-space- already in use in a general sense (e.g. age vision of a planet-wide ocean on Venus heliostats) and is likely to go with us to was so cruelly burst by the radar detection the stars as yet another generic. One way of surface temperatures there in the 900 around this particular problem is to coin °F range, and since our probes showed that slightly altered adjectives to refer to the atmosphere on Mars was too thin to out particular parent-star and its realm. allow liquid water to subsist on its sur- For example, we could say Solaric System face, we have had a growing appreciation when we are referring to our own, and use of our water-laden home planet for the solar systems in the generic. I can't very special oasis which it is. But the think of a plausible parallel for helio- revised popular notion that, in all the serving the same specific function, but Solar System, Earth alone has appreciable I'm sure Greek-adepts could coin one. Then reserves of liquid water, is mistaken. it becomes a matter of public education. What about the ancient Greco-Roman Another Water World? god of the sun, Apollo? Alas, the word has On their fleeting passes through the existing currency (manned lunar program of Jovian system, the four Pioneer and the sixties) making it a confusing choice. Voyager probes revealed an ice-crusted Already well known, simple, and Europa, with a surface that has been aptly easily internationalized, is "Ra", name of described as "smooth as a billiard ball". the ancient Egyptian sun god once revered Absent are any crater relics of the in Heliopolis. But a case could be made earlier epoch of wholesale bombardment by for "Bast", another Egyptian deity who debris left over from planet-formation, an represented "the life-giving power of ordeal apparently experience in common by sunlight". Also lees known is the ancient all the planets and their moons. Europa's Sanskrit "Ravi" and Hindu "Surya". brilliant white crust is crisscrossed by Quite a different solution would be narrow brownish streaks that show no topo- to give our own Sun a proper name adapted graphic relief (height or depth). Global from that of a figure in world history who elevation differences do not much exceed a played some especially significant role in token hundred meters or so. our understanding of the Sun's place in Apparently, the ice crust of this the scheme of things. My vote would go not moon is thin enough to fracture under to any recent solar astronomer but to internal pressure from time to time, Copernicus, the first of our species to letting a water-brine of some sort erupt teach effectively that the Sun, not our out onto the surface, quickly freezing the Earth, is the center of our system. Now fracture shut. Europa, it seems, has an his name is already given to a very ocean! Water and vacuum do not socialize. prominent lunar nearside crater. One way But ice and vacuum get along quite well. to avoid confusion would be to use a Thus a thick enough self-derived icy variant form of his name. Instead of the "firmament" can contain an ocean just as original harsh sounding Polish "Kupernik", effectively as a thick atmosphere. we could use a feminine form of the common However, some source of internal heat Latinization i.e. "Copernica". Admittedly is needed to keep the ice crust from thick- this flies in the face of the almost uni- ening until that's all there is. Europa, a versal chauvinist convention of using only little smaller than the Moon (1942 miles masculine names for the Sun, with feminine versus 2160 miles in diameter), is hardly ones reserved for Earth, i.e. the Earth- big enough either to have long-retained Mother/Sky-Father theme of folk myths. any residual heat of formation, or to have Perhaps you would like to suggest undergone sufficient internal heating from yet another choice? My own preference? I'd radioactive materials in the rocky silicate say "Copernica" and "Ra", in that order, crust that probably underlines its ocean - over the other options listed above. But we know Europa's mass, hence its density, and can argue from that. Of the four great it's a wide open question! < MMM > Jovian moons, Europa is the second closest- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 47 in, and that's near enough to provide contin- whose totality is sometimes punctuated by uous heating from the tidal stress that the orange glow of quickly cooling erup- characterizes its location deep down the ting lava. We had once thought that all throat of Jupiter's massive gravity well. food chains, must begin with photosynthesis. Europa: more water than Earth? Evidently, hot sulfur-rich mineral-laden The guesstimates I've seen are that water jets provide nourishment and energy the ice crust is no more than 2-3 miles enough upon which to base whole indepen- thick and that the globe-enveloping ocean dent ecosystems. below could be 60 miles deep. Even consi- [For an amply-illustrated early account, dering Europa's smaller size, 1/4 th the see National Geographic.November 1979] diameter and 1/16 th the surface area of It is the safer assumption that life Earth, that still amounts to 1.8 times as could not originate in Europa's ocean - or many cubic miles of water as in all Earth's that it could not have gotten much further oceans (back-of-the-envelope calculation). than sulfur eating bacteria. On Earth, Any hypothetical Europans would be amused, even if the sulfur-eating organisms at the if not chagrined, to read of Earth's boast bottom of the hot-vent food chains are to be the "water planet"! native to such sites, the diverse multi- A proper name for Europa's Ocean? cellular metazoan creatures such as the In ancient mythology, Rhadamanthus tube worms we now find there, are surely was the son of Europa by Jupiter. cousins to long-familiar varieties and co- So The Rhadamanthic would seem an descended from ancestors that had evolved especially appropriate choice. in oxygen-rich, photo-plankton fed ecosys- A Mind Probe of Europa’s Ocean tems in much shallower seas. Yet it seems Europa and its ocean supplied the equally plausible that we might someday supporting theme of a major motion picture: successfully transplant some denizens of Arthur C. Clarke's "2010". What might the our own ocean bottom vent colonies there, conditions in this ocean be like? We would at the bottom of the Rhadamanthic. We expect it to be devoid of dissolved oxygen. could then hang around for some centuries But any gases vented by submarine volcanoes, to watch their progress from stations on a plausible feature, once they reached a the ice-crust-firmament above, using tele- certain saturation point in the water, may metry and teleoperated benthic probes. keep collecting in gas pockets below the We need to take a look-see ice, eventually building up enough pressure Where is the imagination of our to fracture it in the manner our probes planetary scientists that they have not have observed. There could also be some yet brainstormed a mission to dispatch a dissolved salts, not from any sediments drill-equipped probe to Europa? Well, washed down from eroding protruding conti- drilling through some miles of ice is far nents, of course, but from ash vented by more ambitious - as remote robotic missions these same conjectured submarine volcanoes. go - than anything we've attempted to date, Deep Ocean Life on Europa? even skin-pricking comet penetrators. This Given the light Moon-like gravity, is a mission for the next century, one even at some sixty miles down, the water that will generate a lot of suspense and pressure would be only half that in the expectation. Now that we have found relics Marianas Trench in our own Western Pacific. of ancient, probably now extinct, native Exciting? Conjure up story plots? Hold on! microbial life on Mars, shall we someday Enter another discovery 400 million miles find evidence of existing microbial life sunward, down home in Earth's own ocean in Europa's ocean? How far and how depths. Scientists have found thriving diversely will it have evolved? teeming oases of ocean-bottom life huddling Are there other water moons? around deep sulfur-rich hot water vents on Some have suggested that Europa's the mid-ocean ridges. Here in the absence larger siblings, Ganymede and Callisto, of appreciable dissolved oxygen, hitherto with 3.3 and 2.4 times as much surface totally unsuspected well-diversified colo- area respectively, also may harbor vast nies of life-forms evidently descended oceans under their dirty ice crusts. But from familiar varieties - yet strangely, it is clear from the near saturation inci- grotesquely, and beautifully evolved - dence of slumped craters on their surfaces live out secluded lives feasting on their that the ice crust on these moons must be exotic dietary bonanza, in a darkness substantially thicker, and that as a Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 48 consequence, water from below is far less What would a humanoid culture in a likely to work its way up. Both moons are Europa-type setting be like? How would it too far removed from Jupiter to benefit develop? Would they live like the fictional from tidally-induced heating. So it seems survivors of some sunken Atlantis - subject more likely that any oceans there are long of several science fiction films and TV since frozen through. episodes - in pressure resistant glass and Saturn’s close-in Enceladus also metal "bubbles" within which they breathe sports a smooth bright icy surface appar- air - and live, work, and play much as we ently regenerated in recent times. Again, do? Hey, if you're looking for a fresh tidal heating and water venting are suspect. twist for your science fiction novel, why Whether this much smaller world, only 310 not brainstorm such a "stranger in a miles across, still has a mini-sea under strange land" type of culture? What you the visible surface is something else. come up with might be a truer caricature Life-friendly "E-Class" Planets of the galactic "beyond-the-cradle main- May Vastly Outnumber "M-Class" Worlds stream" than is the world and civilization into which we've all been born. Whatever the case for Ganymede, < MMM > Callisto, and Enceladus, in general, the conditions for the formation and mainten- ance of Europa-like moon worlds seem rather easy to meet in the vicinity of gas MMM #38 - September 1990 giant planets. And gas giants should be quite commonplace throughout the galaxy. It will matter little if the Jove-like primary of the candidate moon does not Conepts of Regolith Primage orbit a sun-like star. Might they not even circle rogue gas giants and isolated brown dwarfs in the sunless interstellar reaches? (Brown dwarfs are dud wanna-be stars with not quite enough mass to trigger or sus- tain nuclear ignition and thus become true A “Do or Die” Key to Lunar "stars". The jury is still out on whether Industrial-Agricultural Success they are relatively rare, or far more by Peter Kokh abundant than all other star types.) The pre-tilling of the Moon [As of 4/'00, similar sub-ice oceans are Through eons of meteorite bombard- strongly suspected on both Jupiter's moon ment, lunar soils have been extensively Callisto, and Pluto's moon Charon. - PK] "gardened" or turned over vertically, and As Europa is one of a class of very even mixed horizontally - up to half the special worlds that we might search for surface materials in any given area is the elsewhere we'll need a generic name for import of splashout (impact ejecta) from them. One possibility is "oceanids", pro- areas nearby and distant alike. On Earth, nounced oh-SEE-a-nids. In mythology, the mineral-based industries have been able to oceanids were daughters of Oceanus and take advantage of enriched and concentrated Tethys. But "europids" (yoo-ROH-pids ) deposits - a result of eons of geological would also work, taking their name from processes peculiar to our planet. While the first of the class to be discovered. undoubtedly somewhat more favorable concen- What really gets the juices flowing trations of a few minerals do occur on the is the possibility that Europa-like worlds Moon (homogenization provided by bombard- are far more common out there than Earth- ment not being 100% thorough), in general like ones, outnumbering them by perhaps a lunar settlers will have no choice but to thousandfold, or more. We ought to make it make do with deposits we would shun as a top priority in the next century of two "uneconomic". to see what we can do with Europa - exer- While the Moon is richly endowed, in cising all due environmental caution, of a gross sense, the lunar economy will have course. Farming the sub-glacial oceans of the much more difficult job of separating such moons could be an alternate ticket to out or beneficiating the desirable minerals the universe, one which many a star-faring prior to processing. No one should imagine civilization has adopted for its main that just any system of lunar mining-based thrust. economy would guarantee success. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 49 In "Gas Scavenger" [MMM # 23 p.4 media for gas separation, March 1989 - republished in MMM Classics insulation, and molecular #3] we pointed out that if we religiously sieves. And added back extracted the pure iron fines and all the into the “soil”, they will Solar Wind deposited gases from any and enhance mineral ion tran- all regolith that we had to move or handle sport to plant roots, espe- anyway, we would then accumulate potenti- cially in early 'immature' soils not yet ally valuable reserves, at low cost, that fully colo-nized by micro-organisms nor could be one principal means of diversi- laden with organic matter. How to provide fying the settlement economy. We have to for suffi-cient mineral ion transport in move regolith in excavating for shelters, regolith-derived soils is thus another in covering them with shielding, in grading needless worry on the part of researchers. roadways, and in providing raw materials [In view of these possibilities, I am to ore processing facilities. Iron fine rather critical of the value of lunar removal (by magnet) and gas extraction (by agriculture experiments that use any lunar heat) capabilities should be an integral simulants formulated on the unexamined part of ALL regolith-moving equipment, we presupposi-tion that we will be stuck with counseled. using crude raw regolith.] Agricultural Needs The remnant after this last sieving Let’s carry the argument further. operation would be larger rocks (aggregates Apparently, some of the things that worry and breccias) that could serve well as lunar agriculture researchers most, are gravel fill, for lunar concrete. So, just actually characteristics of 'gross' lunar by including this multi-step vibra-sieving regolith easily changed in the handling operation in our "Regolith-mover", we will process. After all, settlers won't be erec- have (1) enormously enhanced the chances ting domes over undisturbed lunar regolith, of success for lunar agriculture; (2-5) then attempt to farm this raw soil. We started businesses in molecular sieves, will be building pressurized agricultural gas-separation, catalysts, and insulation; modules of whatever volume - and then, (6) supply the highly refined material moving regolith from the outside into the needed for processing; and (7) supply prepared beds within. coarser material for 'lunarcrete' mix. Researchers worry that the 15-20% A third worry of the Lun-Ag people fraction of regolith which is ultra-fine is potentially toxic levels of chromium powder of less than 0.25 mm grain size, and of nickel in regolith-derived soil. fine to medium silt, will clog soil pores Their concern is perhaps more justified leading to water-logged soil. In the Moon's with chromium, as observed nickel concen- light 'sixthweight', water will percolate trations are possibly tolerable. How we through the soil more slowly; thus we will could make use of regolith pre-handling want somewhat coarser soil than is ideal opportunities To extract a significant on Earth. In the course of bringing rego- fraction of the Chromium-containing lith-soil in from the outside, this fine minerals (e.g. some spinels) is a nice chal- silt can be removed by vibration-sieving lenge for the chemical-engineering types or by 'winnowing'. As a bonus, this unwanted among our readers. How about it? fine silt may have a higher content of A Tool for Many Needs adsorbed Solar Wind gases; also it may be Now that's quite a work load for our easier to process in some ways (glass?, everyday Lunar 'Lith-Mover! Iron fines; ceramics? etc,) than less refined 'as-is' Solar Wind gases; silt for processing; Ag- regolith. grade soil; zeolite feed stocks (glasses) The 75% ideal medium-sand-through- for agriculture filtration and insulation; coarse-silt 1.0-0.25 mm fraction is next. gravel for lunacrete; chromium ores. We A 3rd sieve removes larger agglutinate can obtain all these in the very handling glass nodules which can then be trans- of regolith, prior to all other forms of formed-into zeolites by mild hydrothermal processing - including oxygen-extraction processing [150o C, 0.3 MPa, 76 and glass-glass composites (Glax) produc- h]. Zeolites are hydrated silicates of tion. For these collective First Fruits, I aluminum with alkali metals (K, Na) and propose the term “Primage.” [Most diction- cavity-rich crystal lattice structure. aries define this term solely as a safe- They can be used as catalysts, adsorption handling bribe paid by a shipper to ship's Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 50 captain and crew. But as a suggestive show-stopper. Unlike a smaller outpost precedent, the O.E.D. also has: “the probably powered by a nuclear reactor, a amount of water carried off suspended in larger settlement may be economically the steam from a boiler” (about 3%)] strapped to use that energy available to A Primaging 'Lith-Mover it in as efficient a way as possible - at Going through all the bother of care- least until prosperity from trade reached ful regolith-primage, much like scraping a point where the settlers could burn up and sanding the loose paint before repain- the ergs in a more customary carefree ting, will seem to most a thankless and American style! To get the community's unwelcome ritual. There will be a strong vital food crops through the fourteen day temptation to dismiss the need. But the long lunar nightspan with the same amount settlement that adopts primaging as a of light provided 'free' by the Sun during transcendental imperative, will have a dayspan, would take a power generation significant head start towards economic capacity several times as large at that diversification and self-sufficiency. needed to take care of all the settlement's Primaging could be the well-spring other needs such as construction, industry, both of prosperous lunar industry and of transportation, air/water circulation and productive lunar agriculture. Developing a treatment, etc. practical, simple and rugged "Primaging A Need to Experiment 'Lith-Mover" should then be among our very Realizing that any settlement's highest priorities. < MMM > success might in large part depend on knowing how little and/or how infrequently their plants needed a light-fix during the LUnar nightspan to coast until the next dayspan growth period - and still produce an accept- National able harvest - our SSI support group, Agricultural Milwaukee Space Studies Team (MiSST) put together a small pamphlet aimed at enlis- eXperiment ting home hobby gardeners. "Guidelines for corporation Experiments in Lunar Agriculture" is slowly getting more exposure and sparking Logo by Fred Fleischmann and Peter Kokh lots of interest. However, interest is Report by Peter Kokh painless (i.e. cheap). Taking the trouble The Birth of LUNAX to carefully perform these lighting exper- There is a new kid on the block in iments in one's basement or garage on a the effort to pre-develop the repertory of plant species of one's choice seems to be technologies that will someday enable us another matter. Simply put, the data from to establish the sizable self-supporting our rag tag green thumb army of enthused settlements on the Moon that will at last participants is not flooding in. We will make mankind a multi-world species. Some need lots of data on lots of different people, it is true, still labor under the plants. Even though it will not be poss- assumption that such a grand goal is merely ible to rigorously control experiment a matter of money, hardware, and national conditions, a lot of data might yet provide will. Leaving them to their comforting a good enough signal to noise ratio to illusions, some of us in the Lunar Recla- enable us to pick out significant results mation Society Inc., [M.L.R.S. incorporated from spurious ones. But how do we get that under this name July 30th] have quietly flood of data? started to peck away at the still growing [Early Soviet experiments showed that if load of homework that will really be the plants are simply chilled to a few necessary, in the hopes of finding ways to degrees above freezing, they would contribute which will test the limits of survive two weeks of darkness just fine, our collective talents. springing back during the alternating In the process of working on our two weeks of light-feast to produce good entry in NSS' Space Habitat Design Competi- yield. Eric Drexler, while still in high tion (1989) Lunar Base Category, alerted school, performed a similar closet vs. by a "whoa!" from collaborator Joe Suszynski refrigerator type experiment with corro- of Chicago, the new Milwaukee Space Tech & borating results. But even though temp- Rec team identified one serious potential eratures would fall off once the Sun had Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 51 set, at a rate that depended on the ing, beginning with fellow Green Bay NSS effectiveness of the insulation and the member Neil Walker, high school science amount of the thermal mass within the teacher. Through Neil, Dave got in touch farming unit, it might still take a with Ed Mueller in Neenah, Secretary of considerable energy expenditure to the Wisconsin Society of High School induce the proper chill level, all at Science Teachers. Further calls uncovered once, then maintain it - even if heat considerable interest, even enthusiasm, pumps were used to dump the heat into a for the idea. eutectic salt or water reservoir from Next Dave started calling select which it could be recovered near the end professional researchers in the field, of nightspan, when heat was most needed. with NASA connections, to solicit their Chilling the crops may be one part of ideas and comments. This was 'rough work', the answer - but we still need to know especially considering that NASA's efforts all our options!] have concentrated on the food supply and Getting Organized biosphere needs of very limited small To the rescue, MLRS member-at-large outposts - unrealistic models for what we David A. Dunlop of Green Bay, Wisconsin; I proposed to do. Most of the Pros seemed to first met Dave at the '89 Neptune/Triton take it for granted that we'd have all the Voyager Encounter party at the Fox Valley lighting energy we wanted on the Moon, and Planetarium in Menasha a year ago. Dave that crops would be raised in isolated and became quite enthused-about our Prinzton automated phone booth size pressure Lunar Base design study. That fall, he chambers. Once Dave backed up and explained started making the long drive down to to them our much more ambitious perspec- Milwaukee twice a month to take part in tive, they showed a heightened interest, our brainstorming sessions on a possible curiosity, and willingness to give advice book to expand upon our Prinzton study. and assistance. These sessions would often last into the Now that we began to feel confident wee a.m. hours, after having adjourned that we had found a promising approach, from the Central Library's Old Board Room the task became one of organizing. On June to the nearby I-Hop, or some all other 24- 23rd Dave and I drove up to Sturgeon Bay hour eatery. in Wisconsin's beautiful Door County, to When we took up the proposed chapter meet his friend, attorney and Chicago on Agriculture and the Biosphere, Dave restaurateur, Albert H. Beaver Jr. There became riveted on the challenge of the in his office we drew up papers for a new quite limited extent and rudimentary level non-profit corporation, with the three of of appropriate experience and know-how us as Directors, to pursue the effort to available. Not only do we need to know all involve schools in those areas of Lunar our lighting options, we need to know how Agricultural Research wherein the present to transform sterile Soil that has never rudimentary level of our knowledge still known air or water into a medium that can leaves room for meaningful school-level sustain its crop yield season after season, contributions. not just once. We needed to determine what A Magic Setting plants, and what microorganisms, would Al owns a private resort, the work together in a very limited ecosystem. Chateau Hutter, along the Bay shore, nine We needed to know a lot of things. And in miles north of Sturgeon Bay, and we point of fact, all we really know now is decided to use this "ideal" facility to that we need to know one heck of a lot more! host an “Invitational Workshop” for a Late one evening, Dave's call inter- short list of high school science teachers rupted Star Trek TNG with a challenge. We and professional researchers (some of need lots of data and it simply isn't coming these by tele- conferencing) to carefully in from individuals. Why not organize the define an initial set of experiments, and "Lunar Nightspan Hardiness" Experiment and establish an Advisory Board and Reporting perhaps some other suitable agricultural System to keep the process going. experiments and then enlist High School The 1st LUNAX™ Workshop-Conference Science Teachers, with the hope of getting was set for Tuesday thru Thursday, August more data, and data of better quality? Not 21st-23rd. Because it was necessary to being one to come up with an idea and then limit attendance to a dozen or so in order go hide, Dave immediately started network- to insure results, and because this brash Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 52 initiative was not guaranteed success, we Wisconsin high schools anxious to decided not to publicize the event outside premier the LUNAX Experiment Package the chapter. LUNAX I is now history. include Chippewa Falls (McDowell), Green Thanks to a truly magic mix of indi- Bay (East, Preble) Madison (Memorial, West), viduals of varied talent, endless enthusiasm Milwaukee (Bayview,Rufus King), Neenah and deep conviction, we succeeded in defi- (Shattuck), Racine (Park), and Waukesha. ning our goals and designing an initial 2- We can expect to pick up more schools as track set of experiments. The Lunar Night- word of this unique science opportunity span Hardiness Experiment (here we are spreads. looking for the limits of crop failure) LUNAX' immediate task will be to will begin with a practice run using gain experience with the initial experi- Wisconsin Fast Plants' Brassica rape, able ment package worked out at Chateau Hutter, to go from seed to maturity in 28 days, and to guide the follow up research, while and used in thousands of schools across continuing to define complementary experi- the country. We will then seek to zero in ment directions. A modest school registra- on the nightspan hardiness of a wide tion fee system will allow results to be variety of food and fiber plants that may gathered and analyzed, new experiment make attractive candidates for the Lunar projects to be developed, and a newsletter Biosphere. (Harvest Moon) to be published. We also prepared guidelines for an Individual hobby-gardeners and armchair open-ended multi-year Lunar Soil Evolution fans outside the school system will be Experiment using MINNESOTA LUNAR SIMULANT able to participate in or follow LUNAX (here we are looking to find strategies progress. MiSST's pioneer work will be for success). Three additional experiment continued by LUNAX. tracks are in process of development, each We also hope to tap talent at the of them aimed at supplying knowledge we do community college level. We have a fine not now have, but which we will need if a start here at Lac Court Oreilles Community “Return To The Moon to Stay” is to be College in Hayward. successful. The challenge facing Lunar National Prospects Agricultural Experiment Corporation is an We are off to a propitious start and exciting one. While the work to be done is it's time to let the cat out of the bag. frighteningly enormous, the team gathered We will be field-testing our initial LUNAX at Chateau Hutter begins with the confi- experiment package in about a dozen schools dence of being on the right track. MMM in Wisconsin. The next step is a major will keep readers informed with updates on presentation at the annual convention of our progress. We welcome this first addi- Wisconsin Science Teachers in Manitowoc, tion to Lunar Reclamation Society Inc.'s next April 19-2Oth, before spreading parti- new family of roll-up-the-sleeves part- cipation throughout the country and abroad. nerships. < MMM > Our purpose will not be just to teach already known space science. Rather, by reaching out through the hitherto Many Thanks untapped resource of H.S. Biology and Ag- to science Teachers, we offer kids a "unique opportunity" to contribute brand new Arthur P. Smith science of vital importance. Agreeing to serve on LUNAX' Board of for keying in the articles from Science Advisors: Mel R. Oleson of Boeing Aerospace, Seattle; Gary G. Lake, Clarke & MMM issues #21-40, which Associates, Technical Director Wisconsin previously existed on Commodore Fast Plants, UW-Madison (an expatriate of Brisbane, Queensland); C. William Easterwood, 64 floppies, no longer readable. the U. of Florida in Gainesville (and Without his assistance, these formerly at the LAND, Epcot Center); and Paul W. Weiblen (of Minnesota Lunar two volumes of MMM Classics, Simulants) U. of Minnesota Space Science #s 3 & 4, would have been Center, Minneapolis. LUNAX will most likely be based in Crew Bay, Wisconsin. postponed indefinitely. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 53 [Star*bound Series Cont.] This argument, articulated by some respected people, is nonetheless "in bad OF TIDES faith". First of all, the Sun also raises tides, and while it is true that solar tides are much lower and weaker than lunar ones [the ratio is about 1 : 2 1/2], if the height of the tide is great enough not to be masked by common wave action, just how high it may be is quite irrelevant. AND STARS The important thing is the availability of near-shore depressions with an erosion- resistant lip within reach of tide crest. Even if tide height were important, solar tides in up-flow cul-de-sacs like the Bay of Fundy are higher than the highest lunar tides in most other places. Continental
by Peter Kokh placement vis-a-vis ocean currents is the Gut Feelings major co-determinant of actual tide I am forever grateful for having heights. All it need take is just one learned from the American philosopher tidal pool to successfully concentrate and William James that our temperament influ- simmer a proto-organlc soup of the right ences reason more than most of us care to recipe. admit. But let us accept, for the sake of argument that Earth may be unique in When it comes to the cosmic place possessing such a disproportionately large of mankind, it is temperament that predisposes some to give more weight moon (actually, Charon, in comparison with to considerations that suggest we Pluto, about which it orbits, is propor- are unique, tionately much larger and closer). Let us and others to give credence to also accept, for argument's sake, that considerations that suggest just tides relatively as weak as those raised the opposite. by the Sun are insufficient to do the job, Some people have an inner need, That still does not rigorously lead to the conclusion that life is unlikely to arise based neither on reason nor evidence, to hold that we are alone in the elsewhere in the universe even on planets immensity of space and time. that are otherwise of the right size, composition, and proximity to their Is a large moon necessary central star. for life to emerge? Often cited as argument, is the unex- Squelching the argument pectedly large size of the Earth's natural Stars smaller and dimmer than ours satellite, the Moon. By all indications, a will have eco-zones (in which the amount planet of Earth's size and proximity to of light and heat per square meter is its star, ought to have no moon at all, or favorable to life) that are closer-in to a very small one at best. their central star. But since a star's What has this to do with the presence luminosity varies as the 4.5 power of its of life on this planet? The Moon causes mass, and as tidal force increases tides, and thus creates and maintains inversely with the cube of the distance tidal pools in near-shore depressions, (not the square!), stars only 'slightly' places where the proto-life soup of amino dimmer than ours will raise tide signifi- acids and other pre-organic molecules cantly higher on any planets situated in could stew and brew. In contrast, such their eco-zones to receive the same amount molecules would be so diluted in the ocean of light and heat as does Earth. at large that they might never interact Tau Ceti, the most promising plane- sufficiently to get something really inter- tary host in the solar neighborhood (12.8 esting going. And so, their argument goes, Lt yrs distant) has a 0.74 solar lumino- as most Earth-like planets would not be as sity, and thus an eco-zone radius of 0.74 fortunate in possessing such a large moon, AU [1 AU = 1 Earth-Sun distance], but with they would not form tidal pools needed as 0.935 solar mass. It would hence raise incubators. tides of 2.01 mean solar value at an Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 54 earth-like light/heat distance. And this approximates the present tides raised on Polders, A Space Colony Model
Earth by the Moon. by Marcia W. Buxton* Epsilon Eridani, also near and solar * a Cultural Anthropologist & founder is smaller, dimmer. It must raise still of Northwest O5 Society Chapter higher tides on any earth-like world it (now Seattle L5/1) in June 1996 harbors. And so on. Stars less luminous From the beginning of human civiliza- still might tidally arrest the rotation of tion families have made sacrifices for any equi-lighted planets. See Graph: their children and for future generations. In order for human civilization to continue it seems self evident that families must eventually move into space and become a spacefaring people. An interesting parallel can be drawn between the familial movement into space colonies and the Renaissance development of the Polder System in the low countries of Europe. Each is truly an artificially created environment. "A polder is a piece of land won from the sea of inland water and is constantly defended from it thereafter," explains Paul Wagret in Polderlands. Beginning in the 11th Century along the Northern Coast of Europe families labored to painstakingly force the sea to relin- quish land in order to provide farm land for their progeny. These brave men and women worked hard to provide future land Even a star of the same luminosity not for themselves but for their children as the Sun or not too much brighter, can and their children's children. In the same raise tides of lunar-like proportions way serious thought must be given by all seasonally (and that's all that is neces- families today to look to space colonies sary) on a properly positioned moonless to provide a better life for their future planet, if that planet has a sufficiently generations. eccentric orbit. For example, if Earth had The family structure as it had deve- no major satellite but had an orbital loped by the 11th Century, in what is now eccentricity of 0.26 (e.g. swinging in as the Netherlands, decreed that at a husband's close to the Sun as Venus, and out half death his widow received half his wealth way to Mars), it would experience tides of excluding his land. All his farm land went lunar intensity for a few weeks each year to his eldest son and the remaining wealth near perihelion. was divided among the brothers. This The upshot is this: even conceding custom allowed for a large enough area of the rather crucial role of tidal pools in farm land to be passed from one generation the successful origination of life on to another to sustain at least the eldest Earth, and even conceding that Earth may son. Daughters were generally expected to be uniquely blessed with a major satellite marry or enter convents to pray, teach, large enough and close enough to raise copy manuscripts and care for the sick. tides significantly higher than those The remaining sons frequently were prepared It does not at all raised by the Sun, to enter guilds to become expert weavers follow that the rise of life must be rare, or other sorts of craftsmen. The center of let alone a once-in-a-universe, once-in- cloth production was the city of Antwerp. all-time occurrence. Au contraire, the Other sons might choose the monastic life. strong plausibility of equally effective and considerably more common "great tide" In France, wealthy Lords would often scenarios becomes a major argument for the grant monks the right to the marsh land on opposite hypothesis - that life must he the edges of their properties provided common. If ever we do reach the stars, we that the monks endeavored to successfully drain the land for pastures and maintain will find life-laden worlds! < MMM > Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 55 them as polders. This "reclaimed" land was religious persecution in other countries theirs henceforth. Here they constructed many immigrants, particularly Anabaptists their religious buildings including stone and Mennonites who refused to bear arms, towers which could be used as shelters in fled to the low countries. Here the ruling times of floods by the people living in the class, perhaps because some of their ances- low lands. Mont St. Michel is an example. tors had been among the Crusaders in the In the areas of Friesland, Zealand, Holy Lands and had opened up early trade and Flanders much of the land was a routes and welcomed new ideas and foreign- brackish peat bog bounded on the North by ers, respected these people who were the Sea (illustration below). As the popu- willing to work so very hard to drain lation expanded, the digging of peat to be fields and maintain the polders. And they, dried and used as fuel became necessary. as other polder workers, were exempted The word "polder" may derive from the from military service and payment of land Flemish word poelen, meaning "to dig out". taxes. These immigrants were allowed to This digging was done in conjunction with organize their own schools and churches. the digging of ditches for the drainage of The development of the canal and the brackish water into the sea. This polder system was not without many real lowered the water table and the people catastrophes. There was often great destruc- learned that when these [newly] created tion but always followed by rebuilding. dry areas were planted in clover and The canals also began to serve other desalinated with natural rainwater, purposes and small barges were used to eventually this area became land where develop an efficient system of primitive cattle could graze and much later hops, commerce, dispersing beer, wine and salt. hemp, flax, coleseed, rapeseed, cereals, With the beginning of commerce came and finally flowers could be grown certain restrictions. Members of the successfully. This often became the land ruling class, usually people owning large of second and later sons. amounts of land but who lived in the towns In order to aid the drainage of the and villages, began to demand tribute for low lands, canals needed to be constructed. the use of the canals near the villages. Dikes using woven willow twigs and burnt The continuing need to dig for peat clay bricks were built systematically to for fuel which enhanced the reclamation of keep the brackish water from returning to the low lands, the emergence of the the hard earned low crop lands. The area windmills, the building of locks, and the is often six feet below sea level. Great slowly developing system of commerce care needed to be taken not to dig for encouraged the establishment of "high peat too near the dikes which might be water authorities" and water boards. weakened causing catastrophe. Voting rights depended upon ownership of farm land. Among the peoples of Utrecht, Netherland, Zeeland, and Flanders there were to become in the 14th Century the hoogheemraad schappen or high water authorities and [they were] responsible only to the governments. At the local level these Waterschappen came to serve the function as a court of law. By the 13th Century primitive wind- Just as the marsh lands were reclaimed mills and lifting dredger buckets were from the sea with embankments, with established along these "highways" of increases in population attention needed brackish water. Younger sons became inheri- to be paid to reinforcing the coastal sand tors of the early windmills. Bridges, locks, dunes along the North Sea. Wagret describes and paths were built along the canals to a polder dike as being perhaps 40 meters aid the families in fetching drinking in width, but a main sea dike may reach 80 water which often could only be obtained to 100 meters in width. The ebb and flow by going a considerable distance to an of the tidal currents along the sea coast area where rainwater collected suffici- sometimes caused erosion. ently for fresh water wells. Jan de Vries, in The Dutch Rural At the end of the 15th Century due to Economy in the Golden Age, remarks that Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 56 rural districts were prohibited from loped ambitious large scale pear digging brewing, spinning, weaving, or ship organizations. Plots were carefully laid building but that skippers of barges out as were canals and locks where settlers passing villages were required to dock, dug the peat and later were able to claim unload their cargo and allow their goods the soil as homesteads [ illustration to be offered. In 1575 there were elaborate below]. plans made which are reminiscent of the early plans and dreams in the 1970's of the L5 Society for Gerard O'Neill's High Frontier. His "Bernal Spheres" concept, housing 10,000 people, were to be nearly a mile in circumference and rotate to provide gravity comparable to that of Earth. The L5 Society proposed building such habitats by the end of the twentieth century from lunar materials to provide living space for workers and their families in a space manufacturing complex producing, among According to de Vries, "dike main- other things, satellite solar power stations tenance was an obligation divided among to supply cheap, clean power to Earth. the villages that benefited from it." A Immigrants to Bernal Spheres were to land user was responsible for a specific develop a better life for themselves and segment and the Waterschappen supervised for future generations. It may not have the system. been by digging peat out of low lying bogs Windmill operators took on growing and creating drainage ditches, but by using importance and were expected to keep the materials from the Moon, colonies would be polders dry throughout the winter. In 1574 created and solar energy would be utilized an 8 sided windmill was worth 3,500 gulder to grow food in a closed system, and event- and the salary of a mill operator was 100 ually there would be trees, streams, attrac- gulder plus a supply of candles in order tive housing, and a peaceful environment to work at night! Rapeseed became a for future generations. One space colony frequent polder crop and oil-pressing would act as a stepping stone to the windmills in Northern areas often were building of others. kept busy the entire year. Windmills were The Haarlemmer Meer Book of 1575, by also used for sawing wood [harvested] from Jan Adriaanszoon, describes an elaborate carefully tended groves of trees. plan to build 160 windmills and to build de Vries writes that "the monastic extensive canals to drain a major lake lands yearly yielded several hundred area. Like the L5 Society's early dream it thousand gulder for the support of educa- was not developed immediately but finally tion, health and welfare. Women played a with the invention of the steam engine the very important role in the life of the project became a reality in 1852. religious community. Churches played a By 1607 the Leeghwater's Beemster major part in the communities providing drainage project using 43 windmills some education, but literacy in the created 17,500 acres of usable acreage. majority remained low. Nevertheless five Some of the money necessary to finance universities were established. this project came from the highly success- Canals became of increasing impor- ful Amsterdam merchants of the East India tance and interconnected the major Company, trading primarily spices, sugar, villages and cities. Barging guilds were coffee and tea. Land owners were encour- formed and established regular service aged to grow livestock to provide large between major cities. Frank E. Haggett amounts of butter, cheese, and livestock sites that by the mid 1650's 80,000 acres that could be exported abroad. Near had been reclaimed form the sea. The Amsterdam by 1649, six villages combined farmers taxed themselves hundreds of efforts to provide a dairy for the nearby thousands of gulder yearly to improve the city, using their farm lands for that quality of their soil. Sea shells were purpose. ground up and used for fertilizer. Capitalists beginning in 1612 deve- Everywhere farm structures and homes were Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 57 enlarged or rebuilt. Commerce along the canals flourished. MMM #39 - October 1990 In 1667 there was a proposal to polder an inland sea, the Zuider Zee (See Figure 3). Hendrik Stevin developed the idea of closing off the incoming tide with Saving Money on Food in Space sluice gates but allowing the ebbing tides to flow into the sea. Eventually the fresh Prior and Future Progress water would replace the salt water sea. by Peter Kokh (The project was actually begun in 1927 $400/oz or the price of gold these and the first crops harvested in 1933 with days, works out to $6400/lb. The way we 175,000 acres eventually reclaimed.) have been making anti-progress in slashing By 1798 there were over 3,000 local the cost per pound of getting anything to Waterschappen and a central Waterstaat was orbit, much less from there all the way to created to fight against major floods. a soft landing on the Moon, that would be "The state set itself up as a protector a very optimistic ball-park guesstimate of against floods, the hereditary enemy of just the 'freight-added' cost of anything the country. The Waterstaat undertook upported from the Earth to early lunar works too large for small groups, collec- outposts. ted data, coordinated hydrological obser- Everyone recognizes the importance vations and drew up maps. According to of finding ways for early settlers to Wagret, 577,905 acres, or fourteen percent self-manufacture the more massive items of what is now the Netherlands, had been they will need, out of whatever materials reclaimed from the sea. The cost of the they can process from moondust. But often recla2mation always exceeded the actual I hear "Oh, we could afford to import this value of the land first brought into or that - it hardly weighs anything!" Hey, cultivation - only future generations were just remember, it will cost more than gold! to be the true beneficiaries. Thus it is not surprising that it A worthy cliche, "God made the Earth, seems self-evident to most people that it except Holland, which the Dutchmen made will be an urgent priority for lunar for themselves." Might that we, with God's outpost volunteers, and the settlers that help, break free of Earth and build the someday will follow, to grow their own Universe for ourselves. < MMM > food - 'it would cost too much to haul it References: up from Earth.' But this common wisdom is Barnouw, Adrian J. The Pageant of a bit simplistic, nonetheless. Let's take Netherlands History. New York: a look at some very real virtual savings Longmans, 1952. in food costs already realized even though we still do bring all food up from Earth - De Vries, Jan. The Dutch Rural Economy in one form or another. in the Golden Age 1500 - 1700. New Already we freeze-dry Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. most foods destined for Hugger, Frank E. The Modern space, saving all the Netherlands, New York: Praeger, 1971. weight of the associ- O'Neill, Gerard K. The High Frontier: ated water. To rehydrate Human Colonies in Space,New York: the food, we use water Doubleday, 1976. manufactured in space as a by-product of the orbiter chemical Rachlis, Eugene.The Low Countries New fuel cell energy system which runs on York: Time Life Books hydrogen and oxygen. Yes, we bring these Spier, Peter.Of Dikes and Windmills. bottled gases up from Earth - but now, we New York: Doubleday, 1969. are not 'also' bringing up extra water Vanveen, John. Dredge. Drain. Reclaim. just for food and drink. The Art of a Nation. 1962 bottled fuel freeze ready Wagret, Paul, Polderlands. London: H2 + O2 ]]]]]]] > H2O + dried = to eat Methuen & Co. 1959. gases cell items FOOD Note: It is in the above sense that the Check the labels on freeze-dried word “Reclamation” is used in “LRS.” foods packed for campers at the local Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 58 outfitters supply store and you will be in the needed Carbon, Nitrogen, and surprised to see that water accounts for Hydrogen as liquid methane and ammonia as much as 65-80% of the weight of ready- processed on Phobos and/or Deimos, the to-eat meals. Now that's real savings! companion mini moons of Mars. The capital When the first returnees establish costs of installing such a production our beachhead outpost on some 'magnifi- capacity could easily be amortized as the cently desolate' lunar plain, even before lunar population grows. The profits real- their prototype food-growing unit brings ized at Mars could defray the costs of in its maiden harvest of vegetables, they opening up the Martian frontier. A doubly can realize another 89% breakthrough in attractive strategy! food and drink costs as soon as they start There is one way, however, that using oxygen 'squeezed' from the moon rocks lunar settlements might become totally to make up that associated water of hydra- self-sufficient in food. And that is by tion. At this stage, we will be upporting supplying all their Carbon, Nitrogen, and only hydrogen and freeze dried foods. Hydrogen needs as byproducts of extensive So, when our nifty little 'agricule' Heliium-3 mining operations to supply starts spitting out real fresh food we Earth's voracious energy appetite. Of save the total cost of upporting freeze these, in comparison to lunar demand, the dried food, right? Not quite! All we save least abundant by far is Nitrogen - which by this loving garden-tending labor of will be the limiting factor on settlement raising our own up-home food supply is growth, mostly because of the high volumes another 53% of what we can get our rego- needed as a buffer gas in air. Hopefully, lith-soil to supply. profits from Helium-3 exports will allow Typical composition of oven-dry the settlers to pay the import price of as biomass from wheat, for example, is: much extra Nitrogen as they'd like. 48.0% Oxygen What we have said about food is 2.0% Calcium equally valid for usually forgotten but 0.8% Magnesium vitally important byproducts of prospec- 0.01% Iron tive lunar agriculture: fiber (cotton, linen, flax), oils, natural biodegradable all of which we can get from our make-do dye stuffs, cosmetics and soaps, and other soil, plus some eco-friendly household products. Of these, 2.7% Potassium fiber for clothing, toweling, bedding, and 0.8% Sulfur furnishings will likely receive the earli- 0.6% Phosphorous est priority. of which we can get perhaps half from the Saving money on the Moon by regolith. The rest must be upported from defraying avoidable upports from Earth is Earth: 36% Carbon 6% Hydrogen, 3% Nitrogen, only one part of the Story. Lunar agricul- and perhaps half of the Potassium, Sulfur, ture even in the early era when all Carbon, and Phosphorous. Nitrogen, and Hydrogen must be imported, Settlers will strive to mitigate has the potential to earn badly needed this burden by vigorously recycling their export income for the settlement. For waste biomass and anything else of organic Luna-grown food, simply for the Oxygen content, by withdrawing from the productive savings it realizes, will be deliverable biosphere as little organic material as to low Earth orbit and other space loca- possible (i.e. no wood for furniture or tions at a decided price advantage over other items, where substitution is poss- fresh food brought up from Earth. Ditto ible), and by carefully engineering all for fabrics and anything else incorpora- entry and exit systems to conserve ting lunar Oxygen. Early production of nitrogen-rich air supplies. [See "Liquid oxygen is then the key to everything else, Air-locks" in MMM # 17 July '88 p3 - and all the fuss about lunar agriculture republished in MMM Classics #2] presupposes this development. How could we make inroads into this The space frontier economy will be a stubborn balance? This still onerous complex hierarchy of supplies and demands. import burden will drive settlement policy. We hope you can appreciate the great As much as 2/3 rds of the upport transpor- potential for diversification ahead - if tation fuel cost can be saved by bringing we do our homework now! < MMM > Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 59 indistinguishable from the source material. MOON MINING Tailing mounds will blend in with the moonscape, and if preferable, can be raked & COMMON ECO-SENSE back over the surface. The only clue to an
by Peter Kokh area's having been mined will be a tell- The multi-thousand-year-long record tale absence Of minor craterlets. Tailings of human mining activities on our home should usually be minimal, nonetheless, planet will surely be enough to convince since more than one resource will be even the most bribe-prone galactic bureau- extracted leaving little more than the crat to deny us required permits to extend proverbial squeal of the pig. such esource extraction efforts off-planet. [See "Tailings" in MMM # 23 March '89 - In default of such red tape, it is left up republished in MMM Classics #3] to us to judge and police ourselves. (6) Fluids and gases used in the With mines come huge ugly piles of extraction process such as water, hydrogen, useless barren tailings and scarred land- hydrofluoric acid, chlorine etc. must be scapes slow to heal, streams poisoned with brought from Earth at great expense. So acid run-off, and legions of workers with resource extraction cannot possibly be dust-racked lungs. The record gives pause accomplished economically unless ways are to those considering opening up pristine found to recover and recycle these reagents eco-vulnerable Antarctica for development almost totally (read 99%). There will be of its legendary mineral wealth. Should it no mass leachate drainage into the envi- not also give pause to those who look with ronment. such high expectations to the plains and (7) Even in the case of accidental rolling highlands of our serene gray neigh- spills of reagent leachings, there is no bor, the Moon? lunar ground water to pollute or spread The salient points to remember are the problem. Spills will remain localized these: and it will be an economic imperative to (1) The Moon's mineral endowment has recover as much as possible. been minimally differentiated or locally (8) Miners, if you can call them concentrated and is thus distributed rather that, will not be breathing atmosphere in homogeneously, by Earth comparisons, in contact with the regolith they are proces- ores that are extremely poor by our stan- sing. Health concerns will instead focus dards. There will be no reason to fight on minimizing accidents and exposure to over deposits or jump another's claim. cosmic rays and rare solar flares. (2) There is no reason to believe (9) As to housekeeping activities of that richer deposits lie buried deep miners themselves in their shielded habitat beneath the already pulverized regolith- warrens, they too must recycle and conserve blanket that covers the entire surface to religiously [see "Saving Money on food in a depth of some 2-5 meters. In effect, Space" - elsewhere in this issue]. They will countless ancient meteorites by their assuredly be acutely aware that living bombardment have already "pre-mined" the immediately "downwind" and "downstream" of surface for us. There is no need for open themselves in cradling mini-biospheres pit mining. leaves scant room for eco-carelessness. (3) As to what does lie deeper, the As long as private enterprise - central peaks of the larger craters repre- carrying the baggage of the almighty sent upthrusted material from several "bottom line" - is the agent in question, kilometers below - sample and source you can rest assured that sheer economic enough should we need it. There will be no necessity will work mightily to prevent need to deep tunnel the Moon. 'eco-nonsense' on the Moon. The real danger (4) In the absence of atmosphere, would come with government leadership and any and all dust 'kicked-up' by our various its deferrable accountability. activities, has nothing to suspend it When you hear or read someone express above the surface, and is quickly purged alarm at prospects for developing the Moon, from the near-surface vacuum by the Moon's remember these points. A good response light but effective 1/6th gravity. with this as with any challenge: "That's (5) Tailings, the unwanted residue just what I used to think - until I looked after resource extraction, will be visibly into the matter further!" < MMM > Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 60 the Moon formed hot and dry and that none MOON MINING of its volcanoes or fissures spouted any steam and that its great lava outpourings & ENGINEERING REALITIES were also quite dry.
by Peter Kokh The writer shoots his respectability In an article in the June 1990 issue in the foot when on the one hand he com- of the Engineering and Mining Journal with plains that our exploration has not been the title "Moon"Mining: should we boldly thorough enough, and on the other he states mine where no one has ever mined before?" correctly that the Moon is 'unlikely to Earl C. Herkenhoff, P.E. raises several contain minerals that have been concen- points about the very logic of moon-mining. trated by magmatic segregation'. When he His tone is blatantly hostile. states that 'it is a safe bet that most The writer's principal point is that minerals are complex silicates' he isn't (to his knowledge) our survey of the Moon's telling us any thing that we don't already mineral wealth is so incomplete that it is know quite well. highly premature to be discussing what we He also shows the shallowness of his can - or cannot extract from it, and science background when he doubts out loud certainly premature to be spending hard how we can be so sure that Solar-Wind- scarce cash on studies as to how to go derived Helium-3 is more than a local quirk about doing it. Our response is that while in the few tiny soil samples studied. Surely admittedly our mineralogical survey is far there is no mechanism by which the Solar from complete, the wide equatorial swath Wind could have deposited its largess in 'read' by orbiting gamma ray spectrometers anything BUT an indiscriminate way! on board Apollo Command Modules the last Herkenhoff complains that established three missions, coupled with the six mining companies have not been consulted widely scattered diverse surface sites about mining methods - after he has already actually sampled by our astronauts and the slipped and told us that they wouldn't three additional sites sampled by the auto- dream of trying to extract anything useful mated Soviet sample-retrieving missions, from such miserably low grade ores. "Even gives us high confidence that what we've on Earth, process hydrometallurgists would seen and sampled is representative of the flinch at such an assignment." In point of Moon at large. fact, established companies have been too Herkenhoff insults NASA geologists busy getting wealthy off of Earth's much and their carefully supervised astronaut richer ores to have bothered to accumulate proxies when he speaks scornfully of "only any know-how that might apply to the situ- a few pounds of ation facing us on the Moon. What would be √ “grab samples” “snatched” from the the point in listening to those whose pre- surface of the Moon dictable broken-record message is "it can't be done"? We have no choice but to seek at only “a tiny spot” on the surface √ out rebels willing to try something new. where the landing craft was set down." He points to the difficulty miners It's clear that the writer hasn't will face in working in vacuum and without gone even the first mile in trying to abundant water - surely not news to us! We objectively understand what we were trying have to pioneer not only whole new chemical to accomplish during Apollo. extraction processes but engineer new ways The granted exception to this is the of handling the raw materials involved. absence of sampling and orbital readings You have to grant him a sharp touché', how- near the lunar poles leaves open the possi- ever, when he asks how we can ever hope to bility that perma-shade cold traps in deep do anything so difficult, when NASA can't near-pole craters may contain volatile seem to get even simple things straight resources which have been ruled out else- these days. where. On this very point, vis-a-vis the Certainly no one should underestimate possibility of finding water, the writer the engineering and chemical processing betrays his shallow study of published difficulties ahead of us. Unfortunately, lunar findings by speculating that more most space advocates betray in their but- thorough prospecting might find hydrates to-the-sofa fixed positions just such a as fixed water in igneous rocks. To the naive grasp of the situation. We have a contrary, we are now quite certain that Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 61 fearsome amount of homework to do. NASA is celestial impactors. This periodic burst not doing it, and NSS seems to assume it of freedom from the bonds of its own will just all fall into place somehow. SSI internal logic may be the only way it can by itself can only scratch the surface be freed of its own ruts, even as the seed with the member-derived funds it has to of some pine species can be freed of the work with. host cone only through intense heat in an Perhaps it is this all too nonchalant eventual forest fire. cocky conviction that we display in our Asteroids these days take much of bold scenarios for the future that encour- the blame, or credit as I see it, for ages this open scorn. Our dreams of the these clutch-hitting escapes from could-be future may turn out to be on target, but evolutionary dead-ends. But comets, despite if we continue to rely on nothing more their lower densities, can arrive with far than let-George-do-it [i.e. the government] greater momentum if coming from well "activism", how will we ever know? beyond the Asteroid Belt, indeed from well beyond the outer Solar System. Herkenhoff lists an impressive bibli- There are short- and long-period ography. It is mute testimony that he has comets, tame (or tamed?) inhabitants of done his homework with prior bias in search the realm of known planets. They revisit of ammunition. the coma-inducing warmth of the inner [Nb. Thanks to R. McNeil of the Willey Ley Solar System on a regular basis. Then Space Society, the Chattanooga, Tennessee there are those rare visitors throwing out NSS chapter, for bringing this article to hoary tails along one-night-stand hyper- MMM's attention!] < MMM > bolic trajectories from out among the stars, with too much speed to keep them [Star*bound Series Cont.] from returning thence. In between there comes the infrequent OORTFOAM visitor on a scarcely parabolic path which will bring it back Sunward some thousands of years hence. If we assume that such gelid objects could not have formed in
by Peter Kokh such eccentric paths, but must have coal- Consider for a moment how a fire- esced in some more rational more circular devastated virgin forest slowly rises up zone of proto-star cloud material, where from its ashes; only few plant species might that conjectured birthplace be? The colonize the wasted area at first, then as answer according to Dutch astronomer Jan they grow, niches are created that can be Oort, writing in 1950, was a vast spherical exploited by other plants. It can be a shell of pristine comet hulks thousands of century or more before the original bio- times more distant from the Sun than diversity of the forest is restored. If Neptune or Pluto. Known as the Oort Cloud the visiting devastation is very widespread, ever since, this region has been commonly some areas may stabilize with a quite imagined to drip Sunward great swarms of different mix of species than before. This virgin comets whenever some passing star is just a hint of what must have happened made an incursion into the neighborhood, after a number of episodes of near global clumsily disturbing their orbits in slate-wiping caused by large asteroid or wholesale fashion. Balderdash! comet impacts. When whole species, and One of the central assumptions sometimes whole families, of plants and behind all modern attempts at a scientific wildlife are wiped out, hierarchical cosmology (or better, cosmogony: theory of rebuilding of the niche-plexes of various the origin of the Universe as we now eco-systems must chart fresh paths. Survi- observe it to be) is the idea that what ving plants and animals, previously held holds true anywhere, must, all else being in check by now exterminated dominant equal, hold everywhere. Astonishingly, as species, are suddenly freed to exploit new religiously dedicated as most astronomers opportunities and effectively 'encouraged' are to this principle, their seemingly to evolve to do so. unquestioning mass-attachment to the idea The actual course of evolution has of Oort Cloud disturbances as the font of apparently been critically dependent on episodic cometary invasions of near-Sun- adventitious intervention of heedless space gives it the lie. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 62 SQUELCH ONE: passed through the much thicker asteroil That comets with slow but enormous belt at a relatively slow 10 klicks a momentum in orbits tangential to the Sun, second. should somehow lose ALL of that momentum, A people-entrusted interstellar and no less, to fall straight inwards, craft slicing through our galaxy-wide should happen about as often as every "Oort Foam" at perhaps a mere 10% of the other lifetime of the universe. In other speed of light i.e. 30,000 times swifter, words, it ain't too likely. would effectively densify comet spacing by SQUELCH TWO: that same factor. The odds against an actual (anihilating) collision (the force What's good for the Sun should be of the impact increasing with the square good for any other system-laden star. To of relative velocity) are still favorable think, even by default, that we are alone perhaps, but only statistically. An ample- in having an Oort Cloud (if we do indeed time warning system seems a long shot. have one, but that is not my dispute) Travelling at near light speeds may cut borders on being discrediting. If, like down on exposure time to cosmic rays, the two ships passing in the night, the Sun amount of non-recyclable consumables and another Oort-sporting star pass are needed for the trek (energy-generating another relatively hard-by (this should needs) and other dangers, but it'll surely happen every few hundred thousand years or so) then it is far more likley that the demand its own special courage.< MMM > Sun and its planets pass through the Oort Cloud shell of the other star, than that WOULD-BE STARFARERS QUIZ #2 that star create precisely the kind of by Peter Kokh gravitational wake which will send ANY of our own Oort Cloud's inhabitants dead-on 1. Q. How far from the Solar System would Sunward. Whatever comets may have restarted you have to travel before the star the stalled elan of evolution on occasion, patterns of the familiar constellations have had at us from their orbits around became unrecognizable? other suns. 2. Q. Are all stars approximately the same We are a long way from some General age? Theory of planetogenesis and solar system 3. Q. Does the color of a star tell us formation that will cover all the wide anything? range of star and system types so as to 4. Q. The Sun has 'sunspots' which come allow us to say much more about "compara- and go in pairs of eleven year cycles. tive oortology", if you will. But thing is Is this typical? clear. Oort clouds are, according to the 5. Q. Do stars ever collide with one original theory which it is not my purpose another? to question, too far out from their host 6. Q. Can the death of a nearby star suns, in comparison to average inter-star effect the Sun itself, or life within distances, not to loose members steadily our Solar System? by being routinely disturbed into some 7. Q. Has the Sun always had the same wide-ranging brownian dance. The number of neighbors? rogue comets no longer belonging to the ------gravitationally shepherded flock of any 1. A. Bright nearby stars like Sirius, star, must be rising steadily since the Procyon, Altair, Vega, Fomalhaut, onset of star formation in the galaxy. Capella, and Arcturus would shift from Nearer home, all our probes bound their familiar positions by the time for Jupiter and the outer planets (both you reached ten or more light years Pioneers and both Vikings) have passed from the Solar System in almost any through the Asteroid Belt ('thick' only in direction. You'd have to travel a bit the imagination of artists and writers of further before the stars in the Big space opera) as if it wasn't there. Even Dipper started to shift noticeably, but the thickest parts of the nearer Kuiper Orion would hold its shape stubbornly and remoter Oort comet clouds are consider- until you were some hundreds of light ably less densely populated yet - than the years away. It may seem natural, and Belt. However, the 'urgency' of population even romantic, to include the names of density (if one can speak so) is effec- host constellations in the names of tively relative to speed. Our proxies stars themselves (Alpha Centauri, Tau Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 63 Ceti) but what constellations they "lie 4. A. Sunspots are slightly cooler regions in" is entirely a matter of local per- on the surface (they are dark only in spective, so that these names betray a comparison!) associated with magnetic very provincial chauvinism. Such names storms. Solar flares share the same would not wear well - if and when civi- timetable. We know stars have flares, lization reaches an interstellar level. paradoxically, the smaller and cooler 2. A. No. Star formation probably began the star, the brighter and mote violent shortly after the matter contained in these flares can be. Some dim red dwarfs our condensing proto-galaxy reached a brighten considerably during flares. On certain trigger density, maybe 14 B hotter, brighter stars, flares are almost years ago. Almost all of the smaller, unnoticeable. We have found gigantic less massive, cooler burning K- and M- sunspots on the bloated surface of type stars formed at this time are Betelgeuse, a star nearing its death. still around. The more massive, brighter, 5. A. Compared to the immensity of space, hotter burning ones, long since consumed the volumes occupied by even the largest all their nuclear fuel and came to the stars are like mere points. Galaxies, end of their "mainstream" lives to end in contrast, occuppy much larger volumes up as degenerate dense white dwarf of the space they cluster in, and some- stars, as even denser neutron stars times do collide. We can see some gala- (pulsars), or even as black holes. The xies in the process of collision. But Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, the while such slow-motion events surely age of the Solar System in general. have an enormous effect on the dust and Most of the bright stars you see have gas clouds within the two galaxies, to be much younger since they belong to their individual stars must collectively the short-lived variety. Some, like pass clean through each other's inter- Sirius and Procyon, have companion stellar spaces with no more than near stars that have already burned them- misses. On the other hand, close binary selves out. There are indications this stars can gradually orbit one another may have happened to Sirius B within in ever tightening circles. Contact historical times. binaries have been observed. And quite 3. A. The color is a direct clue to the often, in the pre-death bloating stage, surface temperature of a star, and an one of the pair will expand to swallow indirect clue to the rate and intensity the other. For hermit stars like our with which it is consuming its nuclear Sun, there is no danger. fuel (hydrogen burns into helium, helium 6. A. It was probably a shock-wave from a into carbon, etc.) Red stars are coolest, bright nearby star dying in a super- orange ones a bit warmer. Then come the nova explosion that triggered the col- solar-type yellows, yellow-whites like lapse of the dusty gas cloud from which Procyon, and whites like Vega. Bluish the Sun and its planets formed. Some of stars like Rigel, burn hottest and the elements in our Solar System are brightest. Dwarf reds live the longest, present in atypical abundances for which the blues occupying the limelight just this seens to be the best explanation. briefly. When we study the spectrum of In general, all the atoms heavier than a star, its light passing through a hydrogen within our bodies are star-ash prism to reveal the various color com- from ancient stars long gone. But while ponents, we see tell-tale black absorp- the death throes of a nearby star like tion lines which indicate the presence Sirius could certainly be a major of certain elements. In general, stars happening in our skies (that there are that have lots of 'metals' (here meaning no records of such a spectacle when anything heavier than helium) are Sirius B went Nova, may indicate it was younger, having formed at a period when behind the Sun in line of sight at the star-forming clouds in our galaxy had time), we are not 'currently' close become more peppered with heavier ele- enough to a potential supernova candi- ments fused in the cores and supernova date to have to worry. But it won't be explosions of stars already dead. Thus too healthy for those only a few light solar-type stars poorer in 'metals' than years from Rigel when its time cones! the Sun, e.g. Tau Ceti, must be somewhat 7. A. Each star has its own orbit around older, say six billion years or so. the center of the galaxy, its own Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 64 diverging trajectory, its own pace. It ACT I: fade from the ruins we see today, takes the Sun an estisated 250 million and known to us as Mohenjo Daro, back in years to make one circuit. So our Solar time to one of mankind's first experiments System is only about 9 galactic years in urban settlement - we do not know by old. It is highly unlikely that the Sun what name its inhabitants called it - is still any where near any of the stars where the city fathers meet to accept the populating the neighborhood of its plans of their chief urban architect for birthplace. Nor, given chaos theory, the world's first urban sewer/drainage could we ever reconstruct what stars system: a network of gravity-gradient open were nearby at the time. You see, inter- ditches, into which all liquid-born wastes stellar travel - by the stars themselves would flow off to same final place of out- - has been around a long, long time. of-sight/out-of-nind. And we're aboard now! ACT II: there never has been an ACT II. Ever since Mohenjo-Daro, except for putting the sewer and drainage system underground MMM #40 - November 1990 and treating the effluent so that it commits less aggressive harm against neighboring communities, we have been in CLOACAL VS. TRITREME PLUMBING the rut of the very primitive duck bill platypus, stuck using a cloacal system to handle the quite different wastes from toilet (septage), bath and laundry (gray water), kitchen, and industry. Lessons for the “New Towns” of Space Except in "new towns", it would be prohibitively expensive to switch to a new 'multi-treme' system which keeps different types of sewerage separate from the begin- ning in order to benefit from simpler and more efficient source-appropriate forms of treatment, with the fringe benefit of
by Peter Kokh enjoying whatever valuable byproducts such The Best Plumbing System for Lunar separate treatment may promise. Lunar and and Space Settlement Biospheres? space settlements are "new towns". Infra- structure is 'change-resistant'. Therefore
cloaca: (clo AH ka) = a common cavity it is of supreme importance to choose it into which the intestinal, urinary, and wisely from day one. reproductive canals open in birds, While in many other areas NASA has reptiles, amphibians, and monotremes chosen to pioneer radically new technolo- (the lowest order of mammals). gies, the agency, and those involved in monotreme: (mo NO treem) = either of the 1977 Space Settlement Systems Summer the two remaining species (duck bill Study, turned instead to existing urban platypus and spiny anteater) of the models when it came to the basic architec- lowest, most primitive order of mammals, ture of plumbing and sewerage treatment with one hole for all discharges. systems. If you think of the opportunities for Earth-side spin-offs, this tack SCENE: the lower Indus Valley about 200 emerges as a major slip-up. miles NNE of modern Karachi, in the north Let's explore the benefits of an part of Sind province, in what today we alternative triple conduit or tri-treme know as Pakistan. drainage and routing system for future TIME: some 4,000-4,500 years ago. off-planet mini-biospheres. PLAYERS: a people, long since vanished 1) Farm, garden, and lawn run-off, food- from the area, but with increasing evi- processing waste and kitchen garbage- dence that they were the ancestors of the disposal waste (if not saved to compost populous dark-skinned peoples of today's for home gardens): the water laden with southern India: the Dravidian speakers of them should be kept separate by a distinc- Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese, Malayalam. tively labeled and color and/or design- Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 65 coded drain and conduit system. After valuable and elegant opportunities to sieving out larger chunks for composting, produce 'organic' fertilizers and other such water can empty into fish tanks regolith-soil amendments which are far without further treatment. superior to chemicals in their buffered 2) Gray water from showers, hand- and slow-release of nutrients and in soil- dish-washing, and laundry would similarly conditioning character. have a privileged routing system, to a In smaller space and/or lunar out- treatment facility which would remove what- posts, heavy reliance on chemical assist- ever biodegradable soaps and detergents ance for fast-cycling sewage treatment may are allowed, for composting separately. be the only feasible way to go. But as we The remaining liquid could be run during design settlements for hundreds or more dayspan through shallow near-surface ponds, pioneers, we have the opportunity, if not top-paned with quartz, where 'raw' solar the duty, to consider more natural alterna- ultraviolet would sterilize it, killing tives. Every part of our proposed tritreme all pathogens and bacteria. Simply cleansed drainage and sewage treatment system, has and purified with the biodegraded cleaning separately received abundant proof of agents added back in, this nutrient-rich concept on Earth. < MMM > water could go directly to farming areas and into the drip-irrigation system. 3) Septage (= urine and feces) can be COMPOSTING TOILETS handled next in several ways. The familiar very water-intensive water-closet flush toilet system could be preserved, connected to its own drainage net. Solids could be removed to be channeled through an anaer- obic digester for composting and methane production [see "Methane" below], and suspended particles in the waste water Advantages for the Lunar Frontier treated by microbes to produce milorganite- by Peter Kokh and Doug Armstrong type organic fertilizer. The clarified With Thomas Crapper's invention of would then go to the farm effluent the water-closet flush toilet that immor- watering system. Or, the urine and fecal talized his name, large segments of the water might alone use a third drain line world's population became freed of un- system, while fecal solids are 'collected' pleasant odors from out-houses and/or the for separate treatment. [See "Composting problems of having nowhere to empty pots Toilets" below]. of 'night-soil' save out-the-window or in 4) Industrial effluent must be purified a gutter. But convenient water-closets, and reused in a totally closed on site whether attached to urban sewers or country loop with a high price for any loss make- septic tanks, are not the only alternative up water piped in. Allowing industries to for sanitary disposition of one less plea- discharge water, of any quality, into the sant side-effect of having a body. public drains system, invites than to pass On the market today are alternatives on clean-up costs to the public. If all targeted primarily at owners and builders industries must play by this same rule, of remote homes and country cottages where and cost out their products accordingly, the type of terrain may make septic tank there will be no problem with this make- installation impossible, and/or where it or-break provision. seems prohibitive or simply not desirable The 1977 NASA study recommended the to tap a 'flush-away' water source. These use of a wet-oxidation (euphemism = incin- wizardly contrivances are known as compos- eration) process for treatment of all ting toilets. Using on-the-spot microbial water-carried wastes indiscriminately. biodegradation, they turn human wastes While this method almost certainly offers into good garden-ready compost without the swiftest turn-around for our costly subjecting its user to unpleasant odors original investment of exotic (= Earth- and with little expense. sourced) hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and Are such devices space-ready? Not possibly added phosphorus and potassium, quite. They require venting to an outside on the order of 1-1.5 hours, it misses air-sink, a luxury we won't have in mini Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 66 space or lunar biospheres. For our purposes, The HUMUS™ it will be necessary either to filter the Dry Toilet is "waste air" for direct inside venting or meant for occa- to devise a waste air drainage network, sional use by a with all fetid and stale air channeled few people. Much into fish tank aeration systems within more capacious farming areas. This can be made easier by systems, like the not overloading the system to begin with. Clivus Multrum For example, the simple "conpostlet" or type depicted "COMPO" pictured below evaporates the urine. here, will serve But the urine and fecal water could be larger families collected in closed containers for separate on a full-time treatment. basis, and also handle compost- able kitchen wastes from food preparation. Integrated systems such as this one might also find application in "space frontier" settings large or small. Not only would compostlets put less strain on any settlement and outpost waste water treatment systems, their product, sanitary organic garden-ready compost, can only be replaced by chemicals expensively 'upported' from Earth only to do the job (waste treatment And fertilizing) less well. However fondly attached we are to flush toilets, however much we are inclined to scorn any alternative as an unwelcome throwback to cruder times happily behind us, the space frontier version of the com- postlet is in our own best self-interest. For those living in small off-planet quarters with no home garden space, and (1) Swingaway Chamber Cover - when lid is those who simply do not want to keep up a lifted, only clamshell disk shows. Pressure home garden in 'sunlit' space provided, a on seat makes halves swing open. utility service could pick up sealed com- (2) Flush Button postlet trays on a regular basis, to feed a (3) Automatic Aerators: Electric motor communal composting operation. Or, luxury connected to flush button drives water-closets could be provided, flushing agitators, turning composting matter for into a separate septage-only drainage full drying. system as suggested in the previous article. (4) Thermostat An appropriately steep installation charge and user fee schedule for this "carefree" (5) Air Channels: fan drives warm air and expensive option could be charged to the oxygen through channels under compost. accounts of those who insisted upon it. (6) Level Tube: Fluid high level mark Okay perhaps for large enough space indicates need to reset thermostat. This frontier settlements with major farm oper- function is readily automatable. ations! But what about the smaller outposts (7) Removable Tray Cover: The final dried which will almost certainly be used as compost lies in tray ready for emptying. beachheads initially, both for lack of (8) Ventilation Pipe: For moist (urine) money and our need to build up know-how, air and odors. If urine was drained into a experience, and confidence step by step? sub-tray with odor trap, the venting need In the long run, it'll pay us hand- should be reduced to drying fecal matter. somely to treat human wastes as a "precious This fetid air may be exhausted commodity" - yes, like gold or platinum - (a) indoors, through activated charcoal from the outset. If at first we cannot filter, or (b) via a common stale air afford to bring along the means to compost duct-tree to be used to aerate fish ponds. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 67 wastes properly, or have no use for such phere is an almost certain indication of compost, we can simply freeze-dry or other- the presence of "life". wise immobilize the stuff until we do On the space frontier, we are unlikely begin farm operations. to find natural sources of methane this Incineration ("wet-oxidation") would side of the giant planets. Yet within the be a grave misuse of a valuable free carefully tended mini-biospheres we must resource. A damn-the-future, let's-go-with- install in alien climes to re-encradle convenience attitude is not the way to ourselves, methane has a roll to play - bootstrap our way to any more significant within limits. It may be ill-advised to realization of our space-faring ambitions. brine along ruminants such as cows or even To say the least, the expediencies so goats (which are far more efficient in lightly recommended by some planners, producing milk and cheese) unless we are would be judged harshly by those trying to certain we can handle (i.e. collect or build on such beginnings. trap) their steady outgassings. In planning the next stage, Methane is also produced in anaerobic we must always peer ahead a few digesters composting farm biomass waste steps, lest we venture off down (= parts of plants not edible to humans or any dark dead-end alleys. Bad livestock, as well as produce of reject infrastructure decisions quickly quality). They are an especially efficient become "entrenched" and change- and quick way of rendering compost as resistant. opposed to the best window designs. [below] Plumbing-As-Usual would be a costly case in point. Vertical Digester Think “Compostlets!” < MMM > (1) Inlet (2) Rotating mechanism METHANE (3) Plowshares (4) Air pipe (5) Manometer (6) Orifice plate
by Peter Kokh (7) Deck & Methane is the simplest, most common (8) Compost gaseous hydrocarbon. Incorporating one atom of Carbon and four of Hydrogen in each molecule, it is also known as "fire damp" The Question: and "marsh gas" It is the major component, So is natural Methane production usually more than 80%, of the "natural gas" within space and lunar biospheres some- widely used for home heating, industrial thing we should hold to a minimum = no ovens and electrical power generation cows or goats; incineration of biomass plants. It is produced naturally in human wastes, rather than the slower process of and animal food digestion, and emitted as anaerobic digestion? Or does it offer us flatulence (cows and termites being notor- something of great potential to foster iously efficient at its production) and with care? Let's back up a bit. anaerobic (oxygen-starved) plant decompo- At present we can only speculate sition, such as at the bottom of a swamp when the day will come that will find us or bog. 'mining' lunar top-regolith for Helium-3 Without warning additives, it is to feed yet unengineerable fusion power clear and odorless, about as dense as air, plants, and in the process extracting and poorly soluble in water. Methane is significant amounts of Hydrogen, Carbon combustible in air if certain threshold and Nitrogen from the moondust as by- concentrations are reached, and slowly products. Until such a time, we will have oxidized at any level. Over the long run, to "out-source" these necessary ingredi- Methane can 'co-exist' with atmospheric ents for life. That will mean tanking them Oxygen only if the former is continuously in either up-well from Earth, or at a re-generated by the processes mentioned potential 2/3rds saving in fuel costs, above. Thus seemingly stable co-existence from a processing plant on Phobos or of Methane and Oxygen in a planet's atmos- Deimos, strategic moonlets of Mars. Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 68 For ease of handling, it will be BROWN DWARFS considerably more convenient and efficient to ship this vital threesome combined as liquid CH4 Methane or liquid NH3 Ammonia, than as separate gasses (though liquid N2 Nitrogen is easy enough to handle if we need more of it than the amount co-impor- table with whatever Hydrogen we need). In other words, we will already have by Peter Kokh on hand equipment to break up Methane and put it to good use in the process of intro- Long before the term "BROWN DWARF" ducing its component Hydrogen and Carbon became the established currency for refer- into the biosphere system. Fuel cells that ring to substellar bodies without enough burn Methane and Oxygen are one possi- mass to contract gravitationally to the bility. Now with that possibility in mind, point where spontaneous nuclear ignition can begin and be sustained, I felt that Tanks of liquid Methane - or there must be innumerably more of such Methane pipe lines - might be the denizens of the dark [calling them dud most efficient way to ship energy stars, substars and finally "infrars” from the main settlement (or the since they could shine only in the infra- Spaceport) to distant outposts red than the stars themselves. else where on the Moon. The argument is quite simple: among But it gets more exciting. Methane the known types of stars, the cooler and is comparatively clean-burning in air (79% fainter the star type, the more of them N ) so far as Hydrocarbon emissions and 2 there are, in a geometric ratio. Now if Carbon Monoxide are concerned - Nitrogen indeed there are far more "BD"s than oxides are still a problem. visible stars, distances between then must So if we burn it instead with pure be somewhat less formidable than those Oxygen stored in a tank just like the that quarantine stars and their planets- Methane, this will give us a Nitrogen-free in-tow from one another. Our closest combustion environment, an engine that stellar neighbors, the double star Alpha exhausts only water steam and Carbon Centauri with its tag-along, Proxima, are Dioxide needed by vegetation. Nor will some 4.3 light years away (= 270,000 A.U.). that mean too much CO2 . NASA's "wet As remote as this seems, more than 3000 oxidation" process would incinerate all times the known diameter of our Solar wastes without composting, dumping more System, we are fortunate to have a neigh- bor so close. CO2 yet into the biosphere and probably more heat as well from equipment run by If you take a list of all known stars less efficient electrical motors! within 10 parsecs (32.58 light years) as a representative sample, the "statistical By taking the pains to produce com- average" distance between any one star post, we are left with a fuel which can be system (binaries etc, count as one) and used to run agricultural equipment - at no its nearest neighbor is 6.3 light years. - extra expense dumping its C2 rich exhaust There are some stars even 'luckier', of into the farm areas right where it is course. It's just a matter of breaks. One needed. As far as this writer knows, there pair is only 1.1 light years apart. Stars are no existing engines that burn Methane drift and in the past we've come even with tanked Oxygen. However, we will be closer than that to sundry stars, like developing them anyway for Mars applica- "ships passing in the night". the tions, as it is ideal fuel for that Back to our story. If for every environment. visible star system, I argued, there were Such engines could run plowing, ten "rogue" brown dwarfs, unattached to tilling, harvesting, processing and drying full-fledged stars, then the average equipment etc. They could also be used to distance between closest neighbor systems generate extra heat needed in nightspan. of either type must be 6.3 Ly times the Why not be the first to develop such an reciprocal of the cube root of 11 (10+1) engine in your garage? < MMM > = 2.83 light years. That sounds a little Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 69 more friendly - but don't get excited. IRAS was capable of detecting only It's still an unattainable distance given those rare dwarfs with a fairly high current demonstrated technology. If for temperature, such as they would have if every visible star, there were a hundred they were recently formed. It is the more of such dark rogues, then that intersub- plausible assumption that the overwhelming stellar mean closest distance would be majority of such substars were formed in only 1.35 Ly. You have to remember that the earlier waves of galactic star forma- space is cubic! tion and have long since cooled to a point A debate has been raging over whether where they emit heat too feebly to be the universe has "enough total mass" to be detected by our current state of the art gravitationally closed or not. Will current instrumentation. Further, the investiga- expansion eventually stop, even as a ball tors FAIL to admit, they have been looking thrown up into the air, to be replaced by only for brown dwarfs that are companions some final epoch of infalling contraction, of known visible stars, not for those or will the expansion and 'thinning' go on harder to find hermit rogues in sunless forever? The total of visible stars and reaches. known gas and dust clouds in all the known So these intra-stellar substellar galaxies adds up to only 10% of the mass curiosities may still lurk out there some- needed to "close" the whole. Some propose where. If so, these hermit brown dwarf that the conjectured swarm of unseen brown systems, despite the somewhat less intimi- dwarfs may possibly account for most of dating distances between them, won't become the "missing" mass. stepping stones to the stars. It would be absurd to waste the fuel and the time So now these illusive objects are no needed to decelerate for a "pit stop" in longer just an absorbing topic, as we idly such a system. daydream of alternate pathways into the universe at large. Searching for them has But, it is possible many of then become a top priority! have dwarf planetary systems not unlike Jupiter's, close-in and cold!. and, ample Those searching argued that some solar energy is not the only hook on which brown dwarfs may retain enough heat from to hand our pioneering hat. their original formation, the heat of con- traction, to be detectable by special infra- Circling some of these lonely dwarfs red-sensitive telescopes. Until recently, may be numbers of "oceanids" or "europids" we could not conduct such searches. [see MMM JUL '9O #37 article "Oceanids"], Europa-like moons with ample water oceans The water vapor in our atmosphere kept liquid by tidally-induced heating effectively screens out the infrared part under vacuum-packed ice crust seals. Some of the electromagnetic spectrum. But now, day we may learn how to farm such ocean- new instruments on very high peaks such as trove moons, starting with Europa herself. Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii at 13,796 ft (4300 m) poke above most of this Communities of settlers could orbit water vapor screen yet that is still not in space settlements or live in shielded enough to provide the sensitivity needed. and insulated stilt-supported structures Nor do the brief flights aboard NASA's out on the ice-crust. For energy they infrared-equipped Kuiper Airborne Observa- could tap into strong magnetic differen- tory suffice. So when the IRAS (Infra-Red tials surrounding the brown dwarf or rogue Astronomy Satellite) went up in January gas giant, in much the same manner as OTEC '83, the search for brown dwarfs became a (Ocean Themal Electric Current) schemes. top priority. This is a technology we probably must develop if we are serious about attempting While IRAS did make a serendipitous to bring Jupiter's big Galilean moons into discovery of previously unsuspected proto- the human domain. planetary "dusty" disks around some nearby stars like Vega and Beta Pictoris, no In a way he did not foresee, Arthur unchallengeable evidence of brown dwarfs C. Clarke, co-author of "2001" the Movie was detected. Many, even some of the inves- (Saturn's Iapetus, not Jupiter, hosted the tigators themselves, have jumped to the stargate monolith in the book version), conclusion that the assumptions on which Jupiter could yet become our dawn break- we've been postulating their existence are through point to the stars! < MMM > wrong, that there aren't any such critters. LOOK for MMM CLASSICS 5 & 6 in July 2005 Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 4 - Republshed January, 2005 - Page 70