When We’ll Really Nuke The Moon

October 14, 2009

The dust is still settling from the public blowup over NASA’s LCROSS experiment to go prospecting for water on the moon by crashing a rocket booster into it last Friday. The impact was a PR flub. There were no dramatic images for any evidence of the smashup.

Nevertheless, I have subsequently received a few angry e-mails from people who are incensed that we would harm Earth’s only natural satellite.

The tersest note was from a retired Marine:

“Stop bombing the fu*king moon.”

In a following e-mail he was more philosophical: 

“Yes, worlds are being destroyed every second in our timeless universe, but through natural processes of creation and recreation . . .”  

If I apply that logic, then we should do nothing in the future to deflect or destroy any Earth-bound asteroid, but instead let nature take its, er, natural course  in “recreating” life on the surface of an incinerated Earth.

Another writer admonished:

“I just want NASA to leave the moon alone. Consider it an anti-littering position.”

The picture at the top of this blog is an example in interplanetary littering. It shows what happened when NASA deliberately crashed a 31,000-pound rocket booster into the moon in 1971. The booster was the upper stage of the Saturn V rocket that propelled Apollo 14 astronauts to the moon. The energy of the impact (nearly 10 times more powerful than the LCROSS impact) created small tremors that were measured by the seismometer placed on the Moon by Apollo 12 astronauts in 1969.

Now guess what?  The 115-foot diameter crater with its fresh, bright ejecta rays is indistinguishable from any other lunar crater formed by a meteorite impact. In fact, you wouldn’t even know this was “planet littering” if NASA didn’t dutifully point out the man made crater in a recent high-resolution picture from their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Nobody got their nose out of joint when NASA quietly performed this seismic experiment nearly four decades ago to send vibrations through the moon’s surface to probe the internal structure of the lunar crust. But that was in the pre-Internet days. There was no cyberspace landscape for goofy ideas to freely pop up like whack-a-moles, or social networking for anonymous blabbering and carping. 

What will NASA do to "despoil" the moon next?

NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio is developing a small nuclear device that would be launched to the moon to provide 35 kilowatts of power to a manned moon base. Heat from the 1,200 degrees generated by the decay of uranium would run four Stirling engines mounted on a metal truss above the reactor.

Why not use solar power? Simply because nights on the moon are two weeks long. And, rechargeable batteries would wear out. But a small nuclear reactor would run for years untended.

The U.S. president would have to approve launching a nuke to the moon. This could be sticky considering that Chicken Little protesters unsuccessfully tried to stop NASA's 1997 launch of Cassini, a Saturn probe carrying 72 pounds of radioactive plutonium.

I can just imagine the public hysteria and doomsday warnings over putting a trashcan-sized nuclear power planet on the moon. I’ll be getting e-mails: “Don’t make the fu*king moon radioactive!”

But if we want to send humans to live on the moon and Mars, nukes will have to go along with them. There's no room for misguided and pretentious interplanetary environmentalism when it come to surviving in space.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Don]

You're right Ray. It's hard to imagine how humanity could undertake long-term exploration and settlement on the Moon or in the far reaches of the solar system without nuclear power. The systems I've heard about, including the Sterling model you mention, would be launched "cold" meaning they would not be active until they were far out into space with no chance of falling back to Earth.

[Emory Stagmer]

35KW is a decent start, but we really need on the order of 1MW in order to make the commercial case for lunar resource exploitation.(see writings by Dennis Wingo in particular) That means big solar arrays at places like the rim of Shackleton (which is 80% lit) supplemented by these kinds of fission systems. Looks like there's uranium up there, so maybe - EVENTUALLY - we could launch the power plants un-fueled and fuel them in-place. That's a dream we can work toward anyway :)

[Greg Fish]

Oddly enough, there was once a plan to really, actually nuke the Moon according to the Russian conspiracy grapevine...

http://worldofweirdthings.com/2008/12/05/the-soviets-secret-moon-plans/

[MichaelL]

Greg Fish:
Not only the Russians planned to nuke the Moon, but also the Americans:

http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/nuke_moon_000514.html

[brobof.wordpress.com]

I seem to remember a Science Fact article appearing in Astounding (way back) from one of the people involved in Project Plowshare. The concept being used to blast habitable space under the lunar surface. The article suggested that most of the radioactivity would be contained by the slag pool at the bottom of the cavity!
A have always agreed with Gerry Anderson that the Moon is the best site for our Nuclear industry (Blowups Happen) and just the spot to build Orion (the original) and reprocess all that silly nuclear arsenal into serious fuel for a serious deep space vessel!
And to think that we could have done this all by 1999!

[Mr. Jody Bowie]

I agree the LCROSS mission was a major PR disappointment. However, I think its worth noting that (as I read on another blog) "sometimes in science things don't turn out like we think they will". This is an important concept that students need to be reminded of (especially in a time where most "labs" are simply cookbook verifications of what they are learning in class).

I don't know the answer for NASA, but they are surely going to have to work on their PR if they are going to survive gov't cutbacks. Sometimes I worry they are a sinking ship which people do not perceive as relevant anymore.

I always enjoy reading, thanks for posting.