Asia dives into moon race

By M H Ahsan & M Raja

With the Chinese and Japanese making plans to establish moon bases, can India be far behind? "Global players have declared that by 2020, they will have their bases on the moon," Madhavan Nair, chief of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), declared on August 18. "I don't think India can afford to be lagging behind in that." Nair said ISRO is defining technologies needed for India's first manned space mission in an Indian space vehicle scheduled for 2015 (Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma spent eight days aboard a Soviet Soyuz T-11 in 1984).

Fifty-nine of 122 lunar probes launched worldwide were successful. More are heading moonward in a renewed interest in Earth's neighbor 385,000 kilometers away. Leading Asia's moon ambitions is the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which rescheduled its lunar orbiter, Kaguya, to September 13 instead of this month. On August 17, China insisted its lunar Chang'e I program is purely scientific and not competing with any other country (read Japan).

India is expected to invest US$1.5 billion over the next five years to develop technologies for a manned space flight by 2015 and a moon flight by 2020. Most of the designing, research and technical jobs are to be completed by 2012. The United States wants a permanent outpost on the moon. This month, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a master list of potential lunar objectives, consulting more than 1,000 people from businesses, and it included developing lunar commerce.

Scientists say moon resources could support life on Earth with cheaper and cleaner energy and help human exploration of the solar system and outer space with cheaper rocket fuel and space-travel construction materials. Lunar mineral deposits include aluminum, magnesium, titanium, iron (for building moon structures), and silicon (to make solar cells for energy), besides the lunar soil enriched with oxygen (for astronauts to breathe and for making rocket fuel) and hydrogen; the soil could also be melted into casts and used as construction blocks. Former Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt says a tonne of helium-3 from the moon could be returned to Earth to produce fusion power that would be price-competitive with oil at $30 a barrel. But this technology could be still decades away to make it cost-effective.

"If investment visionaries have their way, the moon of the 21st century is going to be dotted with robot factories, underground cities, power towers, tourist stopovers, science stations, even lunar burial sites," promised Space.com at the turn of the millennium, reporting on the second annual Lunar Development Conference held in the US and attended by entrepreneurs, land developers, space technologists and researchers. Growing interest in space tourism makes moon inhabitation closer to reality.

Patrick Collins, a space-tourism expert and professor of economics at Azabu University, Japan, says that just 10% of existing governmental space budgets would be needed to make space tourism a $100-billion-a-year business. Russia's Federal Space Agency has announced a moon-tourism project to be launched by 2010. With California-based Space Adventures and the Tokyo-based travel agency JTB Corp as partners, the project offers around-the-moon trips on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Two tourists per trip will go on the moon ride, accompanied by a professional astronaut. The return ticket? Just $100 million. Shimizu Space Systems, a Japanese company working on space and lunar tourism, plans to build lunar bases with inflatable buildings served with golf courses and tennis courts.

A Lunar Hilton bigger than the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, could dot the moonscape if British architect Peter Inston's designs for a lunar complex for Hilton International appears. The Lunar Hilton would be a 5,000-room, domed, solar-energy-powered structure, with drinking water from lunar ice, and with restaurants, a church, a beach, and moon buses taking guests on lunar picnics. Asia could soon have its versions of the Texas-based Moon Society, affiliated to the Artemis Society, whose Artemis Project works to "design, fund and deploy the first private lunar base for commerce and tourism".

The Moon Society's top agenda is to establish human communities on the moon and promote large-scale industrialization and private enterprise on the moon. Greenpeace, of course, would then have its lunar branch. NASA, aiming for a moon base at either the north or south pole of the moon, estimates that by 2024, there will be continual presence on the moon, with International Space Station-like crews being rotated around the year. Private US space companies are already in business, each with projects to send orbiters, landers or robot rovers to the moon in the next few years.

On August 13, California-based SpaceDev - describing itself as "an entrepreneurial space-systems company" - declared its second-quarter and six-month fiscal results, reporting $17.7 million in revenue, a 12% increase from the previous year. TransOrbital, with its tagline "The moon is open for business," says it's the first private company to be authorized by the US State Department for commercial flights to the moon. Given the Indo-Chinese economic-growth rate, Asian companies will not be far behind.