Back in December I started bothering Rick Tumlinson to get me a copy of the book Return to the Moon for review on this blog. At the end of February, the publishers - Apogee Space Books - kindly routed a copy to me. Since the book is a collection of short essays, I had promised Rick that I would review the book essay by essay over numerous blog posts. If there are any spelling errors in the quotations I give, then these errors are entirely mine, as I am copying from the book rather than cutting and pasting.Previous in this series: Part 1
In his essay "The Next Age of Lunar Exploration", Andrew Chaikin gives a little history of the Apollo program, and talks about his conversations with Apollo astronauts Alan Bean, Dave Scott, Buzz Aldrin, and Bill Anders. He then makes the case for returning to the moon:
But there are some who would bypass the Moon in favor of going directly to Mars. Their viewpoint mystifies me. Scientifically, our nearest celestial neighbor is priceless; it is the Rosetta Stone for decoding the history of the Solar System. And the fact that six teams of astronauts spent a total of about 12 days living and working on the lunar surface means we've barely begun to explore it.Sure, the moon is a good stepping-stone for the long trip to Mars, but to view human habitation of the moon as merely an excitement-generator and as a stepping stone to bigger and better things is shortsighted, and simply not enough to justify a human settlement there.
When it comes to the operational aspects of living and working on other worlds, the Moon is invaluable. Just two and a half days from home, it will be, in the words of the science-fiction writers Judy and Gar Reeves-Stevens, a kind of Outward Bound school for planetary explorers... Compared to the Moon, getting to Mars will be like the difference between hiking in the foothills and climbing Everest.... I don't think the "been-there-done-that" crowd appreciates how exciting it will be to step outside at night, look up at the Moon, and say, "there are people living there, and learning how to explore the solar system."
Fortunately, the moon is more than a training ground. The vast resources of its surface will be the enabling resources for every long-term human endeavour in space over the next century. The raw materials available there, with just a little industrial processing, will be the ones which supply the Oxygen and Titanium and pretty much any metal we require for construction of real space stations (gigantic rotating wheels that house thousands of people at the LaGrange orbits, GEO, and so on), at much lower cost than if they were hefted from the earth; the Platinum-group metals we find there will be absolutely required to shift from an oil-based economy to a Hydrogen-based economy; and the construction of gigantic solar-collector power stations in orbit will only happen if we can bring the raw materials of the moon into play. The moon's biggest advantage is as a source of raw materials near the top of the earth's gravity well.
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