I am delighted to announce that my soon-to-be-published novel, “Trogs” has been nominated for the Prometheus Best Novel Award. Established in 1979, the Prometheus Awards recognize the best in libertarian-oriented science fiction and classic fiction.
“Trogs,” the sequel to “Dust Mites,” is scheduled for release Sept. 8. Set in the year 2075, both novels chronicle the stirrings of a second American revolution in colonies on the Moon.
There are several steps on the way to winning the award. I’ll keep readers posted as to my progress — assuming I progress, that is. (If I don’t make the cut, I’ll just drop the subject!)
An illustration of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS), a spaceflight experiment designed to keep track of objects entering, operating in, or leaving cislunar space. (Image credit: U.S. Air Force Capt. David Buehler), by way of Space Insider.
To the layman, there looks to be a lot of wide-open space between Earth and the Moon, so the idea of someone conducting a Straits of Hormuz-style blockade of transit between the two is not a possibility that comes readily to mind. But Leonard David writing in Space Insider warns that it’s an all-too-real possibility.
Blockading cis-lunar space is not a problem we’ll need to worry about in the short term. But with the space economy on a geometric growth track, the Moon is destined to become an integral extension of Earth’s economy. Satellites, He-3 mining, solar power, data centers, chip fabrication and pharmaceutical manufacturing — you know the drill.
“Just as the Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway, cislunar space, though seemingly large, actually contains a few unique and exclusive points of transit through which all lunar travel must pass,” David quotes Marc Feldman, executive director of the Center for the Study of Space Crime, Piracy & Governance, as saying.
The article does not elaborate on what those choke points might be, However, CoPilot suggests the following:
The key “choke points” in cislunar space are the Lagrange points and the narrow gravitational transfer corridors that spacecraft must use to move efficiently between Earth and the Moon. These are the few stable or semi‑stable regions where traffic naturally concentrates, making them analogous to maritime chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz.
I’ve just published a second edition of Dust Mites. It’s got a snazzy new cover, it’s about 5,000 words tighter, and a cleaner layout means fewer pages.
The original sub-title was “The Battle for Air Lock Three.”
That fit the central drama just fine, but it didn’t do justice to the broader theme, which I’m developing in the sequel, “Trogs.” Both are/will be sub-titled “A Second American Revolution,” parts I and II in the Dust Mites saga.
Bacon’s Rebellion was lucky enough to snag an interview with “Dust Mites” author Jim Bacon. As he is the blog contributor most familiar with the book, Bacon interviewed himself. — JAB
JAB: Thank you so much for granting this interview, Mr. Bacon. First, let’s dispense with formalities. Do you go by James?
JAB: Jim would be fine.
JAB: Your novel is set in the year 2075 when there are numerous American colonies on the Moon. The colonies — one in particular, Galileo Station — is chafing under the imperial rule of an out-of-touch Congress and imperial presidency in Washington, D.C. Do you think that’s a plausible scenario?
JAB: I picked the year 2075, only 50 years from now, for literary reasons. I was deliberately playing on the parallels with the American Revolution. The incident that precipitates the action in the novel — the dispatch of the U.S. Marshal’s Special Operations Group into the underground city of Galileo Station to arrest its governor to stand trial — plays a role analogous to the events at Lexington and Concord in sparking a rebellion.
While the date may be arbitrary, let me advance a few propositions: (1) human exploration of the Moon will be commonplace by the end of the decade; (2) colonization of the Moon for scientific, military and economic imperatives will soon follow; and (3) tensions inevitably will arise between the U.S. colonies and the imperial power. It is not implausible to think that the central government in Washington, D.C., will continue to accumulate power over the next half century and become more assertive and more authoritarian than ever.
NASA soon will test a circuitous route to the Moon that takes its microwave oven-sized CubeSat satellite nearly a million miles into deep space to take advantage of gravitational forces that will allow it to reach the Moon with less expenditure of energy, the space agency reports.
The route, called a “near rectilinear halo orbit” (NHRO) works well in NASA’s computer simulations. CAPSTONE, short for the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations, will provide the first real-world test of NRHO dynamics. The mission is intended to support NASA’s Gateway, a multipurpose outpost that will support long-term lunar missions under the Artemis orbit.
Lonestar Data Holdings, based in St. Petersburg, Fla., is closing $5 million in seed funding toward its goal of creating the ultimate in data-storage disaster recovery — with server farms located in lava tubes on the Moon.
The company has signed contracts to launch prototype demonstrations of its capabilities aboard lunar landers by the end of 2022. Lonestar will run a software-only test, storing a small big of data on an Intuitive Machines lander under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The mission is expected to last one lunar day, or two Earth weeks.
A second launch scheduled for 2023 will send an Intuitive Machines lander to the Moon’s South Pole to drill for ice. Included in the package will be Lonestar’s first hardware prototype: a one-kilogram storage device, the size of a hardback novel, with 16 terabytes of storage, reports The Register.more “Data Centers in Lava Tubes — an Economic Driver for the Moon?”
Shackleton Crater, of primary interest for its suspected water deposits.
Scientists with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) a the University of Colorado at Boulder think the Moon may be awash in far more water than scientists previously believed, reports Universe Today.
LASP researchers created computer models to recreate conditions early in the Moon’s history. They discovered that ancient lunar volcanoes spewed huge volumes of water vapor, which settled to the surface. In craters near the poles that are permanently exposed to the heat of the sun, the water froze froze. The study suggests that the water could measure dozens or even hundreds of feet thick in places.
“It’s possible that 5 or 10 meters below the surface, you have big sheets of ice,” says co-author Paul Hayne. “It’s a potential bounty for future moon explorers who will need water to drink and process into rocket fuel.”
The study builds on previous work that estimated 25,000 square miles of the lunar surface could be capable of trapping and hanging onto ice.
Well, Canada has amended its criminal code, reports Gizmodo, to allow for the prosecution of crimes committed by Canadian astronauts during trips to the Moon or on the lunar surface. Canada’s criminal code already covers crimes committed aboard the International Space Station.
This is not an entirely hypothetical concern. There are such things as Canadian astronauts. The Artemis 2 mission will include a Canadian astronaut, and Canada is contributing a robotic arm to the Lunar Gateway, a planned outpost around the Moon.
Governments normally assert judicial authority only over geographic areas that they control. No one claims control over lunar territory, much less cislunar space. Canada’s extension of its legal writ may set precedents for other governments.
A lunar crater measuring about 600 feet across. Credit: NASA/GSFC Arizona State University, via LiveScience
In 1954, 34-year-old Ann Hodges was napping at home in Sylacauga, Alabama, when a nine-pound meteorite smashed through her house’s ceiling, bounced off a radio, and hit her thigh, leaving a nasty bruise. She is the only person in recorded history to have been struck by a meteorite. The odds about getting hit are about one in 840 million. It helps that most space rocks — an estimated 95% — burn up in the atmosphere.
But what about the Moon where there is no atmosphere?
Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office — located in Alabama, as it turns out — has made the calculation. “The odds of an astronaut being hit by a millimeter-sized object is like 1 in 1 million per hour per person,” he tells LiveScience
That’s pretty infrequent — but a lot more common than the comparable odds on Earth.
The quantity cannot be calculated for “impactors” smaller than a millimeter, but Cooke estimates that between 11 to 1,100 tons — the mass of 5.5 cars — of dust collide with the Moon daily, LiveScience reports.
Cooke is more definitive about larger rocks. “There are about 100 pingpong-ball-sized meteoroids hitting the moon per day,” he says.
That adds up to roughly 33,000 meteoroids per year of a size sufficient to impact the lunar surface with the force of 7 pounds of dynamite.
Larger meteoroids hit the Moon too, but less frequently. A rock as big as 8 feet across plows into the Moon about once every four years on average, releasing roughly 1,000 tons of TNT-equivalent energy. The flash of light can be seen from Earth.
Given that that Moon’s surface is about 14.6 million square miles, Cooke says, “If you pick a square kilometer patch of ground, it will be hit by one of those pingpong-sized meteoroids once every thousand years or so.”
Let’s do some extra numbers crunching. Let’s say the Moon has been colonized and has a million inhabitants. And let’s say that, while most people spend most of their time in sheltered environments, at any given time 1,000 people are wandering about on the surface doing one thing or another. Using Cooke’s estimate, in any given hour, there would be a one in 1 thousand chance of someone being struck by a millimeter-sized meteoroid — which is big enough to kill. Over the course of a 24-hour day (that’s Earth days, not Moon days), there would be a 2.4% chance of someone getting clobbered. Over the course of a year, those numbers would mount to eight to nine people getting the Ann Hodges treatment.
There are likely bigger hazards on the Moon, but meteoroids are not to be ignored.
This NASA Goddard map shows permanently shadowed craters near the Moon’s south pole. (Credit: LiveScience)
In 2018 scientists documented the first evidence of water ice on the Moon that was trapped in the bottom of craters at the north and south poles locked in perpetual shadow. Discovery of the ice created new questions. While the craters are protected from direct sunlight, they aren’t shielded from solar wind. The ionized particles from the Sun is highly erosive and, unlike the Earth, the Moon has no magnetic shield to protect it. By some peoples’ reckoning, the solar wind should have destroyed the ice long ago.
In research presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last month, University of Arizona scientists shared their map of magnetic anomalies, regions of the lunar surface with unusually strong magnetic fields, reports LiveScience.
These anomalies may serve as tiny magnetic shields.”These anomalies can deflect the solar wind,” Lon Hood, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Science. “We think they could be quite significant in shielding the permanently shadowed regions.” more “Do Small Magnetic Fields Protect Pockets of Lunar Ice?”
