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.
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.
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.
Five Apollo expeditions landed spacecraft on the Moon without incident. One would think that a feat accomplished with 1969-era technology would be a cakewalk today. But landing people on the Moon remains an ambitious feat, writes Mashable.
“Just because we went there 50 years ago does not make it a trivial endeavor,” Csaba Palotai, the program chair of space sciences in the Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, told the publication.
California-based Venturi Astrolab has built a working prototype, tested in the American desert, of a rover, called FLEX, that is capable of transporting astronauts and cargo in support of lunar activities and experiments.
If selected by NASA, FLEX will support the Artemis program goal of establishing a long-term base on the Moon.
“Once you get there, you’ve got to be able to move things around,” said retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield who test-drove the vehicle, as reported by VOA Learning English. “You also need to transition the equipment that keeps you alive and that enables the activities.”
Image credit: U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)
A congressional spending bill has added $61 million for the U.S. Space Force toward setting up a surveillance network — or “highway patrol” — to track the domain between the Earth and the Moon.
Nation-states and commercial companies will fly nearly 100 missions, both crewed and uncrewed, to the Moon by 2030. As the cislunar region fills with satellites and space junk — there are at present an estimated 27,000 piece of human-made objects larger than a softball in orbit — the Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS) will track and identify all man-made objects a combination of optical and radar sensors — critical for mitigating potential collision risks.
“The responsible use of space and unfettered access to space domain awareness ensures collision avoidance, on-orbit logistics, communication, navigation and maneuvering, all critical to the United States and allied space commerce, science and exploration,” states a video produced by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory that can be viewed here.
Some critics warn that the intrusion of the armed forces into cislunar space represents a potential usurpation of NASA and militarization of space. Military strategists say the stakes are too big to leave cislunar space to the civilians, and the Pentagon will be compelled to take on a major role. China, which has plans to build a lunar base, cannot be trusted to pursue only peaceful aims, and could use its space program for both economic and military advantage, Politicosays.more “The Pentagon Plans Highway Patrol for Cislunar Space”
The PitRanger. (Credit: William Whittaker/PitRanger team)
The Moon is dotted with steep-walled holes known as pits, or skylights, which likely lead to sub-surface lava tubes that could serve as sheltered underground environments for human settlers. Engineers are developing specialized robots to explore these hard-to-access topographical features.
The trick is designing these vehicles to be compatible with small landers, making them capable of negotiating steep pit aprons, and equipping them to acquire cross-pit images. A team led by William “Red” Whittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed the PitRanger, a 33-pound mini-robot outfitted with a solar panel and an adjustable telephoto camera and tested it in a massive sinkhole in Utah.
Whittaker explains his challenge to Space.com:
“The scenario is to rove to a pit with a micro-rover, peer into the pit, acquire images of walls, floors, caverns, and then generate pit models,” Autonomy for fast exploration is the critical technology since the small, solar-powered rovers won’t be able to carry direct-to-Earth radio for supervision or guidance.
In addition, “the rover must succeed in a single illumination period” on the moon, because it needs the sun for energy and heating. (A lunar day lasts about 14 Earth days, and the lunar night is equally long.) “It only has 12 days, not 12 years, to complete its mission.”
The rover would circumnavigate the rim, identify the overlooks offering the required, and deploy a tiltable camera to obtain the required angles needed to create a high-fidelity, 3D-quality image, The result will be far superior to anything that a Moon-circling satellite could capture.
Not only do pits provide potential habitats, they are windows into lunar geology. Scientists expect to gain insights into volcanology, morphology and much more, Wittaker said.
As China invests in its space program, scientists have identified helium-3 (He-3), an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, as a major subject of interest.
According to CGTN, a Chinese English-language news source, Chinese scientists say the Earth possesses roughly 30 kilograms (about 66 pounds) of the helium isotope. Deposited by solar wind, the substance is abundant on the Moon’s surface — about a million metric tons. That’s enough to power the Earth for a thousand years.
Extracting He-3 from the lunar regolith does pose a challenge. The material would have to be heated to about 600 degrees Celsius before being extracted, packaged and transported back to Earth.
China’s Chang’e-5 lunar space mission, a 23-day operation launched Monday, aims to bring back regolith from the Moon.
“There seems to be another wave of interest of going to the moon, both by the United States and China and there may be other countries as well,” said University of Wisconsin engineering professor Gerald Kulcinski. “And most of these programs have, as part of their goal, harvesting helium-3 for terrestrial use.”
BBC’s Science Focus magazine provides an interesting spin on the primary challenges behind establishing a Moon base.
Where to locate. Given the high cost of getting material to the Moon — $10,000 per kilogram just to escape the Earth’s gravity well — the idea is to use materials on hand to the greatest extent possible. That explains the keen interest in settling in the poles where abundant water ice is sequestered in craters that never see the light of day. Another advantage of a polar location is the ability to install solar panels in mountain peaks that are exposed to the sun around the clock.
Building the base. Planners expect to make extensive use of 3D printing. Experiments on Earth with imitation regolith have shown that it is possible to build large structures with the technology. However, it remains to be seen how well the process will work in the Moon’s light gravitational field. more “How to Build a Moon Base”
California-based Venturi Astrolab has built a working prototype, tested in the American desert, of a rover, called FLEX, that is capable of transporting astronauts and cargo in support of lunar activities and experiments.
