How the White House Plans to Colonize the Moon?

Rebecca Heilweil said in an article on Fox that the first mission of NASA’s Artemis program was finally launched, launching the Orion spacecraft on a trip around the moon.

It is a major step forward in the ambitious plan to settle humans on the moon by 2025. It also marked the beginning of the implementation of the White House’s ambitions to build a permanent outpost on the moon.

 

Biden’s Hopes

Last week, the White House’s National Science and Technology Council released its National Cislunar Science & Technology Strategy, a detailed document explaining the Biden administration’s goals for lunar space, the region under the influence of gravity, and the moon.

The strategy outlines four basic goals that seem highly illogical: investing in research and development, collaborating with other countries, building communications networks in space, and promoting public awareness of human conditions near and on the moon.

The plan raises a host of open legal, political, and environmental questions about how life works on the moon.

Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: “The test missions, like Artemis 1 going on now, and the next crewed mission and then the first landing, are fairly well laid out. The question is, ‘Well, what comes next?’”

Part of the answer to this question lies in the development of science. For example, the United States is interested in how to use the far part of the moon, a protected area of the moon that is not exposed to radio frequencies from Earth, to build new types of astronomical observatories. Developing resources and technology on the moon may eventually facilitate future missions to Mars.

But the government is interested in the moon for reasons beyond expanding human knowledge of the universe. The new White House strategy emphasizes economic development activities available in lunar space and on the moon and outlines the government’s policy goals, including “asserting American leadership.”

Namrata Goswami, an independent space policy analyst, explained: “It’s very clear that it’s not just about research and science. It’s also about the economic prospects of the moon. So far, the United States has been acting very conservatively about the industrial use of lunar resources.”

Pace argues that if the US succeeds in achieving its goals, the moon may eventually look very different. The lunar orbit will be filled with several satellites, including a lunar positioning network and a human space station capable of housing human astronauts that serve as a rest station before they land on the moon.

Although there are no plans for a lunar city, there are proposals to establish a permanent outpost on the south pole of the moon, where crews may one day spend six-month cycles (China and Russia have announced plans to establish a lunar outpost as well).

If NASA’s plan succeeds, the lunar surface could eventually host a series of nuclear power plants, see resource extraction, and even create something resembling an internet on the moon.

Given these plans, the US government estimates that the level of human activity in lunar space over the next decade could surpass everything that happened there between 1957 and today, combined.

 

Possible Obstacles

However, the White House’s plans face several obstacles. Political tensions alone could be a major source of conflict, according to Michelle Hanlon, co-director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law.

First, there is still a shared global vision of what the future of the moon should contain. More than 20 countries have signed the US-led Artemis Accords, a set of principles for the exploration and use of the lunar surface.

The former head of Russia’s space agency said Moscow would not support the Artemis program in its current form, and Congress has banned NASA from working with China since 2011.

As the White House continues to emphasize international cooperation and the size of the moon (just under 15 million square miles), many countries could end up competing for the same resources, such as a particular landing site or a particular set of materials.

These tensions could even affect efforts to create a common understanding of what is happening in lunar space, one of the government’s main goals.

The White House has said it wants to expand access to data on space weather and satellite tracking in order to help with the emerging problem of managing satellite distribution traffic as well as creating a list of all objects on the moon, but it’s not clear how that will happen.

When it comes to lists of space objects in the United States at the moment, they have been largely developed and maintained exclusively by the US Department of Defense, which cannot be a transparent organization for obvious reasons.”

At the same time, there is a more pressing problem that humanity has begun to export to the moon: scrap. The lunar surface is filled with items left behind by astronauts, including golf balls and nearly 100 bags of litter.

Humans have also found ways to get rid of the moon without visiting it: NASA crashed a robotic spacecraft on the moon in 2009 in an attempt to study potential sources of water on the moon.

In March, space scrap believed to be from a Chinese rocket mission in 2014 crashed on the moon. Space environmentalists are concerned that the environmental devastation wrought by humans on Earth could become a problem on the moon and its orbit.

Ideally, the emerging space economy will focus on preventing pollution and avoiding single-use equipment, such as satellites, roving vehicles, and rockets, as much as possible.

Jah, who is also a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Austin, said: “We need to make these things reusable and recyclable.” “For equipment for temporary use, how do we dispose of it safely so that it does not cause a harmful environmental impact?”

Of course, the recently released White House strategy is only a preliminary draft of what the government’s plans for the moon might eventually look like, and there is no guarantee that the US vision will happen.

However, it is increasingly clear that the era of Artemis will come with significant challenges. As humanity ventures deep into space, on the moon, humans risk creating the same problems that we have yet to solve on Earth, including conflict between countries, damage to the environment, and even the challenge of preserving our history.

“It would be tragic if the traces of Neil Armstrong’s shoe were erased because of all these activities on the moon,” Hanlon said.