Do We Need to Go to the Moon to Get to Mars?

The same logic guides China’s space program, whose official 20-year goal is to ”utilize space resources to…enhance overall national power.”

All this is not to suggest that lunar science as such is without interest. On the contrary. Just this February, Japanese researchers reported that images sent back by their Kaguya (Selene) lunar orbiters indicate that the moon’s crust is more rigid than Earth’s and may therefore lack water and other compounds that easily evaporate. In January, researchers at MIT and at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, in California, published an analysis of an ancient lunar rock showing that the early moon must have had a metallic core and a magnetic dynamo. It was Apollo astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, a Ph.D. geologist and later a U.S. senator, who picked up that little rock; by general consent, it is easily the most interesting thing anybody has ever found on the moon.

People used to regard the moon as a big hunk of dead, inert matter, but Apollo data proved that the early moon consisted of an ”ocean magma.” Evidently, the heat generated by the impact of some huge object with Earth was so great, it liquefied the material it hurled into orbit. And so, says David L. Schuster of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, ”in what was probably a well-mixed molten mass, the denser materials might have cohered into a core.”

A decade ago, Schuster and MIT’s Ben Weiss examined a Martian meteorite found on Earth to estimate its temperature at the time of its ejection. Donald Bogard, Pratt Johnson, and Robert Pepin made the unlikely discovery in the 1980s and 1990s that certain meteorites on Earth had come from Mars, based on Viking 1’s sampling of the Martian atmosphere in 1976; to date, 31 such meteorites have been identified. Weiss says he was surprised at how much attention his particular work got. Evidently, the public is more interested in planetary science than it generally gets credit for.

The moon has always exercised a profound hold on the human imagination. Surely, millions of people would love to see a return to the moon and perhaps even the establishment of a permanent colony there. What difference does it make, then, whether it makes sense to go back to the moon? If we want to go there, let’s just go!

The lunar enterprise, however, is meant in some sense to be a template for the much bigger mission to Mars. Why, then, is the moon mission almost strictly made in the U.S.A.? This isn’t the Cold War; the United States doesn’t have to go to the moon to win a missile race with the USSR. Yet the U.S. government is proposing to shoulder pretty much the whole cost of returning to the moon, not to mention Mars, which it can’t actually afford. Italy’s space commissioner, Enrico Saggese, speaking to reporters last fall in Glasgow, estimated the cost of returning to the moon at $50 billion and of going to Mars at $500 billion—a lot to spend during a stubborn world recession.

The diplomatic impediments to globalization of the moon mission are not trivial, to be sure. The Europeans are in a slow-burning rage over the ISS. Though Russia’s space experts are highly respected, their national space agency is a skeleton, and nobody trusts their government. China, Germany, India, Japan—they’d all much prefer to strut their stuff in national showcase missions, not join as junior partners in a big, complicated international effort.

If only the problems were mainly technical. But they’re not. Returning to the moon is not all that technically challenging. What’s challenging is to make it an international effort that puts behind past grievances and sets the stage for a truly challenging international mission to Mars.

For more articles, go to Special Report: Why Mars? Why Now?