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Fifty-four years after we first set foot on our lunar neighbor, the moon continues to beckon. It holds the promise of scientific knowledge, teases a wealth of resources and even offers a novel and pristine snapshot of humankind’s biggest technological achievement – the primary off-Earth footsteps taken by our kind. But make no mistake; as we work (finally) to return to the moon inside this decade, we ought to be moving forward, not back.
In an op-ed “Return to Tranquility Base first,” published earlier this month in , Walt Faulconer argues that the primary Artemis lunar mission shouldn’t go to the lunar south pole as currently planned but relatively to the initial human landing site where the Apollo 11 lunar module sits still at Tranquility Base. Faulconer offers several reasons to support his argument: historical significance, lower mission risk to the crew, and the chance to learn more in regards to the long-term effects of the lunar environment by examining the artifacts left behind by the Apollo 11 landing crew. While those are noteworthy rationales, they pale in comparison with the good thing about initiating polar exploration as soon as possible.
Yes, returning to Tranquility Base can be deeply sentimental and hold a measure of historical significance. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t have the luxurious of time and resources to be sentimental.
What’s more, we shouldn’t have any certainty that now we have the technological capability to return to Tranquility Base without doing substantial, irreparable harm to the positioning and the artifacts contained therein. And the concept that returning to Tranquility Base will one way or the other help “secure the positioning as a crucial historical site” is fanciful at best. The one act that may protect this – and other historic sites – as a universal heritage site is recognition by the international community, not the US by itself. The truth is, should the U.S. return there, it may be seen as an invite to others to do the identical, further endangering the positioning. Briefly, with the present mission architecture forced upon NASA by Congress to utilize the expensive and otherwise unnecessary Space Launch System, crewed lunar missions will likely be scarce and rarely commodities. It could be a mistake to waste one to recreate something humans did many years ago. It’s a misguided homage that may potentially endanger that which it seeks to have a good time. We’d like to show our meager resources to understanding how one can find and utilize lunar water and other resources as soon as possible to facilitate missions measured in weeks relatively than days, whether on the moon or beyond cislunar space.
And yes, it is certainly higher risk to go to a region with more craters and mountains, with more difficulty getting adequate light and communications, than returning to the most important flattest mare (Tranquillitatis), which was the explanation that site was chosen for the primary Apollo mission. But true exploration entails embracing risk if the reward is great, and the danger, on this case, shouldn’t be that much greater. In spite of everything, we go to the moon “since it is difficult,” not because we’ve been there before.
It’s now not the Sixties. We now have over half a century of experience in space hardware and operations.
Technology has greatly advanced. We aren’t the primary to indicate that your phone has 1000’s of times greater computing power and memory than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had within the . The Artemis landers will, too — along with modern sensors and fine-tuned control authority. We can have data-relay satellites in cislunar space for communications from the pole and other mission-support infrastructure that the Apollo astronauts could only dream of. NASA has done extensive probabilistic risk evaluation and has appropriately deemed the advantages of landing the lunar south pole to vastly exceed the extra risk. Finally, the notion that a single landing site in a region the dimensions of Manhattan (e.g., Shackleton Crater) will one way or the other impede follow-on missions seems highly unlikely, if not downright ludicrous. Indeed, it offers the added challenge and opportunity of constructing missions that may re-use and incorporate old hardware into their systems.
As for the good thing about understanding the long-term effects of the lunar environment on space hardware, that may not be possible without physically retrieving the artifacts. This may necessarily involve irreparable damage to the positioning’s historical integrity, including the footprints. Furthermore, even landing near the positioning would likely sandblast it with regolith violently liberated by the exhaust plume of the landing engines, even with the high-engine design of SpaceX’s Starship lander. Once the moon becomes industrialized, there will likely be means to securely approach all of humanity’s historic sites and properly record, memorialize, protect and even preserve them. But the primary mission back after over half a century, without the technology able to a protected approach, shouldn’t be the time to try this.
In 1809, before the Battle of Wagram in Austria, Napoleon Bonaparte reportedly and famously said, “In case you begin to take Vienna, take Vienna!” NASA has been planning for years to go to the south pole of the moon, and that’s where it should go.