Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
Speaker 1: will be reading National Geographic magazine dated September twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher. As a reminder, RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make a difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the first article
Speaker 1: entitled the Great Moon Rush. As NASA prepares to return
Speaker 1: explorers to the Moon, big plans are already taking shape
Speaker 1: to develop this virtually untouched realm to suit human needs.
Speaker 1: Here's what the lunar surface could become if we're lucky,
Speaker 1: and what it might turn into if we're not. This
Speaker 1: article by Charles Fishman, halfway through a conversation about the
Speaker 1: state of modern astrophysics and space science, Joseph Silk says
Speaker 1: something that makes you sputter in disbelief before realizing he's no.
Speaker 1: Silk is one of the pillars of cosmology now eighty two.
Speaker 1: He's been an astrophysicist since before the Apollo Moon landings.
Speaker 1: He has made foundational discoveries about the origin of the
Speaker 1: universe and about its central mystery, dark matter. He's not
Speaker 1: prone to wild exaggerations he's talking about one of his
Speaker 1: strong professional interests, the often overlooked potential of our own moon.
Speaker 1: A few decades from now, Silk says, we'll have the
Speaker 1: ability to place a telescope on the lunar surface that
Speaker 1: will be so powerful that it could, for instance, photograph
Speaker 1: a planet within the trappest Ie System about forty light
Speaker 1: years away with the same detail we can look at Mars.
Speaker 1: We will be able to see the forests, the mountaintops,
Speaker 1: the glistening of the light of the oceans. He says,
Speaker 1: it's unbelievable. Silk is talking about using a telescope to
Speaker 1: take snapshots of life on another planet. If there were
Speaker 1: cities there, we'd see the lights. The magic isn't in
Speaker 1: the telescope. The magic is on the Moon. The Moon
Speaker 1: turns out to be a unique place to do space science,
Speaker 1: far better than Earth or even out in space itself,
Speaker 1: because the far side is radio silent, and because the
Speaker 1: Moon has essentially no atmosphere, giving optical telescopes nearly unlimited resolution.
Speaker 1: The telescope that could photograph life in the trappist Ie
Speaker 1: System would actually be a circular array of about thirty
Speaker 1: interconnected telescopes, creating a single virtual mirror twelve miles in diameter.
Speaker 1: The technology isn't hard. There are already studies and papers
Speaker 1: describing how to design and operate it. The project has
Speaker 1: several other imagined versions, including one built inside a Moon crater,
Speaker 1: and it has a nickname, the Lunar hyper Telescope. What
Speaker 1: the project lacks is the infrastructure on the Moon to
Speaker 1: make it real. Deploying a hyper telescope will require rockets
Speaker 1: to deliver all those small telescopes to land safely. The
Speaker 1: rockets will call from lunar landing pads and a fleet
Speaker 1: of robots to unlock the cargo. Each individual telescope of
Speaker 1: the array will need to be positioned with absolute precision.
Speaker 1: To operate. The hyper telescope will demand always on electricity
Speaker 1: right there on the Moon, even during the Moon's fourteen
Speaker 1: day night, and serious communication bandwidth to get to its
Speaker 1: extraordinary images back to Earth. It will need maintenance and repairs,
Speaker 1: perhaps from astronauts stationed on the Moon. Despite the unbelievable
Speaker 1: scientific and meta physical charisma of a telescope that can
Speaker 1: take pictures of individual planets two hundred thirty five trillion
Speaker 1: miles away, we're not going to build and install all
Speaker 1: those infrastructure just for a telescope, not even the coolest,
Speaker 1: most important telescope ever created. Indeed, it's just the opposite.
Speaker 1: The hyper telescope, along with some equally astonishing science projects,
Speaker 1: is likely to be the bonus of a new space race,
Speaker 1: which is gathering momentum with the aim of at least
Speaker 1: establishing a permanent, functioning human presence on the Moon. There
Speaker 1: are now more missions scheduled to land on the Moon
Speaker 1: in the next six years than in the past six decades.
Speaker 1: NASA is sending astronauts back to the Moon in the
Speaker 1: Artemis program, first with a lunar flyby with Artemis III
Speaker 1: scheduled for twenty twenty six, and then the first new
Speaker 1: landing of people, now scheduled for mid twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 1: China's Space Agency aims to put that nation's first astronauts
Speaker 1: on the Moon in twenty thirty. India, which first put
Speaker 1: a lander on the Moon in twenty twenty three, is
Speaker 1: designing a mission to return lunar soil there. Those are
Speaker 1: just some of the nations with lunar ambitions. Independent missions
Speaker 1: from a dozen or more private companies are aiming robotic
Speaker 1: missions at the Moon including a Japanese company's craft that
Speaker 1: crash landed this past June. Here on Earth, thousands of
Speaker 1: people go to work every day laying the foundations of
Speaker 1: the Moon's new future, designing lunar landing pads, construction robots,
Speaker 1: human habitats, a power grid, communication, satellites, even a robotic
Speaker 1: mining operation. In trying to imagine the future of the Moon,
Speaker 1: I spoke with dozens of people immersed in lunar development
Speaker 1: from Nassau and Blue Origin, from Lockheed Martin and Harvard
Speaker 1: Business School, and interlun CEOs and engineers, economists and scientists,
Speaker 1: people who work at companies with one hundred thousand employees
Speaker 1: and adventure capital back to startups with just a dozen.
Speaker 1: Their ambition and their energy are expansive, even inspiring, for
Speaker 1: both commercial development and scientific discovery. Success, they say will
Speaker 1: depend on money, determination, and what surprises the Moon has
Speaker 1: in store for us when we go back to explore it, speaking,
Speaker 1: two paths are possible. If things go according to the
Speaker 1: best laid plans. By the end of the century, the
Speaker 1: Moon will be home to a bustling lunar economy, which
Speaker 1: will provide jobs, profit and also the resources for ambitious
Speaker 1: science like the hypertelescope. But if science teaches one lesson clearly,
Speaker 1: it's that human settlement and development rarely go to plan
Speaker 1: and often veer unexpectedly, sometimes into a ditch or a crater.
Speaker 1: Today's bright vision could fade fifty years, hence to nothing
Speaker 1: more than a threadbeer encampment left over from the optimism
Speaker 1: of earlier decades, grudgingly sustained like a rough, isolated supply
Speaker 1: stop for stagecoaches in the Old West. Without the right
Speaker 1: conservation protections in place, the Moon could end up a
Speaker 1: junk yard of billionaire's dreams, with abandoned robots, rovers and
Speaker 1: landers glittering the landscape, and the world having moved on
Speaker 1: from a whirlwind mid century lunar infatuation. Right now now,
Speaker 1: it's clear that this is the most exciting, most creative
Speaker 1: moment in the world of space since the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: and Apollo filled with a promise and risk, the Moon
Speaker 1: is the next space frontier Again. The road to a
Speaker 1: successful lunar economy will be built on one thing. Dirt.
Speaker 1: Moon Dirt. Lunar dirt called regolith is everywhere, blanketing the
Speaker 1: surface to the horizon in all directions. Regolith is unappealing
Speaker 1: in almost every way. It is dull, gray, gritty, sharp, dingy, electrostatic, abrasive,
Speaker 1: damaging to equipment, and dangerous to people. It's also the
Speaker 1: resource on which everything else on the Moon will depend.
Speaker 1: Delivering equipment and supplies to the Moon is so expensive
Speaker 1: when gallon of water rocketed from the Earth to the
Speaker 1: Moon will cost anywhere from one hundred thousand dollars to
Speaker 1: more than a million dollars to transport that the only
Speaker 1: economically practically way to develop the Moon will be to
Speaker 1: use what's there. As unpromising as it looks, rega is
Speaker 1: loaded with what you'd want if you were thinking about
Speaker 1: setting up a moon base. Aluminium, iron, titanium, silicon, oxygen.
Speaker 1: If you heat regolith to twenty nine hundred degrees fahrenheit
Speaker 1: so it melts, magical things start to happen. Once regolith
Speaker 1: is molten, you can skim off its components and make
Speaker 1: things with them. Melted regolith fortuitously canned from the basis
Speaker 1: of landing pads. The first thing is a successful lunar
Speaker 1: outpost will need NASA plans to land humans back on
Speaker 1: the Moon with space X's Starship HLS Human Landing System
Speaker 1: which will also be used to deliver cargo payloads to
Speaker 1: the Moon. At one hundred sixty four feet tall, the
Speaker 1: rocket is the height of a fifteen story building. Curing
Speaker 1: one hundred tons landing tail down tipping over on landing
Speaker 1: would be a disaster. During the Artemis missions, it will
Speaker 1: have to make do with finding a smooth, safe landing
Speaker 1: spot on the Moon's natural terrain for that first landing,
Speaker 1: but future missions would be greatly aided by a landing pad.
Speaker 1: Several companies are already working on engineering them. They are
Speaker 1: prototyping robots that can crawl along the Moon's surface level
Speaker 1: It then scoop up regolith, melt it shape paving bricks
Speaker 1: or solid surfaces, and position them, sealing each to the
Speaker 1: next in line to form a steam free landing apron.
Speaker 1: Imagine inventing a machine to scoop up dirt in Ohio
Speaker 1: and turn it into an interstate highway. A veteran of
Speaker 1: aerospace giants Grumman and L three, Sam Hemenaise is the
Speaker 1: founder and CEO of Astroport's Space Technologies, a San Antonio
Speaker 1: based start up that aims to build moonports then operate
Speaker 1: them as you would the port of Houston or the
Speaker 1: airport in Memphis. Astroport wants to build the landing pads,
Speaker 1: build roads to connect them to nearby bases, build storage
Speaker 1: buildings to hold off loaded cargo, and charge for all
Speaker 1: those surfaces. Emenes says his company's paving robot, the Lunatron,
Speaker 1: is in testing. Astroport is connecting a fifty acre test
Speaker 1: bed in Midland, Texas and filling it with simulated lunar regolith.
Speaker 1: This is the foundation, Hemenes says. We can make a
Speaker 1: business out of melted regolith. That's what's different about this
Speaker 1: moon race. It's one thing to go someplace the moon
Speaker 1: Mars touched down and retrieve some samples. It's quite another
Speaker 1: to arrive there to create a future that sustains itself.
Speaker 1: The first is an expedition paid for by a government.
Speaker 1: The second is an economy which generates value and profit
Speaker 1: and builds on itself. The rocket people need the landing
Speaker 1: pad people. The landing pad people need the rover people,
Speaker 1: and also the rocket people. Everyone needs the power people.
Speaker 1: They all need each other. They need customers, they need suppliers.
Speaker 1: Nothing makes much sense with the out everything else here
Speaker 1: on Earth, This lunar economy is already weaving itself together.
Speaker 1: Imenez Astroport is working with another Moon tech company, Astrolab,
Speaker 1: on the actual rover that will move the lunatron paper around.
Speaker 1: Astrolab is designing and building a compact Moon surface truck
Speaker 1: called the flex Rover, which can transport two thousand pounds.
Speaker 1: Astrolab has a reservation to ship the flex Rover on
Speaker 1: an early SpaceX cargo mission. The idea of a lunar
Speaker 1: economy built on dirt is so potent that one of
Speaker 1: the largest companies in the new space economy, Jeff Bezos's
Speaker 1: Blue Origin, has created an entire division devoted to turning
Speaker 1: lunar regulis into useful products on the Moon. The sixty
Speaker 1: person group, based in North Hollywood, California, is called the
Speaker 1: Space Resources Program, and senior director Vlada Stemenkovich, a planetary
Speaker 1: scientist who formerly worked at mit D and Nassau's Jet
Speaker 1: propulsion Laboratory, says their job is to learn how to
Speaker 1: make almost everything out of nothing. Their first target is electricity,
Speaker 1: the most important element of Moon infrastructure after the rockets themselves.
Speaker 1: Since twenty twenty one, Blue Origin says the group has
Speaker 1: been using simulated lunar regolith to make wire and solar
Speaker 1: cells relying on nothing but solar power and robotic technology.
Speaker 1: The Moon is about to be a very busy place,
Speaker 1: with eighty four announced national and commercial missions just between
Speaker 1: now and twenty thirty. To start, they mixed up the
Speaker 1: simulated lunar regolith not just with the right proportions of minerals,
Speaker 1: but also with a realistic blend of grit size and texture.
Speaker 1: Based on sample's retrieve during the Apollo missions, the company
Speaker 1: developed a solar poward process to melt the regolith into thick,
Speaker 1: bright molden liquid. Without providing much detail, the company says
Speaker 1: it separated out silicon, iron, and aluminium and that blues
Speaker 1: robotic system turn to those raw materials into working cellular cells.
Speaker 1: Blue Origin released an image of a circular solar cell
Speaker 1: about the size of your palm, with the company's feather
Speaker 1: logo on it. The company calls the process Blue Alchemist
Speaker 1: and says without a shred of modesty, that it is
Speaker 1: a breakthrough process that will bootstrap unlimited electricity and power
Speaker 1: transmission cables anywhere on the surface of the Moon. Unlimited
Speaker 1: power anywhere on the Moon using just sunlight and silicon
Speaker 1: a bonus. The process produces oxygen as a by product,
Speaker 1: as almost any process that melts regolith will, because the
Speaker 1: lunar dirt is almost half oxygen by weight. One of
Speaker 1: Blue's video clips shows oxygen bubbling up through the molten regolith.
Speaker 1: The oxygen, of course, could provide breathable air to astronauts.
Speaker 1: Even more significant in economic terms, it can be used
Speaker 1: as a critical component in rocket fuel to refuel spaceships
Speaker 1: that have landed on the Moon and need to turn
Speaker 1: around and head home, or to lunar orbit or off
Speaker 1: two points beyond. We don't know the economics of this.
Speaker 1: What's blues capital investment? What will the process cost on
Speaker 1: the moon? What can you charge for lunar electricity? But
Speaker 1: we do know this Bezos's Blue Origin isn't a charity,
Speaker 1: and it intends to make money from regolith. We are
Speaker 1: not playing around, says Stemenkovitch. Solar panels manufactured on the
Speaker 1: Moon will be crucio to keep keeping the robots and
Speaker 1: habitats of any Moon economy running, but they might evolve
Speaker 1: to beam energy back to Earth. With the right infrastructure
Speaker 1: in place, Engineers say it will be possible to collect
Speaker 1: regolith on the Moon heat it to form bricks of
Speaker 1: raw material and launch those off the Moon using a
Speaker 1: catapult a rail gun that will hurl the bricks into orbit. There,
Speaker 1: the bricks will be collected and towed to a space factory.
Speaker 1: The space factory could turn the regolith, packed with silicon
Speaker 1: and aluminum into vast solar arrays, a megavit version of
Speaker 1: blue alchemists for deployment in Earth orbit. Because they avoid
Speaker 1: the problems of night time and cloudy skies, orbital solar
Speaker 1: arrays are seven times more productive than solar arrays on
Speaker 1: the ground. They could generate essentially unlimited electricity with zero
Speaker 1: climate impact without having to erect huge terrestrial solar farms
Speaker 1: or nuclear power plants. It's possible to safely microwave that
Speaker 1: electricity down to Earth and provide power even to places
Speaker 1: currently under served, more easily than building typical power infrastructure,
Speaker 1: and you could make money doing it. The whole operation
Speaker 1: could be tendered by a small human staff working in
Speaker 1: the orbital factory and watching over things on the surface
Speaker 1: of the Moon. Other companies could make good money supply
Speaker 1: moon powered ink. Think for a moment about the vast
Speaker 1: oil infrastructure in the Ocean off the Gulf coast of
Speaker 1: the United States. Fifty offshore platforms operate in deep water,
Speaker 1: staffed by a small army of workers who come and
Speaker 1: go on squadrons of helicopters, supplied by fleets of boats,
Speaker 1: turning out fourteen percent of the oil produced by the
Speaker 1: United States. If the Moon develops with imagination, persistence, and
Speaker 1: money by twenty twenty one hundred, it could look like
Speaker 1: the Gulf, a busy, if remote place where important and
Speaker 1: demanding work gets dung for big profit. The sweep at
Speaker 1: the Moon when you're standing on its surface is majestic
Speaker 1: and arresting. During daylight, the Moon's surface is bright, though
Speaker 1: way a snow covered Colorado mountain side is on a
Speaker 1: sunny winter day. The landscape is plains and ridges, mountains
Speaker 1: and valleys and craters, all gray dust without a perceptible atmosphere,
Speaker 1: without the weathering effects of wind and rain and foliage.
Speaker 1: The jackrophy is vivid and crisp. You can see a
Speaker 1: long way the Earth floats in the black lunar sky,
Speaker 1: gleaming blue, surprisingly large, four times as big as the
Speaker 1: Moon looks on Earth. What you don't see is the
Speaker 1: one substance that powers all life on Earth water Without water,
Speaker 1: this vision of a booming twenty one hundred lunar economy
Speaker 1: grows hazier. The promise of unlimited energy to Earth and
Speaker 1: a telescope to spy on extra solar worlds less assured.
Speaker 1: We know there is some water on the Moon that
Speaker 1: was first detected by a Nassau instrument flying on the
Speaker 1: Indian shell dry On one probe in two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: and confirmed by a second Nassau probe the next year.
Speaker 1: The early chantalizing data suggested there might be iceberg size
Speaker 1: qualities quantities of water in the craters of the Moon's
Speaker 1: north and south poles. The swirl of today's Moon activities
Speaker 1: stems in part from the excitement generated by the discovery.
Speaker 1: The indispensable appeal of water on the Moon is easy
Speaker 1: to understand. Flying hundreds of gallons of water in from
Speaker 1: the Earth brief and modest bases would cost millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: But the real leverage for water is that it can
Speaker 1: be easily separated into hydrogen and oxygen. If the Moon
Speaker 1: has usable water, you have oxygen for breathing, and the
Speaker 1: most important, you have hydrogen and oxygen with which to
Speaker 1: make rocket fuel if there is ice in the cold,
Speaker 1: permanently shadowed craters at the South Pole that can be
Speaker 1: harvested and purified into usable water. It's a little like regolith.
Speaker 1: It looks simple, but it's a single resource that makes
Speaker 1: many things possible. No one has yet been able to
Speaker 1: land a water prospecting probe in a crater of the
Speaker 1: South Pole and see how much water is near the
Speaker 1: surface and in what form. But orbital probe scanning the
Speaker 1: Moon's surface since Chandryon one in two thousand eight, another
Speaker 1: analysis increasingly suggests that the easy availability of water on
Speaker 1: the Moon is illusory, if not fantastical. Chunks of iceberg
Speaker 1: size accumulations are ruled out, says Kevin Cannon, a planetary
Speaker 1: scientist who is one of the world's leading experts on
Speaker 1: lunar water and now works for the space start up Ethos.
Speaker 1: Cannon says that since twenty ten, the enthusiasm Moon water
Speaker 1: has run away with itself, understandably given its value, but
Speaker 1: it odds with a slowly accumulating science. What the decade
Speaker 1: of continued analysis shows is that whatever water exists in
Speaker 1: polar craters may be more in the forms of frost
Speaker 1: frozen grains mixed into the Moon's dirt the way bits
Speaker 1: of seashell are mixed into the sand at the beach.
Speaker 1: It could also be buried well below the surface, all
Speaker 1: much less sexy and also much less successible than some
Speaker 1: had hoped. At best, it appears really wet Moon dirt
Speaker 1: might contain five percent water by weight. To get one
Speaker 1: hundred gallons of water, you need to dig up and
Speaker 1: process eight ns of regolith. In practice, the water trapped
Speaker 1: in the permanently dark South Pole craters will be insanely
Speaker 1: difficult to mine, blocked from radio contact, with steep sides
Speaker 1: and uneven bottoms, and interior temperatures of twenty degrees kelvin
Speaker 1: minus four hundred twenty four degrees fahrenheit, impossible for astronauts
Speaker 1: to explore safely, but also impossible for the moment for
Speaker 1: robots to explore, let alone mine and bring up to
Speaker 1: human baisies. A thriving lunar economy will rely on water
Speaker 1: as much as regolith. It could well be the privet
Speaker 1: on which the lunar future turns. The question of lunar
Speaker 1: water is on the agenda of every company in space agency,
Speaker 1: every Moon mission involving people is aimed at the south Pole,
Speaker 1: including Artemis three, Nassau's first efforts since nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: to land people on the Moon. Most of the uncrude
Speaker 1: missions to test out rovers and solar panels and robots
Speaker 1: are also aimed at the South Pole. Many will be
Speaker 1: looking for evidence of water as part of their work.
Speaker 1: Finding it or not will be a powerful indicator of
Speaker 1: what lunar future were likely to get. In March nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, three years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
Speaker 1: would land on the Moon, Nassau received a sobering report
Speaker 1: from engineers and scientists at the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation,
Speaker 1: which was building the Apollo lunar module, and colleagues at
Speaker 1: Arthur D. Little, a Cambridge, Massachusetts consulting firm. The engineers
Speaker 1: had been asked a simple question, how much would the
Speaker 1: Apollo missions pollute the Moon just by landing there. The
Speaker 1: two hundred six page scientific analysis contains an astonishing revelation.
Speaker 1: Right at the start the Moon it turns out as
Speaker 1: a naturally occurring atmosphere. It's very thin, but lunar gravity
Speaker 1: is strong enough to attract and hold a tenuous veil
Speaker 1: of gas molecules. The Apollo eleven lunar module when it
Speaker 1: settled into tranquilquility base atop a plume of rocket exhaust,
Speaker 1: would deliver almost as many gas molecules to the Moon
Speaker 1: as the lunar atmosphere already contained. Indeed, it would turn
Speaker 1: out that each time we sent a lunar module, we
Speaker 1: delivered nearly an entire new atmosphere of gas molecules to
Speaker 1: the Moon from the rocket plume of landing, along with
Speaker 1: gases vented from the cabin and even farts vented from
Speaker 1: the astronauts spacesuits, which is to say, the very active
Speaker 1: exploring the Moon pollutes it. The Moon is fourteen point
Speaker 1: six million square miles, or about twice the land area
Speaker 1: of the United States and Canada. All that land is
Speaker 1: empty now and almost completely untouched. As we know from
Speaker 1: earthly experience, the time to plant for its protection as
Speaker 1: a natural resource is now, or our most ambitious science
Speaker 1: plans for the Moon may be thwarted. That's exactly the
Speaker 1: problem that Caltech astrophysicists Nivedita Mahesh is worried about. But
Speaker 1: the pollution she most worries about isn't the typical sort.
Speaker 1: Mahsh studies star formation at the earliest moments of the universe.
Speaker 1: It's an epoch we call the cosmic dawn, she says,
Speaker 1: when the very first stars turned on. To understand how
Speaker 1: the very first stars formed, scientists have to listen to
Speaker 1: the signals from the universe when it was only one
Speaker 1: hundred million or two hundred million years old, the equivalent
Speaker 1: of understanding the life of a hundred year old by
Speaker 1: looking back to when that person was nine months old.
Speaker 1: In astrophysics, the only way to listen that far back
Speaker 1: is to use advanced radio telescopes. On Earth, you can't
Speaker 1: between the atmosphere and the noise all our own electromagnetic
Speaker 1: emissions make. It's just too noisy. The quietest place in
Speaker 1: the Solar System turns out to be the far side
Speaker 1: of the Moon. Mahesh's part of a group of scientists
Speaker 1: and engineers working on the design of Farview, an extraordinary
Speaker 1: radio telescope that would take advantage of the Moon's radio
Speaker 1: quiet with a high hundred thousand interlinked individual antennas to
Speaker 1: listen to the birth of the universe. The project aims
Speaker 1: to rely on the technology currently under development on the
Speaker 1: commercial side to have Farview build itself on the Moon,
Speaker 1: using robotic rovers to melt regolith and extrude antenna wires.
Speaker 1: Like our colleagues at rocket and mining companies, she talks
Speaker 1: with excitement and a sense of momentum, even inevitability. But
Speaker 1: a vibrant commercial economy on the Moon is both the
Speaker 1: good news and the bad news for science. It could
Speaker 1: lay the foundation for Farview or make it impossible. Nokia
Speaker 1: sent a rover to the Moon in early twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five to test out how lunar's cell phone transmissions work.
Speaker 1: That's great, says Mahesh. Improving communications is critical, but lunar
Speaker 1: cell service could interfere with studying those faint primordial radio signals.
Speaker 1: If not properly shielded, there's a danger. Mahesh says that
Speaker 1: the radio transmissions of routine Moon up rations will spoil
Speaker 1: or contaminate the radio quiet environment. The time to safeguard
Speaker 1: that quiet is now. A hash speaks from experience. Elon
Speaker 1: Musk's Starlanc Version two satellites, launched into Earth orbit in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three to beam internet service from space, have
Speaker 1: blotted out the ability to listen to some signals from space,
Speaker 1: literally blinding some key earth side radio telescopes. Currently there
Speaker 1: are no binding international agreements for conservation on the Moon,
Speaker 1: but new ideas are percolating to start safeguarding the Moon
Speaker 1: against this type of degradation scientifically and culturally. The British
Speaker 1: planetary scientist Ian Crawford has suggested an international agreement right
Speaker 1: now to set aside the Moon's north pole permanently as
Speaker 1: an area protected from human activity, a Yellowstone Park for
Speaker 1: the Moon, so we can always return to an unspoiled
Speaker 1: lunar region if we need to for science or spirituality
Speaker 1: for that matter. Another idea of international rules that would
Speaker 1: require all development on the Moon to be invasive, invisible
Speaker 1: to the naked eye from Earth, so no one will
Speaker 1: look up at night and see bright construction lights or
Speaker 1: red mining operation strobes flashing from the Moon. As the
Speaker 1: philosopher and space exploration ethicist Brian Greene of Santa Clara
Speaker 1: University points out, everyone who has ever lived on Earth
Speaker 1: who can see has seen the Moon. It captures your
Speaker 1: attention from the time you're old enough to look at
Speaker 1: it until the time you die. You can't just mess
Speaker 1: with something like that. The Moon is also sacred to
Speaker 1: many cultures now and historically. In twenty twenty four, the
Speaker 1: DNAE of the Navajo Nation objected to a private company's
Speaker 1: mission to land cremated human remains on the Moon, calling
Speaker 1: that an act of desecration. As it happens that lander
Speaker 1: failed to reach the Moon, now is the time to
Speaker 1: put protections in place, says Crawford, because its the easiest
Speaker 1: moment no one's commercial interests will be hurt. Mahesh is
Speaker 1: already in meetings planning future missions where she advocates for
Speaker 1: strong radio quiet controls, and there are slow moving un
Speaker 1: sponsored talks on related topics like an near traffic control
Speaker 1: system for the Moon so everyone knows where everyone else
Speaker 1: is flying, and on allocating radio frequencies and establishing rules
Speaker 1: for rescuing astronauts in danger. The press of lunar activity
Speaker 1: will push them forward. Nations have hundreds of years of
Speaker 1: norms and rules about managing ocean resources, and management of
Speaker 1: the Moon could well look similar. The distance might seem
Speaker 1: to impart impunity to rogue behavior. Who exactly is going
Speaker 1: to race for the lunar north pole to issue citations
Speaker 1: against those not respecting a park boundary? This concludes readings
Speaker 1: from Nexttional Geographic magazine. For today, your reader has been Marsha.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and have a
Speaker 1: great day.