Science Vs - The Moon: Why Are We Really Going Back?

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

The moon race is back! Countries — and billionaires — are lining up to take a crack at returning to the moon. But why are we really going? Some say this is a lunar gold rush, that countries want to mine the moon for resources. Others are saying the real reason to go to the moon today is that it’ll help us get to Mars. To find out, we talk to engineer Dr. Angel Abbud-Madrid, physicist Prof. Nicolle Zellner, and astronomer Prof. Gregg Hallinan.  Check out our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3oC5kMx  This episode was produced by Meryl Horn and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Tom Simko, Professor Jack Burns, Dr. Paul Byrne, Dr. Martin Elvis, Dr. John Mather, Dr. Jennifer Whitten, Dr. Ian Crawford, Dr. Simon J Lock, and Dr. Greg De Temmerman. Special thanks to Chris Suter, Jack Weinstein, the Zukerman family, the Fausther-Keeys family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is our last episode for this season. We'll be back early next year. But today, we are pitting facts against frontiers. As we tackle the moon and ask, why are we going back? It's been around 50 years since we first stepped foot on the moon. Angel Abud Madrid, who studies space exploration now, remembers that day so clearly. He was eight years old, living in Chihuahua, Mexico.

And the day of the landing, he and his friends were so excited. Among ourselves, we thought, what's going to happen? You know, there's humans going to land on the moon. And we all thought that an alien was going to jump into their spacesuit and then come back to Earth and control everybody. At around 9 p.m. that night, Angel was asleep. But his dad woke him up. And I just remember very clearly my dad shaking me. Okay, come on.

You got to watch this. What do you remember from seeing on the screen? It was a small black and white TV, and it was this grainy picture, and I start watching, and I see the humans stepping out. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. My dad keeps saying, this is a momentous occasion. We were talking about it the day after everybody was talking about it.

And my uncle, my aunts were like, did you watch this? It was incredible. I mean, we made it to the moon, my aunts were like, did you watch this? It was incredible. I mean, we made it to the moon, how far we had gone. And there in the corner was grandma saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, but don't we have enough problems here to be worrying about the moon? Why are we doing this? And that really stuck with me.

After all, what felt like this big day for humankind was also this huge political pissing contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And around the time that the U.S. won, they slashed NASA's budget. And for decades, no one's been that serious about going back to the moon. That was until just a few years ago. Just as the US and China are getting particularly sassy with each other, here we go again. The race to the moon is back on.

With some new players as well. NASA setting its sights on a return to the moon. China's lunar rover touched down last night on the far side of the moon. India is set to head to the moon today. NASA awarded Elon Musk SpaceX with a $2.9 billion contract. Israel. South Korea. Japan. In the last five years or so, this has really exploded in terms of interest.

There are 73 space agencies and probably 20 more are being planned because every country is realizing maybe there's something in it for us. Like what? NASA said in a report from last year that a big reason to go back to the moon would be to keep the US in the leader's position. Yeah, so that they can just keep on winning. So our big question for today is, is it really worth it to go back to the moon? Or is this more of a political pissing contest? Well, when you listen to politicians and bigwigs in this

space talk about why we're going back to the moon, two things come up a lot. And that's what we're going to rove through today. One is this idea of a lunar gold rush. Some say that there are trillions of dollars of resources up there in the moon just waiting to be mined. And the first country to grab them will be one step closer to global domination. The second thing, going to Mars. People are arguing that going to the moon is crucial to getting us to our ultimate destination, the red planet. But do we really need to go back to the moon if we want to get to Mars? When it comes to the moon, there's a lot of...

Why are we doing this? But then there's science. Science versus the moon is coming up just after the break. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no.

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I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. Welcome back. starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today we're asking, why are we going back to the moon, really? Well, one reason is this idea of a lunar gold rush. That the moon is a treasure trove of valuable stuff just waiting for us to dig it all up. And the first country to get their hooks in wins. Now, we know that the moon does have untapped resources in it.

When the Apollo astronauts brought back moon rocks, scientists discovered that, yes, they contained rare earth elements, which are super important to our lives today. They're part of our renewable energy industry. They aren't your phones. The phone that you have in your hand right now has rare earth. They are in your cars. So it's part of our society right now.

That's Angel Abud Madrid again. He's now the director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. So, for example, Angel told us that one of these rare earth elements is called terbium. If you haven't heard of it, it's a shiny, soft metal. And it's used to make the color green on your phone. And there's a bunch of elements like this. Some of them really hard to pronounce.

Lanthanum and yttrium and... Like neodymium and dysprosium. Rare earths are also used in stuff like solar panels and electric cars. The problem is that on Earth, mining these elements is pretty nasty. It can pollute soil and waterways. Plus, the vast majority of rare earths that we use come from China. And so the idea is that if the U.S. or other countries could get their mitts on the stuff on the moon and then mine it without polluting the earth, that would be win-win.

So people thought... Well, these are important elements and we found them on the moon. Would it be worth going after them? And moon. Would it be worth going after them? And to you, is it worth going after them? Uh, not at this point. Not from the information that we have. So even though these things are called rare earth elements, there's actually a lot of them here on Earth.

And not just in China. That's just currently where most of the mining is happening. All over the globe, we're finding these elements. Even though they're called rare earth elements, they're actually not that rare. They're not actually that rare, believe it or not. And curiously, there isn't even that much of this stuff on the moon. We know from satellite data that there's a bit of a hotspot of rare earths,

which happens to be on the right eye of the man in the moon. But even there, the elements aren't just sitting there like a big nugget of gold. They're diluted, mixed up with the moon dirt, and would be hard to mine. Let me give you an analogy. It's like if you want to get rare earth on Earth, it's like putting a bucket in Seattle or New Orleans and collecting rainwater from there. As compared as on the moon,

it will be as having a bucket on Death Valley, probably one of the driest places on Earth. You're looking for droplets. Wow. This sounds really a bad idea. At this point, it is. So it's sounding like we should probably work out ways to mine rare earths safely here on Earth

and even get better at recycling the stuff on our phones before we resort to all the hassle and expense of going to the moon for these elements. Now, there is another idea that's been making the rounds on the web and in science fiction. And it's that the real treasure on the moon is this thing called helium-3. One Apollo astronaut has called it, quote, the best reason to return to the moon in the 21st century, end quote. Helium-3 is a version of helium that people say could be used as fuel for clean nuclear energy. That means no harmful radioactive waste.

But we'd still get all this great power. So you don't need much to generate a lot of energy. If you were to have enough helium, about 220 pounds, so that's the weight of a tall person. So 220 pounds of helium, you bring it all together, you generate energy, it will be enough to light up a city like Dallas for a full year. That's the amount of energy that you have from just 220 pounds of helium. Wow. And that would have no waste, not like the nuclear reactors we have now. No radioactive waste. The beauty of helium-3 is that what is the waste is just helium, the same thing that you put on balloons. Yeah, every one of these nuclear reactors could just be like,

hello, hello, we're making clean energy. Yeah, everybody working there will have that type of voice. So, this all sounds great. You might say, it sounds really, really great. But here's the catch. While it's true that the moon has way more of this special helium than we have here on Earth, if today you went all the way to the moon and grabbed some helium-3, then brought it back, you couldn't use it to power a city right now. And that's because the kind of nuclear reactor that we would use for this stuff,

it doesn't exist. Right now, the way that we make nuclear power is by ripping atoms apart and using the energy for power. It's called nuclear fission. But for helium-3, we'd need to do something called nuclear fusion. This is the opposite. Instead of splitting the atom, you bring two of those atoms together, you fuse them, and that way you generate energy.

So to get this helium-3 working, we're going to need to crack nuclear fusion, and we have not cracked that yet. That's exactly right. Scientists and engineers have been working on controlling fusion for years and decades. It's been really hard. It's really hard to get that initial reaction going, that fusing of the elements. I feel like because fusion sounds like fission, you're like, well, you just need to change the I for a U. This is easy. But it's actually like completely different technology. That's quite a change of a letter. It takes a lot of work.

And sure, it's possible that some countries are interested in this because they want to stake their claim on helium-3, like just in case it's useful someday and we can crack nuclear fusion. But I asked Angel. So if someone said to you, say someone big in the White House who has a massive checkbook and was like, I want to go to the moon for this helium-3, what would you tell them? That we can use that money for something else at the moment. Right. So for now, stripping the moon for parts to use back on Earth, it's not making a lot of sense,

and it is kind of feeling like going back to the moon is more for international bragging rights. But what about this idea that popping back up to the moon could help us get to Mars? That perhaps the moon could be some kind of launching pad that would catapult us into the rest of the solar system. This idea seems to be what got former President Trump on board with the moon. I said, hey, we've already done the moon. That's not so exciting.

They said, no, sir, it's a launching pad for Mars. So we'll be doing the moon, but we'll really be doing Mars. So, do we really need to do the moon to do Mars? That answer, after the break. Plus, we'll find out why going to the moon might help us reveal secrets about the universe. Like why you, me, and everything we know exists at all.

Welcome back. So it's looking like the so-called Lunar Gold Rush is more like a lunar gold bust. So, what's the point of going to the moon? Well, some people say that we've got to go back to the moon so that we can get to Mars. And to find out if that's true, we called up Nicole Zellner. She's a professor of physics at Albion College in Michigan. And Nicole is very excited about getting us to the red planet.

Well, humans have explored for all of humanity, and Mars is intriguing as just the next step in human exploration. Now, technically speaking, you don't have to go to the moon to go to Mars. We can fly direct. In fact, that's what Elon Musk is planning to do with SpaceX. Forget the moon entirely and just go straight to the red planet. But Nicole says that doesn't mean the moon is useless here. So just last year, NASA released this big report about their plans for the moon, and it actually does have to do with Mars, but not to use it as a launch pad. Their idea is to use it as a training ground for Mars.

Which Nicole says makes a lot of sense. You're not going to climb Mount Everest on a whim, right? You're going to climb somewhere in the Catskills first, and then you're going to work your way up into higher and higher elevations. You're going to train for that Mount Everest trip. And you can think about Mars being the Mount Everest for now. This is because Mars is so much further away than the moon. It takes just a few days to get to the moon, but at least six months to get to Mars. If you forget your wrench there, there's no Amazon Prime. Producer Meryl Horne talked to Nicole about it.

You're not just going to go there without any practice. That's... It's like a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for disaster. Yeah, I was going to say it's a fool's errand. I mean, you just don't go somewhere without practicing it first. I mean, that's common sense. And NASA's plan here is actually pretty fun when you look at the details. So over the next decade, they want to put a live-in Land Rover,

basically a souped-up RV on the moon, where a crew of four people would live in it and make these trips, like month-long trips, exploring the lunar surface and learning how to deal with the tough conditions that come with being on a whole new space rock. Like, one thing they're going to have to deal with is moon dust. It's like tiny bits of corrosive glass. And it was a huge pain in the ass for the Apollo astronauts. Nicole told us some of the things they said about it. When I took my helmet off, I was almost blinded. Junk immediately got into my eyes. The dust really bothered my eyes and throat. I was tasting it and eating it.

So when you're in an environment where you can't even go outside without putting a spacesuit on, and then you come back inside, you've got dust everywhere. You got to figure out how to deal with that. And another thing that they'll be dealing with is drinking water. At first, our moonstronauts will get their water from a spacecraft orbiting the moon, kind of like the International Space Station. But it's hoped that these pioneers will ultimately find good water sources on the moon that they could drink and then start to fend for themselves. And eventually, the vision is that if we do find enough water on the moon, maybe we'd use it not just for drinking water,

but for something else, as fuel, to power rocket ships that would venture out into the solar system. And this isn't totally bonkers. You know, water, even on the moon, is just hydrogen and oxygen. And the fuel that we usually use for rockets now is hydrogen. And we can split apart those water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. And then that hydrogen can be used as a rocket fuel. Oh, do we have all the science for that yet?

We do. Yep, we know how to do this. Plus, having a gas station on the moon would be an added bonus because it would be easier for rockets to take off from around there because they could sidestep Earth's strong gravity. Okay, so it makes sense that you'd want to figure out the nuts and bolts of living on the moon before you live on Mars. But maybe you're not sold on any of this. Maybe going to Mars just feels like part of the same pissing contest, and it's starting to feel like what we really need is a giant toilet roll on the moon.

Well, guess what? We found one. And turns out it's one of the best reasons we've heard to go back to the moon. One of its biggest cheerleaders is Greg Hallinan, a professor of astronomy at Caltech. And he wants to put a telescope on the moon, on the far side, to be specific. That's the side that's always facing away from us. And Greg and his team are so amped about this that they actually named their telescope FARSIDE.

But it's an acronym. It stands for... Are you looking it up? I know it off by heart. At 100%, I am guilty. I have not memorized the horribly forced acronym we have used to name the array Fireside. It is called the Fireside Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark Ages and Exoplanets.

Wait, what is it again? It's the Fireside Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark Ages and Exoplanets. And remember, the first word of the acronym is the acronym. So how bad an acronym is that? As bad as the acronym is, it's going to look great. Greg sent me a picture. Okay, here we go. Can you see that okay?

Oh, it looks real pretty. It does. It does. So what we're looking at, look, to tell you the truth, is it looks like a real space-age toilet roll, a little. Oh, it does. It's got that hole at the bottom. Yeah, that's right.

You're right. Yeah, it does. It does. It's a very fancy toilet roll. It's gold-plated. I don't think it'd feel very good, but it would be very expensive. The plan is that this roll will deploy a giant telescope that will cover an area that's 10 kilometers across.

That's over six miles. In my opinion, if we're going to go to the moon, this is why we should go. Okay, so this awkwardly named toilet roll telescope won't feel good for wiping your bum. But this telescope is going to do something even better. It's going to help us understand why your bum exists at all. To understand how, let's travel all the way back in time to a period before basically anything existed. It's called the Dark Ages.

It's this huge gap in time right after the Big Bang. Scientists agree that some 14 billion years ago, the entire universe was inside this teeny, tiny, incredibly hot bubble, which went... Bang! It exploded. And the universe was born. From here, hot plasma was thrown up everywhere. And when that settles, all we have left are these dark clouds everywhere.

At that point, the entire universe was a sea of hydrogen and some helium and basically nothing else, just this sea of neutral stuff. And then something changes. Out of this sea of stuff, stars formed, and then galaxies, and then yadda, yadda, yadda, dinosaurs, Big Macs, podcasts, everything we know. And the big mystery is what changed in this weird dark soup that caused stars and everything we know to be born? Because without that, we'd still be in darkness.

And we don't know how it happened. And the reason that this is such a big mystery is that our traditional tools for peering back in time are telescopes that measure light. But they can't help us here. Like, even if we built a giant one. But if you could build a space telescope the size of the planet Earth, it wouldn't be good enough. Because there was no light, no light, no optical light that we could see with our eyes.

Hence the term the Dark Ages. The only things that existed back in the Dark Ages was this soup of hydrogen and some helium and a couple of other small, you know, elements. And since there was a bunch of hydrogen floating around in the Dark Ages, that is the key. We need to be able to measure hydrogen to know what happened. And Greg's telescope is designed to do just this. Because it turns out that that soup of hydrogen from billions of years ago, it made radio waves that we can still find today.

Greg reckons if we could hear it, it would sound something like this. On one, two, three. That's it. A quiet hiss from the universe could be what we need to reveal the secrets of our cosmic dawn. By analyzing the radio waves, Greg reckons that we could get a sort of timeline of what happened.

We can play a movie that tells us how the universe evolved from that moment all the way through to when we can actually see galaxies and stars. And Greg needs to put this telescope on the moon. It wouldn't work if we put it on Earth because we have this rather annoying atmosphere. The signal can't get through the atmosphere. It's like looking through a brick wall, literally. That's how much the signal is blocked by the atmosphere. So you just can't see it. And that's why we hop over the brick wall and go to the moon. And by the way, Greg hopes that his super fancy telescope will also help us solve another big mystery of the universe. Are we alone?

And that's because its souped-up equipment can study planets outside of our solar system, called exoplanets. In particular, it'll be looking for exoplanets that have magnetic fields, also called magnetospheres, which we think are important for life. Like, for example, Earth has a magnetosphere. Radio telescopes can pick it up. In fact, when Earth's magnetic field is converted into sound, this is what it sounds like. Meryl talked to Greg about his big plans.

Let's say, you know, this is all set up. You turn on the switch and we start getting this data. And then, like, you find an exoplanet with a magnetosphere. How big a moment would that be? That's my ultimate dream. We are designing and building the space telescopes that can actually detect signatures of life of other planets. You know, that would be such a profound moment, you know, discovering life outside our solar system. that like the politicians all around the world that this is just kind of a pissing contest about who can get to the moon faster and who can put the coolest thing on the moon and then the scientists just get to kind of go,

okay, honey, like, but while you're having a pissing contest, I'm going to do some cool shit on the side. I mean, the Apollo missions very fundamentally was the mother of all pissing contests, right? Right. That being said, it's possible for national prestige projects to be fundamentally good in their application. I think the lunar landing is an example of that.

The moon landing, I think, really achieves so much. It transformed our position and our view of ourselves in the cosmos. There were signs done for the moon that was fundamental. So once again, even though it was in its origin, like you said, a pissing contest, in its eventuality, I think it was a fundamentally beneficial thing for all humanity. I think the same applies to what happens on the moon in the future.

Greg, and everyone we spoke to about this, said that these literal moonshots, they always seem to pay us back in spades. Like, the technology that we developed in the first moon race eventually led to things like smaller computers, GPS, even memory foam. So yes, even though in some ways going back to the moon is still a political pissing contest, it's way better than most pissing contests. I mean, instead of just getting your name written in the snow, we're going to get some cool science. That's science versus. And this is our last episode of the season. We're going to be back

in March for season 12. Season 12, baby. Yeah. So in the meantime, if you want to catch up with old episodes, you got to follow the show on Spotify. It's 100% free and you can hit this little bell icon, which means you'll get an alert next time we drop a new episode, which will be in March. So do it now. Go follow us on Spotify so you won't miss an episode when we come back from our break. Go.

We will wait. And in the meantime, you can hear some of our favourite moments from this past season. No, I wasn't going to resign. You can hear some of our favorite moments from this past season. He was like, yeah, I think it's okay. What felt like minutes later, we just heard this tiny, this like teeny tiny, like, baby noise. If we did not do it, we would have been crucified for not doing it. You do not need to feel this way. Stop it right now.

I mean, it really is like popping the cork on a champagne bottle. Just, ah. The person in the cubicle next to me in the office, they are cutting their toenails under the desk with an enormous toenail clipper at work. Oh, it's so gross. It's like disgusting. Oh my God, did you see this?

This is amazing. We have to publish tonight. Leopard! Leopard! I see her. Oh my gosh, she's so sweet. This is like Fight Club. I'm like, oh my God,

you're telling me that I've had blue balls this entire time. Hey, Meryl Horne. How you doing? Hey. Hello. Hey, Katie Foster-Keys. How's it going? How many citations in this week's episode, Katie?

There are 114 citations in this week's episode. Akedi? There are 114 citations in this week's episode. 114. And Meryl, if people want to find out more, where should they go? They can go to the show notes or the website and follow the links to the transcripts. Excellent. Happy final episode of the season.

Woo! We're so tired. Bye! Bye! Woo! We're so tired. Bye. Bye. Have a very happy and safe holiday. We'll see you next year on Spotify. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne and Akedi Foster-Keys with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang.

We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr Tom Simcoe, Professor Jack Burns, Dr. Paul Byrne, Dr. Martin Elvis, Dr. John Mather, Dr. Jennifer Witten, Dr. Ian Crawford, Dr. Simon J. Locke, and Dr. Greg D. Temmerman. A special thanks to Chris Suter, Jack Weinstein, the Zuckerman

family, the Foster Keyes family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next year.