[FPSPACE] New book on lunar resources

[DwayneDay]

Jeff Foust reviews the new book Moonrush, by Dennis Wingo:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/205/1

I agree with Jeff's review, so mostly what I write here is going to enhance upon that.  I've read Moonrush and I was pleasantly surprised.  Compared to Zubrin's justification for Mars exploration, Wingo makes a much more coherent case for lunar exploration.  He also has a pretty good understanding of social, economic, and political issues (Zubrin does not).

Zubrin has essentially argued that we need to send humans to Mars to develop a new frontier and that there will be huge social, political, technological and other benefits to having this frontier.  There are some big problems with that argument, but Zubrin has really shot himself in the foot with the claim that the United States has been technologically and socially stagnant since the closing of the Western frontier in the late 1800s.  The argument is simply absurd.  (Proof?  The A-bomb and the Internet.  Neither needed help from the Western frontier.)

The crux of Wingo's argument is that we're running out of oil and need to develop alternative fuel sources, both for commercial power and for transportation.  He does a pretty good analysis of predictions of peak oil production (at least from my perspective--an oil production analyst might find flaws with his analysis).  Essentially, he concludes that the most optimistic projection is that oil supplies will begin declining by 2054, with relatively unbiased predictions being that this will happen by 2038.  Once this point is reached, humanity either needs to switch to an alternative (or alternatives) or suffer decreasing standards of living.  At projected levels of consumption, by the most optimistic projections we will run out of oil around 2100.  The reality is that we'll never "run out" of oil, because people will stop using it once it becomes more expensive than the alternatives.  So oil usage will drop massively by the latter part of this century.

(A sidenote:  Wingo has a decent discussion of the old "Limits of Growth" study from 1970.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it is a fascinating little bit of future-doom history.  The simple story is that in 1970 a group of social scientists--I believe they were mainly economists--predicted that humanity was doomed.  We were quickly going to run out of oil, natural resources, and food within a couple of decades, and life would be pretty miserable for all of us by around, say, 2004.  The reasons were simple--population kept increasing and resources were finite.  The slightly big problem with this thesis is that population growth slowed considerably in the next few years, and both technology and substitution play a major role in negating resource constraints.  If you run out of some resource, you switch to something else.  The group that made these awful predictions should have just disappeared permanently, embarrassed by how incredibly wrong they were.  But like all good doom cultists, they simply revised their projections and produced another report in 1992, which I think says that we're still doomed unless we change our evil ways, they've just moved the date of Armageddon to the right.  Wingo partially accepts their basic premise, which is that there are limits to growth.  But he then discusses how these limits can be overcome.)

Wingo's solution is what he calls the "hydrogen economy," using nuclear fusion and hydrogen fuel cells.  The latter require platinum group metals that are rare and expensive on earth, but which may be plentiful on the moon (deposited there by asteroid impacts).  The moon could therefore provide a solution to our energy needs on earth.  (Another sidenote: Wingo mentions previous work that indicates that PGMs are plentiful on asteroids.  The problem, he notes, is that asteroids are not nearby, so mining them for their metals will not be easy.  But if we look where they crashed on the moon, we are likely to find metal deposits.  A geologist can address this issue much better than I can, but the logic seems sound.)

It's a decent argument, although I think it has some important flaws or omissions.  One big problem is that Wingo does not apply the same kind of rigorous analysis to the fusion claims as he does to the oil resource claims.  He accepts without much question the claim that a commercial fusion reactor can be ready by 2020.  But this claim quickly follows a brief discussion of the difficulties of building the ITER reactor that would be necessary to reach that goal.  If ITER is having such difficulty getting funded and is behind schedule today, then why assume that the 2020 date is at all realistic?  (Put another way--the ITER operational date keeps slipping, but the 2020 commercial fusion date does not, which makes no sense.)  

(Yet another sidenote:  ITER is an international project funded primarily by the Europeans and the Japanese.  The United States dropped out in 1998 because the Clinton administration thought that the US was being forced to pay too much for the project.  It recently rejoined.  The big problem is picking a site to build it.  Anybody who knows about the politics of big science projects knows that everybody supports them until the location is selected, then the only people who support them are the ones from the region where they are to be built.  ITER is probably going to be built in Europe, and the United States is not thrilled about paying a lot of money to European construction workers and physicists.)  

Several people who know more about fusion research than I do have assured me that the breakeven point for fusion is now probably within reach, provided that somebody funds the ITER.  But I maintain my skepticism--fusion experts were promising breakeven 30 years ago and as I understand it, eventually the government people who kept giving them money essentially got tired of all the empty promises and slashed their budgets.  Maybe this is a boy who cried wolf situation and breakeven really is within our grasp, but nobody believes the experts anymore because of their past, er, optimistic projections.  But even if true, that does nothing to make fusion more achievable.  Somehow they have to rebuild their credibility before they can build their reactor.  The fusion problem is not simply a physics problem, but a political and economic problem as well.

What I think is a problem with Wingo's thesis is that he never really looks hard at alternatives to his chosen solution.  Fusion and fuel cells do not have to be cheaper than dwindling oil supplies six decades from now, they have to be cheaper than alternative power sources six decades from now.  If it simply becomes cheaper to burn alcohol in our internal combustion engines (and continue to pump carbons into the atmosphere), then humanity may choose to do that.  And as Jeff Foust notes, the hydrogen used in the fuel cells has to come from somewhere.  Of course there's plenty of hydrogen in water, but has to be extracted from the water first, meaning that there has to be a power source to crack all those H2O molecules.

Another problem with Wingo's book is that although he endorses a number of means of making spaceflight cheaper, he doesn't have a magical solution for the incredibly high cost of getting stuff to the moon.  So if we're going to mine PGMs and Helium-3 on the moon, it might have to be at significant cost.  And that may not be economical compared to other energy sources, such as ethanol or fission.

I also think that Wingo tends to be rather dismissive of the problems of lunar mining and manufacturing.  Some people who have looked at these issues have warned that lunar dust is extremely abrasive and is going to grind machines to junk.  So even if you can find the resources, get material to the moon at low cost, and start digging, simple operational costs might still be prohibitive.

As Jeff notes in his review, however, the second half of the book includes a long historical account of lunar exploration and proposed lunar exploration.  This in itself is worth reading.  I would recommend the book on this section alone--even if the space advocacy argument does not interest you, a lot of the discussion of lunar exploration is intriguing.  I found that Wingo had a number of good insights into this subject, particularly with regard to the proposed-but-canceled projects.  As he notes, many of these projects were based upon doing _science_ on the moon, not on searching for resources.  Had they been proposed upon the latter, they might have gained more support, or had future utility.  One of the big problems is that the people proposing this stuff were asking for billions for science only, with almost no foreseeable return on investment, whereas resource prospecting offers a potential return on the investment.

But the strength of the book comes from several things.  For instance, it takes a longer-term view.  Wingo is not endorsing a massive lunar mining project _now_, but pointing out that we can put some of the gears in motion.  In addition, he has connected some of the dots, getting us from where we are to a future solution.  Even if the dots he connects are not the right ones, the fact that he has raised the issue is an important point.  Others may follow.  (One thing he notes is that there is not a lot of depth to this discussion to begin with.  The "pessimists" are environmentalists who do not have a solution to the energy problem, but essentially want everybody to accept a lower standard of living.  Unfortunately, the "optimists" are the oil companies, and their solution is to simply keep pumping more oil until it's all gone.  There is almost nobody arguing about both maintaining human growth and productivity AND switching to new energy sources.  That is the community currently occupied by a small number of space advocates.  And it is the community that needs to grow much more in future decades.)

The book is well worth reading.  It has a lot of interesting ideas.  And it really enriches the debate about space development as a possible solution to earthly constraints.  Even if you disagree with some of the argument or the conclusions, it makes for an engaging read.  It gets your brain working.



DDAY