MUMBAI
- With the Chinese and Japanese making plans to
establish moon bases, can India be far behind?
"Global players have declared that by
2020, they will have their bases on the moon,"
Madhavan Nair, chief of the Indian Space Research
Organization (ISRO), declared on August 18. "I
don't think India can afford to be lagging behind
in that."
Nair said ISRO is defining
technologies needed for India's first
manned
space mission in an Indian space vehicle scheduled
for 2015 (Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma spent
eight days aboard a Soviet Soyuz T-11 in 1984).
Fifty-nine of 122 lunar probes launched worldwide
were successful. More are heading moonward in a
renewed interest in Earth's neighbor 385,000
kilometers away.
Leading Asia's moon
ambitions is the Japanese Aerospace Exploration
Agency (JAXA), which rescheduled its lunar
orbiter, Kaguya, to September 13 instead of this
month. On August 17, China insisted its lunar
Chang'e I program is purely scientific and not
competing with any other country (read Japan).
India is expected to invest US$1.5 billion
over the next five years to develop technologies
for a manned space flight by 2015 and a moon
flight by 2020. Most of the designing, research
and technical jobs are to be completed by 2012.
The United States wants a permanent
outpost on the moon. This month, the US National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
released a master list of potential lunar
objectives, consulting more than 1,000 people from
businesses, and it included developing lunar
commerce.
Scientists say moon resources
could support life on Earth with cheaper and
cleaner energy and help human exploration of the
solar system and outer space with cheaper rocket
fuel and space-travel construction materials.
Lunar mineral deposits include aluminum,
magnesium, titanium, iron (for building moon
structures), and silicon (to make solar cells for
energy), besides the lunar soil enriched with
oxygen (for astronauts to breathe and for making
rocket fuel) and hydrogen; the soil could also be
melted into casts and used as construction blocks.
Former Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt
says a tonne of helium-3 from the moon could be
returned to Earth to produce fusion power that
would be price-competitive with oil at $30 a
barrel. But this technology could be still decades
away to make it cost-effective.
"If
investment visionaries have their way, the moon of
the 21st century is going to be dotted with robot
factories, underground cities, power towers,
tourist stopovers, science stations, even lunar
burial sites," promised Space.com at the turn of
the millennium, reporting on the second annual
Lunar Development Conference held in the US and
attended by entrepreneurs, land developers, space
technologists and researchers.
Growing
interest in space tourism makes moon inhabitation
closer to reality. Patrick Collins, a
space-tourism expert and professor of economics at
Azabu University, Japan, says that just 10% of
existing governmental space budgets would be
needed to make space tourism a $100-billion-a-year
business.
Russia's Federal Space Agency
has announced a moon-tourism project to be
launched by 2010. With California-based Space
Adventures and the Tokyo-based travel agency JTB
Corp as partners, the project offers
around-the-moon trips on board a Russian Soyuz
spacecraft. Two tourists per trip will go on the
moon ride, accompanied by a professional
astronaut. The return ticket? Just $100 million.
Shimizu Space Systems, a Japanese company
working on space and lunar tourism, plans to build
lunar bases with inflatable buildings served with
golf courses and tennis courts. A Lunar Hilton
bigger than the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada,
could dot the moonscape if British architect Peter
Inston's designs for a lunar complex for Hilton
International appears. The Lunar Hilton would be a
5,000-room, domed, solar-energy-powered structure,
with drinking water from lunar ice, and with
restaurants, a church, a beach, and moon buses
taking guests on lunar picnics.
Asia could
soon have its versions of the Texas-based Moon
Society, affiliated to the Artemis Society, whose
Artemis Project works to "design, fund and deploy
the first private lunar base for commerce and
tourism". The Moon Society's top agenda is to
establish human communities on the moon and
promote large-scale industrialization and private
enterprise on the moon. Greenpeace, of course,
would then have its lunar branch.
NASA,
aiming for a moon base at either the north or
south pole of the moon, estimates that by 2024,
there will be continual presence on the moon, with
International Space Station-like crews being
rotated around the year.
Private US space
companies are already in business, each with
projects to send orbiters, landers or robot rovers
to the moon in the next few years. On August 13,
California-based SpaceDev - describing itself as
"an entrepreneurial space-systems company" -
declared its second-quarter and six-month fiscal
results, reporting $17.7 million in revenue, a 12%
increase from the previous year.
TransOrbital, with its tagline "The moon
is open for business," says it's the first private
company to be authorized by the US State
Department for commercial flights to the moon.
Given the Indo-Chinese economic-growth
rate, Asian companies will not be far behind.
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