We're going into a totally different phase of space. The first time it was about two
superpowers trying to prove their technological prowess and they set the moon as their objective
and then we realized. There's a lot in space that we can actually utilize. The oxygen that
you need, the propellant, the bricks to build a home are already there. You don't need to
bring it from Earth. That's the value of resources. The living off the land concept
is the one that we're searching for right now. That's going to enable more exploration,
allow us to travel further. It has been realized not just by our own space agency, but by dozens
of space agencies around the world. By companies that see an opportunity here to get involved.
And when you get the whole world behind something like this, you know that it's time to go.
The Moon is shaping up to be a critical destination in the 2020s. The big vision? Establish it
as a celestial boomtown, where new technologies can be tested and the moon’s raw materials
can be harnessed to power future missions. Space resources is anything that you can use beyond
earth. It could be solar power, microgravity, it could be vacuum in space, or it could be
something more concrete like metals, and minerals and gasses and water on the moon. In fact
the very first resource we utilized from space was just the view from above. The ability
to look at Earth has given us weather forecasting, global communications, GPS systems, the ability
to look at the effects that we're causing on Earth. Angel Abbud Madrid has been focused
on the potential of space resources for decades. He’s watched political objectives switch targets
from the Moon, to Mars and asteroids, and then back to the Moon. No matter the target,
for Angel, space resources are key if we want to explore further, and the Moon is the ultimate
proving ground. Nothing beats the Moon. You can see it every night. The rest are just
dots up in the dark sky. This is a place that is close, the place where we can test systems.
Now that the space industry is a $350 billion industrial juggernaut, with new start-ups
and commercial initiatives racing to land on the lunar surface, Angel launched the
world’s first graduate program on space resources to prepare the next generation.
All of the young people feel that this is their time, this is their moon and they want
to be a part of it. We're definitely not just focused on the technology, because engineers
get really excited about developing things. There's a technological, scientific, economic, legal,
and even the psychological aspects of a new phase in space.
This new pivot is not about
extracting resources and bringing them back to Earth. It’s about creating a new manufacturing
pipeline off-world. Every little bolt, every little nut, all of the human consumables,
all of the propellant have come from Earth, and that is extremely expensive. You look
at any rocket. Ninety percent of that rocket is fuel to launch the tiny little ten percent
that could be a satellite, could be a capsule with humans. And so, that's not a sustainable
way to explore. It's going to limit us to what we can do. That is why, one of the most
important resources that we're going to go after is what can help us make propellant
in space. Ask any space resources expert and they’ll likely tell you that: “water is
the oil of space.” Back in 2009, NASA slammed a used rocket tank near the Moon’s south pole,
confirming the presence of water ice and other volatiles in these permanently shadowed regions.
If you can recover the water, you can convert it into breathable oxygen for astronauts,
or split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. There's the idea of using the moon
as a refueling station. So you don't need to carry as much fuel from Earth to get out
of Earth’s atmosphere and gravity well. Launch to the moon, refuel at the moon, and then
launch somewhere deeper in space like Mars. It is totally science fiction in reality.
But before we can build a lunar propellant depot, there’s a tremendous amount of work ahead. There’s
three things that we have to have in mind in order to extract resources from any other
planet. First of all, you have to know the resource that you're going to extract. Then
you have to know exactly if it's ice on the surface, is it snow, is it dirty ice, is it
below the surface, is it combined with the soil. We need to get down there and see what's
happening. NASA is planning to send a golf cart sized rover to the Moon for a prospecting
mission, dubbed VIPER.
Viper stands for Volatile Investigating Polar Exploration Rover. So
it's kind of a mouthful, but that really describes what it does. It's meant for the polar regions.
It's meant to drive all around for miles and miles, taking samples of what's there.
At the helm of VIPER’s drilling operations is Honeybee Robotics. They’re veteran drill
experts and roboticists who’ve developed this planetary drill. In true space biz fashion,
it’s got an acronym too: TRIDENT, or the Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploration of
New Terrains. The Trident drill has been in development for almost two decades.
The idea is that it's a rotary percussive drill. That means it rotates and hammers down to
one meter. It takes a little bites of the ground and it pulls up the sample. And then
the NASA instruments are going to look for water or any other volatiles that come out
of the soil. It's very small and compact. It has to be super dust tolerant. The moon is
known for being very difficult with dust. VIPER is going to last a couple of lunar days,
which means that it needs to survive the lunar night. So it needs to be low power. It needs
to be light mass. It needs to never get stuck. Once it's in space, it's in space. You can't go
out and just fix it. It just has to work, and work for a really, really long time.
We do a lot of testing here. We take them to the farthest reaches of the earth just to
make sure they'll last. Through all of the testing we've done to date, we have not been
able to get this drill stuck, even when we've tried to. NASA talks about technology readiness
level or TRL. TRL 6 is sort of the cusp of when something is ready to be developed for
flight. So, that's where we're at right now. All the prospecting phase, technology demonstration
will have to be undertaken by robots. It's the cost and the extreme environment that
you're gonna be facing. Right now, the cost to send a kilogram to low earth orbit is about
$4,000. Thirty five thousand dollars to put it on the surface of the moon. Multiply that
by 10 or by 50 to have humans. You're looking at a place with radiation, you're looking
at a place that is dark, that lacks communications, so why send a human to do that job first,
send somebody else. And that somebody else is a rover that can tell us, okay, this is
what I found. Once we’ve prospected and know more about the water ice, step two and
three in this future lunar depot plan come into play. Now, you know the resources, but
do you have the technology to recover it, under any environment that you're going to
be dealing with. Within the first ten years you'll see some of the technologies to prove
how you can extract them. And third, you have to have a customer. As important as science
and technology and knowing your resources and how you're going to extract them, is everything
that comes around it. Some of the companies that are trying to get involved in this, they're
asking those questions. Can I actually extract them? Is anybody interested? And is this legal?
I don't want to touch it if the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 tells me that no country can
own any piece of celestial land. You cannot own the moon. You cannot own asteroids. That's
been signed by more than 100 countries. And so, how am I going to extract the resource?
Well, is there a way that without owning that object, the Moon or an asteroid, can I claim
a certain space, be there for a couple of years, extract whatever I have to do and then
leave. As of January 2020, only the United States and Luxembourg have passed laws that
allow commercial companies to extract resources. At some point, we have to agree on this. So
that has pushed efforts to bring countries together to talk about it. This is an important
conversation that we're trying to have, because there's some attachment to the Moon. All
civilizations have looked to the Moon in different ways. They see it as a place that some people
have religious connection to it, philosophical connections, or just, the beauty of it. And
so, we're going to have to agree on what's doable and what's not.
Now that we have the
vision, what will lunar robots look like in the future? And how exactly are scientists
going to turn the moon’s billion year old water into rocket fuel? Check out the second
part to find out!