Ken Murphy / 5:26 am January 2nd, 2006

Well, it looks like Out of the Cradle gets to be one of the first to review the “Return to the Moons” that have recently come out.

We’ll start out with the ‘Return to the Moon’ edited by Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation and Erin Medlicott, who is also active in the space advocacy community. For the record, I know Mr. Tumlinson personally from various conferences and he has tried to recruit me into the SFF. However, I paid for my copy so this is a paying consumer review of the work, warts and all.

The book collects twenty-five essays by well-known figures from a variety of fields but all notable for their work relating somehow to the Moon. The focus is on the many reasons it makes sense to return to our Moon, and how it can be done from a variety of perspectives like transportation and law. It also touches upon sociological aspects, most notably with Frank White’s “Overview Effect from the Moon” essay. I know from personal experience the powerful affect Mr. White’s book “The Overview Effect” had on many, many of the participants in the UN-sponsored Space Generation Forum and subsequent Space Generation Advisory Council.

The publisher’s website notes:
“Although both the public and private sectors are feeling a renewed excitement about going back to the Moon and on to Mars, the battle lines are drawn between the forces of the old school traditional NASA/aerospace community and those advocating an alternative “Frontier” approach to space. NASA has so far responded to their orders from the president with an expensive and bloated re-working of the old Apollo program, which critics such as controversial Editor Rick Tumlinson and many in this volume charge will result in yet another “flags and footprints” dead end unless dramatically changed. But there is still time and still hope that those advocating a new partnership that leads to the expanding human settlement of space can win. The differences are clear, and the winners will determine not just the future of America’s future in space, but the future of the human race.”

I didn’t get quite such a sense of stridency in the collected essays, but many touched upon exactly those messages, whose sense of import I share. I strongly feel that commercial space development is crucial for future U.S. commercial competitiveness. We’re one of the few nations that have cleared the barriers to entry to working in space. If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity, others will.

So who do I feel is the target audience that SHOULD see this book? I would say every middle-manager in American industry. (Why not top management? They’re too busy feathering their nests to think about what’s right for the future of American industry. That means the middle-managers need to take the initiative) That way we can start getting good ideas on how American business can contribute to making our expansion into space permanent.

I also think that every student at International Space University and UND’s Space Masters programs should get a gratis copy for the next couple of years.

Who else? Those who work in the volunteer space advocacy community. It helps to cogently encapsulate good solid reasons to go set up shop there.

It can also be of interest to the general public. I doubt most would have the patience to read it cover to cover, but they might pick up bits and pieces here and there. The average is about eight pages per piece, with some as short four pages. Another hundred pages wouldn’t have hurt, and I’m a bit disappointed that more depth wasn’t achieved. There’s some Lunar facts and statistics in the back.

Now for the warts. It could have used one more run past an independent editor. There are numerous formatting errors on section titles and enough misspelled words (I curse thee, auto-spell-checkers) to be a bit distracting and detracts a bit from the professionalism of the message. Hopefully these will be cleared up in the much anticipated second edition.

For this reason I have to give it just shy of a Full Moon.
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The other ‘Return to the Moon’ is by Harrison Schmitt. This work is a comprehensive (328 pp.) systems analysis of the establishment of a Helium-3 production facility on the Moon.

He-3 is often dismissed as a canard in Lunar commercialisation, and by itself no, I don’t think it’s a sole-justification for going back to the Moon.

However, looked at as a by-product of other processes, in this case an initial shake and bake processing of collected regolith to liberate the bulk of the SWIEs prior to processing for metals and oxygen, then it makes sense to collect the He-3 for use back on Earth. Remember, He-3 has other uses than fusion alone, such as certain medical processes.

Mr. Schmitt makes a strong case, though, that the energy value alone of the He-3 is a compelling reason to return to our Moon. In the tradition of system analysis it is comprehensive and wide-ranging in its scope. It is a dry, academic read (okay, no, I haven’t finished it yet) and its target audience is likely academics and hard-core space and Lunar enthusiasts. It SHOULD probably also be read by energy-industry executives to at least get them thinking about alternatives to our present bondage to dead dinosaurs. I’m personally more in favor of geosynchronously located solar power satellites as the nearer-term necessity, with a gradual build-up to robust He-3 fusion capabilities as our space-based capabilities increase.

Because it is geared so much towards specialists I can only give it a waning three-quarter Moon.
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