Ken Murphy / 3:09 am March 2nd, 2008

“Moonlight Mile: One Small Step” original story by Yasuo Ohtagaki and published in Shogakukan’s “Big Comic Superior”. The DVD is distributed in the U.S. by ADV Films, and my copy just arrived at my local anime shop anime pop.

Two men, manly men, are proving their virility and potency by climbing to the top of Everest, the highest point on Earth. On the way, they see a French team wiped out in an avalanche, though one young lady miraculously survives. She tells the climbers that from the peak you can see the satellites all the way to the stars, and she wanted to see it with her fiancee, now dead. Then she dies. They make it to the top, and place her ring atop the victory pole. Looking up, they see the space station overhead, with the full Moon beyond. They now know the next peak they must climb.

Jack ‘Lostman’ Woodbridge gets a job with the Navy, flying fighter jets to prep for a space pilot assignment. Goro Saruwatori goes to work in construction in Japan, becoming certified in an array of advanced construction tools. Rather propitiously so, as the nations of the world decide to dissolve their individual space agencies and unite into an International Space Association. The U.S. wants to lead with a mission to harvest the He3 on the Moon - the Nexus project to provide power to the world. This requires a ramping up of efforts in orbit to provide a stepping stone to the Moon. Now it is no longer just the elite who get to walk in space, but construction workers as well, from all over the world.

Goro positions himself well, and a daring rescue at a construction project puts him over the top, and he’s off to Houston as a Construction Specialist trainee. He meets a nice girl, who happens to be the sister of America’s latest space hero, and gets a chance to prove himself in the space program. Lostman is shot down in the latest war in the oil states and may not make it back to get his acceptance letter from ISA.

Make no mistake, this is grown-up anime. It’s powerful and vulgar and heroic and sensitive and philosophical and an amazing ride into near-Earth space. We haven’t gotten to the Moon yet in the first volume, just released, but we’re well on the way. The characters are human, with vices and virtues and they face life-or-death situations (with aplomb). The animation ranges from some rougher stuff, like in the desert, to super-crisp computer renderings.

The first episode has a lot of flash-forwards and cross-cuts between action on Earth and action in orbit, evoking a kind of cosmic resonance that connects all human activity. The story contains a fair amount of philosophy, especially Goro’s development, with references to Japanese literature like my favorite: “Many paths lead me through life. I walk the path through dreams to the stars.”

The premise is the promise of Helium-3, and its cleanliness in the fusion process. This is often touted as a perfectly good reason to go back to the Moon in and of itself (q.v. “Return to the Moon”). A lot of folks are sceptical of the promise of clean fusion (since the pure He3 reaction is pretty tough to achieve and sustain), but He3 is used already in medical applications, so it’s not as if it isn’t already useful. The story with helium-3 on the Moon is that it is one of the components of the Solar wind, which is mostly hydrogen but also helium, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen in rapidly diminishing quantities. Since the Moon has no atmosphere or magnetic field to speak of, what’s in the Solar wind impacts the Lunar surface and sticks there, for the most part, and has been collecting for billions of years. When you shake up the regolith and bake it to about 800 degrees Celsius it starts to liberate the Solar Wind Implanted Elements (SWIEs). These SWIEs can be captured and distilled for other purposes. Of the helium distilled, a decent but not large portion will be helium-3 as opposed to the usual helium-4.

Assuming we’re smart about how we approach the processing of the regolith, we’ll be collecting the stuff anyway, so it may well end up as an export product from the Moon. My personal feeling is that scientists will try to take advantage of the natural vacuum of the Moon and construct fusion labs up there, because if they go boom you’re not really doing damage to anything other than your expensive equipment. In that case I can see the fusion occuring on the Moon and the energy being microwaved back to Earth, as proposed in the story.

My bias is towards Solar Power Satellites (SPS), which we are much further along the path of being able to actually do, and the Sun isn’t going to burn out any time soon, meaning we can lessen our consumption of past Solar energy (such as helium-3, or oil) by tapping current and future energy. We know the Moon contains all of the needed raw materials in some form or another, and in the long run it’s a lot cheaper location to source your basic elements like structure and PV cells. Plus, GEO is closer to Earth, allowing for tighter beam focus. Still, the smart thing to do is explore all of our options.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the story so far. It’s definitely a worthy successor to Planetes, and I honestly appreciate the focus on near-future, near-Earth developments like going back to our Moon, instead of deep space fantasy like Star Trek or Star Wars. Give me more! (Freedom Vol. 4, Earthlight Vol. 3, Moonlight Mile Vol. 2, Rocket Girls!)

Again, not really for the kiddos given some rather graphic (figuratively as well as literally) adult situations, a fair amount of cussin’, drinking and smoking, violence, and a fairly deeply woven plotline, some of which we’ve only gotten the barest hints in the first volume. In many ways it reminded me of Allen Steele’s “Lunar Descent” in it’s portrayal of the blue collar nature of our space future.

I’m going to give this one a tentative waning Full Moon. I want to see how the next volume develops before I assign a definitive rating, but I like what I’ve seen so far.