Ken Murphy / 9:38 pm January 17th, 2009

There’s a new Moonbase book in town: “Lunar Outpost: The Challenges of Establishing a Human Settlement on the Moon” by Erik Seedhouse. Just published by Springer and Praxis, it weighs in at 292 pages all told.

I’ve been trying to think of how to approach this review. From the title, it would seem to be a nice complement to existing Moonbase references like Eckart’s “The Lunar Base Handbook“, or Schrunk et al’s “The Moon: Resources, Future Development, and Settlement“. In the end, the content choices of the author may have left this book as an interesting historical footnote in the Moon-reference oeuvre.

Before getting to the meat of the work, the book gives us a long list of figures and tables, a hint of what’s to come, as well as a ten-page list of acronyms. Acronym lists are a regular feature in space books, and are oft referenced given the prominence of their use in space texts. Perhaps it’s a kind of training mechanism, as only insiders and the passionate can easily decipher more than a few while reading.

Chapter One gives us a summary of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), released at the beginning of 2004 to help guide the U.S.’s space policy going forward as the Shuttle era wound down. The folks who put it together did their research, putting together a blueprint that appealed to diverse space constituencies while opening the door to participation from the commercial sector in order to pursue commercial, security, and scientific opportunities in space. NASA got to work, and by that summer was getting input from American industry through the Concept Exploration & Refinement (CE&R) studies that offered architecture and transport recommendations on how to realize the goals of the VSE. Then, abruptly, Administrator O’Keefe resigned, and Michael Griffin was appointed by the White House. The previous work was abandoned, and NASA decided to find the solution itself. The Exploration Systems Architecture Study was commenced in mid-2005 to confirm that the Ares I and V rockets were the transport solution for the VSE.

To be honest, your friendly Lunar Librarian never liked the ESAS architecture. It closes the door to commercial participation and does nothing to contribute to a permanent and sustainable presence in space. At the time, I railed against the program in my guest postings over at the Selenian Boondocks, but as the ISDC 2007 (which I co-chaired) approached, I tempered my words and haven’t really had much to say about it since. The reader should recognize that I do have a bias in this regard.

Chapter Two takes us on a race to the Moon, as the author outlines some of the international efforts taking place with a focus on our Moon. In turn, each of China, Japan, Russia and Europe are visited with brief descriptions of their efforts. Notably missing is India, who may prove a more cunning competitor than most realize.

The next two chapters take 80 pages to lay out the Constellation architecture - the Ares Rockets, Altair and Orion, looking at the various design considerations that led to the selection.

Chapter Five looks at the factors one must consider in designing a facility for use on the Moon, including threats like radiation and micrometeoroid punctures. The various systems are visited, from life support to communications.

Any base that’s going to do anything of real value is going to have to be staffed, and the next chapter looks at NASA’s astronaut selection requirements, and the associated medical requirements. Various factors such as psychological and compatibility considerations are explored, as well as a thorough look at the radiation environment in a section on medical care that doesn’t talk much about the care part. The best look at Lunar-specific medical considerations that I’ve found is chapter 14 in the first ISU team paper, the ‘International Lunar Initiative Organization‘.

Chapter Seven looks at mission architecture ‘From launch to landing’. It touches on some of the previous studies that have been done, including the work of the NASA Exploration Team (NExT). When I worked NASA Academy program support in the summer of 2002, we visited JSC and got a briefing by the NExT folks (pdf). I was stunned by the large number of parallels with the conclusions I had reached over a year earlier in my Masters study for ISU. The chapter then goes on to look at how the current architecture was developed within the constraints of the launch vehicle chosen and the affects on the design of the Lunar portion of the mission.

Next up, the author, looks at some alternative mission architectures. He notes an upcoming study challenging the direction of the VSE (he may have been referring to the MIT report ”The Future of Human Spaceflight“), and takes a look at the DIRECT architecture that has been proposed as another alternative to the Ares transport architecture. While I don’t dislike DIRECT as I dislike ESAS, I’m a bit ambivalent about ‘choosing’ a National Space Transportation System compared with allowing industry to provide a number of solutions to the Earth-to-Orbit transport problem as with the EELVs.

The next chapter looks at Lunar exploration objectives, focusing on the fact that the reason we’re going to the Moon first is to make sure we’ve got good systems and equipment for moving farther out into the Solar system. We can hypothesize all we want about how things are supposed to work in space, but it’s only by going out there and putting the equipment and systems to the test of reality that we’re really going to learn how to move ahead. The author then looks at some of the science that can be conducted on our Moon, and some of the In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) strategies that can be worked out there.

Last up is a look at Lunar space tourism, the pieces for which are coming together even as you read this. Space Adventures Ltd. has offered a circumlunar flight for the not completely unreasonable price of $100Mn. The Artemis Project is noted, as well as the efforts of Bigelow Aerospace to provide orbital facilities that could be extensible to the Moon.

So the book is certainly comprehensive in its coverage. I do think that the strong focus on the ESAS transportation system is a drawback given its uncertain future. In my view if the author had spent less time on ESAS and more on what other studies (such as CE&R or NExT) had proposed, he would have ended up with a book with longer term utility. Additionally, while a broad number of topics are considered, few are considered in significant depth, with radiation issues one notable exception. In this regard I don’t think it quite measures up to either Lunar Base Handbook or The Moon. Nonetheless, it can serve as a primer for the issues to consider for further research.

I’m going to go middle of the road and give this one a Half Moon.