Humans will return to the moon next year, more than 30 years after the last Apollo astronauts left.
Unfortunately, the new lunar visitors will have a large handicap that will hinder their exploration efforts: they’ll all be dead.
The humans in questions will arrive in the form of small amounts of ashes from cremated remains, and they’ll be riding the first commercial spacecraft to pay a visit to our nearest celestial neighbor.
Last week, Transorbital Inc. of San Diego signed a $20 million U.S. contract with Moscow’s international space company Kosmotras for launch services. Kosmotras has been authorized by the Russian government to use decommissioned ballistic missiles for commercial space launches.
Transorbita plans to send an unmanned space vehicle called TrailBlazer to the moon next October, to orbit for three months, then crash onto the surface. (A test launch of a replica of TrailBlazer is scheduled for as early as this month.)
While it’s orbiting, Trailblazer will take high-resolution pictures of the moon’s surface, creating a high-resolution atlas of the moon whose images will then be available–for a price–for anyone who needs a close-up look at some part of the moon’s surface.
When it crashes, Trailblazer will deposit on the lunar surface private messages, cremated remains and other commercial cargo, all encased in a capsule designed to survive the impact. Transorbital is charging $2,500 (U.S.) to send a business card to the moon. Messages start at a mere $16.95. Inert materials–including human ashes–are $2,500 per gram.
The company says it already has thousands of orders to deliver jewelry, business cards and remains. The people sending ashes “like the idea of seeing their relatives on a nightly basis,” says the company’s president, Dennis Laurie.
(The first human remains sent to the moon actually rode a NASA spacecraft. A vial containing an ounce of astronomer Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes was aboard NASA’s Lunar Prospector science craft, which crashed into the moon at 6,000 kph in 1999. It seemed an appropriate tribute for a researcher who specialized in cosmic collisions; Shoemaker gained fame as a co-discover of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which hit Jupiter in 1994.)
The Russian rocket TrailBlazer will ride, called the Dnepr, was known in the West in Cold War days as the SS-18 Satan. Capable of carrying 10 nuclear warheads, it has plenty of boost for sending payloads to the moon Kosmotras has already launched commercial payloads twice aboard Dneprs and has another five in hand. It says it could convert as many as 150 of the missiles if it the demand is there. One thing Transobital likes about Kosmotras is that th company employs a number of veterans of the former Soviet Union’s moon program.
Transorbital has even more ambitious plans that Trailblazer. They want to create the first commercial lunar surface lander, called Electra, capable delivering a commercial payload of up to 10 kilograms to the moon’s surface and providing it with power and command/data communications services.
Governments haven’t been entirely left out of lunar exploration plans. Japan, with additional funding from the European Union and donations from industries and private citizens, hopes to launch a robotic probe named Selene in the next couple of years to orbit and observe the moon for a year, then follow that up with a lander. Ultimately, perhaps as early as 2009, the Japanese hope to place a remote-controlled radio astronomy on the moon. Radio astronomers are licking their lips at the thought of a moon-based observatory, because radio astronomy on Earth is plagued by the electromagnetic noise generated by human civilization.
The Japanese are also hinting at a manned mission to the Moon. “It will take time,” said Norio Kaifu of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, “but in 10 or 20 years the situation will be different.”
NASA, meanwhile, has two lunar orbiters planned for the next couple of years: SMART-1, really a test bed for various space technologies, in particular a solar-powered ion drive, and Lunar-A, which consists of an orbiter and two “penetrators,” instrument packages designed to bury themselves one to three metres beneath the surface of the moon and provide information about seismographic activity and subsurface heat flow.
All in all, it appears our nearest celestial neighbor is about to get more attention than it’s had in years…and, at last, we can say that humans are returning to the moon to stay.
The fact they’re not actually living ones is a mere technicality.
