EVSN - After Hours: International Moon Day 2026 With guest Jekan Thanga

CosmoQuest After Hours intro

0:00It's the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, coming in 3, 2, 1.

0:30Hello, everyone, and welcome to CosmoQuest After Hours for July 17th. I am your host, Dr. Pamela Gay, and I am joined this week by Dr. And I should have asked you before we started how to say your name. I'm going to plow forward ungracefully. I'm joined today by the University of Arizona professor, Dr. Jenkin Thanga. Did I get that halfway right? J.M. Thanga, so that's close. J.M. Thanga, okay. Okay. I'm really glad you're here.

1:00You are working on some really amazing projects to explore and keep humanity going on the moon, and you are part of this year's UN-coordinated Moon Day, which is scheduled for July 20th.

Why Moon Day matters

1:21Can you tell us a little bit about why Moon Day matters to you? Definitely. I mean, lunar exploration is now, I think, entering sort of its centerpiece. You know, there's been a long push to send humanity to the moon, to explore it firsthand, and then further figure out how we can live long, research, explore, use that as a mounting or a beachhead, really,

1:56to explore, you know, all other quadrants of our universe. And that's been, you know, sort of the dream ever since the Apollo missions and what was, you know, sort of shown then. So I would argue that's been the centerpiece for me, me being a person who, you know, sort of grew up in the late Apollo era, in the late 70s, in which, you know, we, I guess beyond the 60s, you know, there was sort of a second golden age of seeing, you know,

2:30what could be possible with the space program. And there was a strong, you know, sort of can-do attitude for a while, especially through the shuttle and the space station and so on. And so, you know, that's one aspect. You know, another, I would argue, is, you know, the moon is our, you know, closest neighbor. It's, you know, got a, as much as we've explored it from Earth, there's still a whole lot of mysteries remain about the moon that I think we need to uncover.

3:04And it plays an important role in Earth ecosystems. It's, it's interconnected. I mean, I mean, the wildlife, the plants, the animals that sort of indirectly depend on the moon, you know, cannot be understated as well. And so, you know, quite an extent of our connection to the moon. It's really kind of amazing all the different ways the moon affects the Earth. The most obvious is the tidal effects where we see the ocean tides rising and sinking, which high tides actually allowed us to unstick a boat in the Suez Canal a few years ago.

3:43And at the same time, these tides are actually raising mountains up and down. We're just less aware of that. But beyond those physical forces, we also see moths and birds navigating by the moon. This is part of why human lights can be so devastating to wildlife. And there's so many other things that are synced up with that lunar cycle that we're still discovering. And while our world does rely on the moon, we are also finding ways to go back with China and the United States, both actively working towards human exploration.

4:25India is out there as one of the leaders in robotic landers.

4:31Where does your team fit into this new lunar ecosystem that's being developed?

Building a lunar economy

4:37Thank you for that question. And we have been, particularly our research group, Space Treks and Asteroids, and they've been active for the past 13 years now, pretty much in Arizona. And we have been going through what I would say is almost the systematic sequence of starting with exploration, starting with helping to uncover the science, really the science mysteries that still remain as a sort of leftover material from the Apollo era, down to, you know, what could be next.

5:17And one of the things that I've been arguing perhaps for the past five years is that, you know, the space program is going to face this big pivoting moment, this inflection point in which, you know, the public want to see big returns, big payback from the space program, apart from, let's just say, Hubble images. And, you know, the tidbit of one minute news articles about, you know, some great thing happening in space, they want a bigger return, especially for, you know, how much the taxpayers have put in.

5:55And that's where I would argue, you know, space development comes in, the need to kickstart a space economy that will help augment, you know, perhaps some of the industries here on Earth, advance new capabilities that's definitely possible in space, particularly in, you know, niche areas and manufacturing at the moment. But it also stretches into healthcare, and, you know, drug production and such. And then the moon could be part of that equation, too.

6:27And that could be, again, you know, sort of that beachhead to, you know, sort of further advance this, you know, whole space economy. And so that's been our, you know, more recent pivot. How would we get started? And so NASA, I would say about five years ago, put out this Moon to Mars initiative, in which they actually pulled, you know, the entire, I would say the space community, academia, industry, government sector, to really speak up for, you know, what would be next?

7:00What would be sort of the next, you know, 30-year plan? And that, I'm, you know, glad to hear is maturing. That's sort of what has now led to the Moon base initiative that was called out earlier this year, though, you know, a lot of details remain to be hammered. But the whole idea is to achieve permanence on the moon, starting with, you know, almost sort of like a tiptoe entry into the unknown, a combination of both robotic and human stays.

7:30But the idea is to go in this, you know, multiple thrusts of exploration, resource, prospecting, and then I would say space development, space construction, towards long-term habitation. And the idea of finding secondary habitats, you know, a secondary home apart from Earth, I would argue is sort of the bigger long-term goal here.

8:00And we're in a place where NASA is really working to fund commercial academic hybrid programs, where through the CLPS program, which has been rebranded, the Moon base program, this is the commercial lunar payload system. They're looking to land a series of commercial landers, rovers, and other combinations of flight equipment onto the surface of the Moon, where the bulk of the costs for these missions are carried by the commercial programs that are working to innovate a new space economy.

8:36While at the same time, they do carry on board NASA-funded instrumentation. This is part of the PRISM program, for instance. And so we're seeing instrumentation being carried on these rovers, on these landers, that are allowing really cool things to be learned. And the most successful of these landers so far has been Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which had that spectacular landing, and we all got to see its shadow. Other missions have tended to explore gymnastics moves, but have returned some amount of data.

9:13And while this has been rare so far, Isaacman has recently said that he's hoping to see a one launch per month cadence come 2027, which is remarkably fast. And I have to ask, what is your team hoping to get on the Moon now that we have this cadence of missions growing so fast?

Surviving the lunar night

9:37What is your dream for lunar exploration? I would argue, you know, we have quite a diverse set of thrusts that we would like to see transported to the Moon. I would say highest among it is technologies to enable other landers, other rovers, all kinds of other assets that we've already put on the lunar surface to survive the lunar night. And that's been argued as one of the most challenging problems we face right now.

10:07And so our group has been developing some really nice, innovative ideas that have now transformed into early-stage technologies that we can pilot and test out that we think could be a very credible, very simplified approach to solving that problem. That, I would argue, that I would argue is sort of the space service, space development segment.

Exploring lunar lava tubes

10:29On the exploration side, we have been, you know, super eager and thrilled to explore the lunar lava tubes or what are purposefully the lunar lava tubes because we sort of see these pit-like entrances. So I'm going to pause for a moment so we can explain this. And for those of you who don't know, we have our moon lunar mapping program over at mappers.psi.edu that actually has folks mapping out lunar melt. So there are two different methods that you end up with molten rock on the surface of the Moon.

11:05There are actually volcanoes on the Moon that are extremely ancient, haven't been active, as far as we know. There's debate on this for billions of years. Those, you have, like, lava just like you'd experience in Hawaii runs across the surface, outer shell solidifies while the inner part keeps going. This leads to having hollow tunnels. But there is a second way that you can end up with molten goodness on the surface of the Moon. And that's the energy from asteroid impacts transforming the lunar surface into lunar melt that can also flow across the Moon.

11:44A lot of the time, this is just sloshing around inside craters. It's running down the walls of craters, carrying boulders with it, acting kind of like a glacier except molten rock. But you end up with all these really cool lava features that I'm apparently overly excited about today. Go to mappers.psi.edu and help us map these suckers out. Now, one of the reasons that we're so excited about this stuff is the Moon is outside the protective magnetic field of the planet Earth that prevents us from the majority of the high-energy particles and high-energy photons from space hitting us and generating cancers.

12:25And the Moon is outside the Moon is outside the Moon, the moon's not so lucky. But if you can get underground, you have shielding. And lava tubes are one of the potential ways to get that shielding. So what is your team looking to do leveraging this free potential habitat on the lunar surface? So as you exactly pointed out, the radiation shielding is the main advantage of these lava tubes, apart from structural shielding. And thermal shielding.

12:56And thermal shielding. So structural shielding against the micrometeorites. At times, we can record these meteorites coming in at tens of kilometers per second speeds, which is something that we can't stop with current barrier technology of any kind that we can think of. So the thick shielding, the natural shielding that's provided over these lava tubes that could stretch into the tens to hundreds of meters in thickness of rock is there. And then the thermal shielding, as you also point out, and this was a discovery from the Apollo era in which if you go below a few meters, you get this temperature constant as opposed to high temperature variance of which the temperature stays a balmy minus 25 degrees centigrade.

13:42Which is, by lunar terms, but the constant temperature is, I think, the big advantage there. And so all three of these factors make these lava tubes potentially strategic ground. We have learned, you know, through, you know, all these planetary science advances over the last 20 plus years, that these lava tubes could be networked. They could be running for hundreds of kilometers.

14:12And in some areas, the size of them, you know, could be compared to Earth sort of magnified. And so there are claims, you know, you could see magma chambers in there that could potentially fit the entire, you know, city of Manhattan inside. And this is all because of gravity, just to give some people some context. There's lower gravity on the moon, which means you have bigger geology, which seems non-intuitive. But if you've ever tried to build a sandcastle, you know, at a certain point, it's just going to slide down.

14:44It's that angle of repose issue and the fact that stuff wants to squish. If you lessen the amount of gravitational squish, for lack of more technical terms, you suddenly get much more massive lava flows. You get much deeper craters. There are craters that are kilometers deep and have massively steep crater walls. So lower gravity gives us bigger geology.

15:16And then hence, you know, this could be a window into the moon's past, which would likely be pristine, likely two to three billion years old, nearly untouched. And so that would be, you know, a huge science coup to get in there and essentially discover what it is. And I think, you know, that's one of the other exploration angles. Then there are the remnant magnetic fields on the moon that are of significant interest.

15:47And various other oddities of the moon that we almost take for granted, particularly its gravitational field being, you know, not so, I would say, well described as Earth. It's a bit supposedly uneven. And it's, in fact, very hard to put satellites in orbit around the moon for those reasons. They get, you know, sort of wobbled out. And so those are, from both a practical standpoint, but also from a, you know, pure science standpoint, it would be of immense interest to sort of learn why.

16:22And that comes back to then, you know, fundamentals of science of planetary and moon formation, physics. And here we have, you know, our nearest neighbor in which a lot of these fundamental questions we can't fully answer yet. And so, you know, that's all really tantalizing stuff. Another line of argument for this is given how Earth has gotten so crowded, particularly with orbit being so crowded, we're going to have challenges with surface astronomy.

16:54And then it's going to get into, you know, orbital astronomy, and that is under threat as well with, you know, these immense amount of traffic. A bunch of us have, you know, postulated about setting up observatories on the lunar surface, and there's been some deep interest in setting it up on the far side of the moon, because that can provide a natural... Radio shield. Radio shield, somewhat of a radio barrier, but also a nice dark sort of background compared to...

17:28Light pollution. Light pollution. So you're dealing with a couple of different factors that I want to untangle here.

Far side observatories

17:34For sure. So the far side of the moon gets just as much sunlight as the near side of the moon. And when we see that quarter moon, the reason we call it a quarter moon, even though we're looking at on the disk, half of it is illuminated. Well, we're only seeing half of the moon, and we're only seeing half of the half illuminated. That's a quarter. Half of the moon is always illuminated. Full moon, that's half the moon illuminated. New moon, that's the half we don't see illuminated. And so when you're building things on the moon, you have to think through, shoot, I can only use solar power for about two weeks, and then I lose the sun.

18:08So you have to use batteries. Then when you're trying to build observatories, the far side of the moon gives you radio quiet all the time because you're not getting the background noise from the planet Earth. But when it's dark there, that two weeks-ish every orbit, you're not getting Earth glow affecting you. So you are avoiding Earth glow, you're avoiding all the satellite noise that we're getting as all of the different megaconstellations get built.

18:44The megaconstellations are truly a horrific problem, which we're not going to get into today because that could make both of us cry. Let's talk instead about how your team is working on extreme robots, machine learning, and this amazing thing called a lunar arc. I'm going to actually start by saying, what is the lunar arc?

The Lunar Ark concept

19:04So the lunar arc builds upon the potential advantages that we talked about with the lunar lava tubes. And the idea is to find a place where we can sort of preserve what we most care about. And this would be, in our case, I would argue, again, some of us would argue it's biodiversity. So that's the, you know, the riches that we have on this planet. And in addition, I would also then, you know, add to that, you know, earthly knowledge, our civilizational knowledge that we have gained.

19:42You know, that combination should be stored and should be stored and backed up safe. And that borrows from the principle of, you know, the Svalbard seed vault. In fact, you know, folks are already, you know, putting this to practice, particularly with the Svalbard seed vault in which, you know, there's this vault containing seeds from nearly a hundred, about a thousand different crops, which is sort of critical for modern day food supply. And it's saved and kept in this, in the shelter, in the, you know, near the North Pole on this island of Svalbard to essentially provide an insurance policy against any kind of, you know, dangers, cataclysms, you know, we may find.

20:27And I would argue we've got to be thinking in the hundreds of years, if not, you know, thousands of years. And at that scale, great cataclysms are a certainty. They're not a probability anymore. And then at that point, we sort of have to address them, right? Yeah. You know, that's a factor. Then the other factor is through our, I would say, scale of development that we're, you know, undertaking, we are rearranging planet Earth in ways we don't fully know.

21:02What the end consequences are. And the symptoms of planet, climate change, I think, is one of them. Having said that, biodiversity is facing that crossfire. They're increasingly being in danger. Everything from, let's look at, you know, stuff that's perhaps a little bit closer to home as in, you know, the human food system and so on. Honeybees, for example. Bananas. And the threats that they face. That's the one that gets me is there's a lot of concern that we're about to lose bananas entirely.

21:36Right. And so with a very critical organism such as a honeybee facing extinction-like events, facing, you know, rearranging of its ecosystem because of us. From, you know, simple things like pesticide or, you know, the next new product that, you know, we are, you know, sort of dazzled with, that has an outsized impact on these creatures. And so we may come to a point where we may have large scale extinction events, which threaten food supply, threaten entire ecosystems, at which point a safe backup is critically, critically needed to have a chance of rejuvenating.

22:17And to put all these pieces together. Yeah. So Svalbard, this polar bear infested island in the Arctic Sea, was chosen because it was thought that with its permafrost, it would be permanently frozen. And they've actually had issues with flooding in the seed bank in recent years due to climate change. With the lava tubes that you brought up earlier, we have these conditions that keep things permanently at temperatures, as you said, like negative 25C, which suddenly becomes very much a temperature that we like to start to store samples at.

22:58Many samples we get even colder using things like liquid nitrogen and stuff. And there's currently folks on Earth that are preserving not just seeds, which you just need a cool, dry place for, but they're also working to preserve genetic materials from animals that are nearing extinction. We have rhinoceros samples in hopes that we can bring back some of the rhinoceroses that we've lost in recent years. And I just point to rhinos because that's the one that is looked to most often and we have the most sad photographs of.

23:31But it's numerous kinds of animals and there have been massive efforts, for instance, with South American amphibians due to an African fungus that jumped continents through the pet trade. It's things like the parasites, the funguses, the diseases that are jumping continents through international shipping, through international pet trade, that are really starting to create severe risk for a lot of life as we know it. Every time you plant that pretty plant, every time you plant that doesn't happen to be indigenous, you might be doing something to your local animals by taking away their food.

24:09We don't think about this. And you're looking to protect all of this. And as you, I think, pointed to there, the cryogenics is, I would say, the technology advancement, the underpinning of what could make this possible. So storing seeds, it's a little bit easier, minus 25 degrees centigrade, a little bit colder could keep them in indefinite storage from what I understand. But with animal cells, it's a little more complicated. To date, we can only preserve one cell at a time and not any more.

24:41But if we could bring that down to about minus 190 degrees centigrade, what they found out is you could potentially preserve them forever at those temperatures. So that's sort of the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, to be able to store these creatures through their cells. We have the advantage of essentially keeping them in this stasis field till perhaps we come to a future where we can figure out how to bring them back to life again.

25:11But once we lose that DNA, we lose that DNA. It's going to be very hard to bring that back. So I think that's the critical thing. The other part is the cost of essentially maintaining all these creatures, these ecosystems in a more compact form than having to recreate Earth itself. So this is sort of the stopgap measure we also sort of think of. But apart from the arc, for it to be, I would say, fully functional, and this was the second part of what we were envisioning, was the construction of a series of terrariums that would be built between Earth and the Moon.

25:48And these would, in fact, become sort of these floating parks, ecological parks, ecologies, exactly, representing all the major ecologies of Earth in which they would serve as a nursery for all of the frozen habitat that we have from the arc, which would serve as your principal backup. But then from that, you know, you would derive and build up these nurseries to then have an opportunity to then reintroduce these creatures back to Earth in case of a catastrophe, in case of a major loss.

26:28And that's straight out of science fiction. I'm trying to remember if it was Kim Stanley Robinson or Neil Stevenson who wrote the books where they were recreating different ecologies inside spinning asteroids, and there were scientists who actually dedicated their entire career to creating, in some case, hybrid systems where animals from the same kinds of environments were coexisting. So, for instance, we've learned quite by accident that hippos are very happy to live in the wild in Colombia.

27:03Colombia is less happy about this. So, these kinds of terrariums are science fiction in our near future, and as someone who has many different aquariums and dreams of having terrariums, except I hate crickets, this is super exciting to me. What kinds of technologies are on the critical path to being able to get there?

Cryogenics and ecosystem nurseries

27:28You know, the cryogenic freezing is one, and that's been achieved. We've got to extend that cryogenic capability to multiple cells and to be able to do that instantly. So, that's going to be, you know, one of those breakthroughs to achieve. Another is to regrow entire animals from these simple cells without necessarily a placenta, without necessarily an egg, through artificial processes. And so, that's another line of reengineering we have to sort of master to sort of figure out.

28:03That, I would argue, is another. Then, I would say, you know, the whole ability to transplant an ecosystem, and this is one of the interesting works that's, I think, at very early stages being carried out at Biosphere 2 in Arizona, which is, for example, taking a barren island that, you know, started off from the remains of a volcano and turning it into a living ecosystem. At one level, it sounds very simple, but believe it or not, we don't have the technology or the sciences to really pull that off at the best of the time.

28:39And so, something fundamental like that needs to be possible for us to, you know, reinvigorate this backup, to take this backup to, you know, re-enable it. In other words, make it active, especially here on Earth where, you know, you could have any one of these catastrophes that could cause a, you know, quote-unquote, reset. Those are several, and then a lot more, I would argue, go into the sort of the bio world, and there's even a lot of logistics trying to be, that people trying to answer. For example, how do we get hold of all of these species for us to carry on the ark?

29:13We are, I would say, still a little bit in the dock on that. We don't quite know how many species are really out there and have, you know, effective technologies and sensing capabilities to detect and essentially collect them. And so, that's a challenge. So, it's already a sort of a leaky cage in that sense for us to sort of utilize. I would also, you know, throw in there, perhaps there will be unknowns. We'll find perhaps unknown category of plants and animals that we don't have.

29:47And this happens regularly. It's, I mean, and the thing that gets me is the scale of some of the things we're still discovering. Earlier this week, it was announced that a new species of monkey that was fairly big, like monkey, monkey, had been discovered with bright orange or yellow lips, depending on who wrote the article. And so, we're still finding large life forms, not just frogs, not just mice. We're still finding large life forms on land. And we have a much better understanding of land than we do of sea.

30:21And so, the complexity rises. But there are companies out there working on so many different things. We've seen, I think, about a decade ago where they started to be able to incubate sheep fetuses in what looked like plastic bags. It was much more sophisticated than that, but it worked. We are seeing colossal biosciences working to integrate in DNA of extinct animals into new life forms that they're breeding.

30:54The direwolves were not 100% direwolf people, but they did incorporate old DNA into new animals. So, these technologies are not science fiction anymore. They are near future things actively being worked on that could be figured out in our lifetimes. And that's what makes this so exciting is we do live at this super weird turning point in technology where the works of Neil Stevenson and Kim Stanley Robinson are becoming our new reality.

31:29So, you're looking at how robotics can implement these ideas.

Robotics for space emergencies

31:37What are the technologies in robotics and machine learning that you see as being critical to this new future? Yeah. So, we work on robotics that is going to augment people's lives, people's capabilities, particularly in space. Yeah. And we're highly in the position of not developing robotics just to further increase, quote-unquote, manufacturing productivity. Right. Or, you know, sort of that kind of thinking. And so, with the robotics here, you know, one of the things that we've tried to look at with space exploration is the integration of people with robots to make that, you know, as seamlessly as possible.

32:19And so, we've looked at different ways for that, particularly in accounting for an environment where, you know, there's a spectrum of people and characters who are both comfortable with robotics to being totally uncomfortable with robotics. And so, how do you, you know, sort of achieve a middle ground with that? And that's where we have found, you know, the, I would say the most impactful areas would be applying robotics to deal with emergency scenarios.

32:53Yes. Fire in space. And the whole flaming activity in space is, in fact, you know, quite otherworldly for us. It's not quite the same as it's on Earth. But in those circumstances, we as humans become pretty much useless in about five to ten seconds. Because in one of these enclosed, you know, literally tin cans, as they call it, the smoke, you know, the flames. There's no gravity and thermal gradient that causes the smoke to rise so that you can just get near the floor.

33:26It's, it's, you're at the whim of your air circulation system. And so, you're put out a commission. Or, or the astronaut crew, no matter how superhuman they are, are put out a commission. Yeah. To date, you know, we're very lucky to not have seen a large-scale catastrophe of that, of that scale that I'm talking about happen. But, you know, the agencies account for that. You know, they have plans in place for that. But oftentimes, you know, the plan of last resort is to abandon the base so that you can, you know, save the humans here.

34:00And that has to be sort of rethought if you're going to be on the moon. Yes. Because abandoning means a four-day journey back to Earth. And it's by no means, you know, a quick jump away as if you're in Earth orbit. Then it's, you know, maybe eight hours to maybe 10 hours back. So, that's a major factor where we think robotics can play a very crucial and complementary role. Other areas is dealing with other kinds of cascading emergencies. Everything from depressurization dangers to micrometeorite punctures.

34:30Which is a problem the ISS has had. Yes, yes. Another factor we've been also looking at is general management of the base, especially doing the dull, the dirty things. The day-to-day stuff that just has to get done. Yes. And that's going to be a bigger challenge for folks on the moon because of the distance, because of the isolation. You know, there's going to be psychological effects here. And so, these chores are going to likely burn people.

35:02And there's another factor that the Apollo astronauts found, which was lunar regolith, because it's not weathered, is dust that will cut you. So, this is super sharp, super abrasive stuff. And I know one of the things I hate about cleaning is no matter what I do, I end up with dust all over me. In my house, it's plaster dust. It's normal dust that gets generated.

35:34It's pollen. That stuff is soft. You're going to want to have robots that are capable of dealing with super sharp abrasive dust particles that smell like gunpowder just because that kind of unpleasantness can actually lead to health issues. And we're still trying to understand if lunar regolith being inhaled regularly will have the same kinds of problems that asbestos has led to.

36:05So, they're doing everything they can to figure out how to build lunar bases that don't have an exchange of inside and outside where you're basically sliding into your spacesuits and never the twain shall meet. But it's almost impossible to have a completely closed system. So, it's not just the psychological. It's also the this hurts part of the equation. Great points there because that leads up to the technology that we've been looking at in that front is sort of the base management, the base construction, and the base sensing.

36:41Given, you know, this plethora of challenges you've got to face, constantly, you know, it's a constant juggling act. And, you know, if an astronaut is completely focused on, you know, if the regolith can, you know, hurt the base or hurt, you know, the crew, that itself is going to become a full-time job. And so, you need automated systems to essentially take care of that. And that's where advancements in sensor networks has been a key thing. We've been looking at this whole new technology of smart construction and smart bricks or smart sandbags, sort of the spectrum of technologies there.

37:21So, imagine, you know, a home in which every brick has got sensors on it, has got a mini computer on it, can think for itself, can pass on danger messages. And so, if you sort of rethink that way, then, you know, if there's a fire alert or a fire danger, these bricks could immediately sense the first trace of smoke that's coming in from the battery.

37:51And they can triangulate the location. The fire detectors in my house can be like this room. But if you have that many, it can be like this chair is what caught fire. And further, using AI technology here, we can, in fact, try to model how a fire would evolve given what is combustible in a room. Right. And where it is located in a room, in a sense. So, how much time do you have? What's that window? So, all of those factors, all of those probabilities are sort of thrown in.

38:21And the idea here is the base with its smart sensors, the smart construction, and then the robot ecosystem would all help in helping to avoid those emergencies, helping to, you know, deal with logistics about, you know, broken systems, repair, reconditioning, regular maintenance. NASA has seen this whole concept evolve. If you ask them 25 years ago, I would say many of them were on the forefront of saying, oh, we're just going to have a, you know, a totally human-centric base here.

38:56It's going to look like a, you know, sort of a cottage in space kind of thing, you know. And now that has evolved because of all these dangers, including, you know, very much the regulates, you know, the regulates problem, you know, came very close to, you know, injuring the Apollo astronauts. Yeah. Because the suits didn't, I mean, the suits were built with the best materials that we have. I don't know if we've improved so much from that since the 60s. Well, the other side of that that has to be pointed out is the poor Apollo astronauts.

39:26They were dumping all the air in the Apollo capsule, going outside through a door, doing all of their stuff, coming back inside with their completely dust-covered suits, and then repressurizing the capsule, or not capsule, the LLM. LLMs, yes. And so they were bringing dust-covered space suits, and as someone who used to work in an equestrian facility, I know how nasty my overalls got, and I'm sure their space suits were worse.

39:59And so because they brought their space suits inside, they were contaminating their environment, and this is where things like Desert Rats have practiced, well, what if we just, like, attach the back of the space suits, and you slide in, and then you climb out? Which is very weird to look at their moving systems with all of these, it looks like, bodies hanging off the side. But once you get over the optics of it, it's actually a super clever way to prevent what happened to the Apollo astronauts.

40:31A whole lot of innovations are needed, a whole lot of innovations have been made to make regular life tasks safe and credible and repeatable on a lunar surface. And to touch on this, you know, the latest plans are, you know, to set up this space, but it wouldn't be permanent per se, in sort of the traditional sense. It would remain largely unoccupied for long periods of time in which robotics and automated systems will need to tend to this.

41:05And then we'll have, you know, visits by humans for, you know, a few short weeks at a time at the start to really, you know, sort of make it into a complete mission. And I think, you know, that's a very well-devised staged approach. Again, you know, we sort of need to tiptoe our way to sort of, you know, better understand this environment. And thanks to revisions, thanks to lessons learned from Apollo and beyond. And so it will also be a slow and, if not, you know, daunting process.

41:38So I couldn't see, you know, the early stages of exploration will be pretty slow and, you know, perhaps at some areas science rich, but not necessarily romantic adventurers. This is all consistent with how the National Science Foundation initially started and then eventually made permanent the human contingent down at the Antarctic bases. This is consistent with how the Chinese space station was developed, where it had great spans of time that it was unoccupied, and now it's fully occupied.

42:12And it builds on, at one point, Japan, JAXA, was planning to do a fully robotic moon base where it was robots, operating robots to do things. It was an amazing plan. It was never actually put together just because funding and there weren't rockets at the time capable of launching this kind of heavy lift need. But now we're starting to see the technologies come into fruition, in some cases because places like Japan and China have actually been developing robots as caretakers.

42:45We are seeing the technologies come into place because we need them for so many things here on Earth. And that's the point that has to be brought up regularly, is everything we're creating to support humans on the moon will also help support humans in rural places here on Earth that don't have the same infrastructure. We'll support people in elder care as we have this great generational gap between the number of younger people and the number of older people.

43:17In developing the things that will let us live on the moon, we are also making it easier to live on Earth and age on Earth and everything else that human beings unfortunately do, whether we want to or not. It's a bright and terrifying future when you think of all the ways things can go wrong, because you've also read that kind of science fiction. What worries you most now and what gives you hope that it will all be okay?

Solar storms and asteroid defense

43:49Definitely, I see both sides. I mean, there's the hopeful side and then not to sort of discount, you know, the danger side to this. I think on the hopeful side, well, let me maybe start with the danger side first then. I think thanks to, you know, advances in science, thanks to advances in exploration, we've learned more about the dangers that could, you know, come back to hit us. Yeah. I would argue, you know, setting up, you know, this lunar enterprise, so to speak, can further, I would be an insurance policy against this as well, because it could provide us some additional data points to, you know, what would otherwise be, you know, to withstand some of these extreme conditions.

44:40So one of them I will argue is solar storms. Yes. Solar storms is... Terrifying. It's terrifying. You know, we've learned about the Carrington event and its, you know, devastating impact. There was a 2008 study done showing, you know, what could be its impact on mainland United States, particularly its electricity grid. The human reaction was to close the book and just move on. As we do. As we do. Now, thanks to the Tree Ring Lab here in Arizona and a few other researchers, we've learned that even Carrington events may be...

45:19We're small. It's small. Yeah. And there's, you know, another larger, quote-unquote, fish, which is these Miyake events that may happen every thousand years and that are maybe a hundred to a thousand times more extreme than Carrington. But we have no sense of what that is, if our sun can even put that out or if it's some other source. So, you know, quite a lot of intriguing but fundamental questions to ask, but we know the effects on the ground has been real.

45:51And so, how is that going to impact, you know, electricity and, you know, the nerve of our present-day civilization? I think that's a major, major factor. That and in other areas, I think we've progressed, particularly on the asteroid deflection front. And I think this is a, you know, masterful example of where science, the technology, the, I would say, even, you know, government-level organization have all come together to start addressing this problem.

46:27And we're now at a point where I'm not so sure, you know, we can have a, we can claim we have a surefire approach to solving it, but we have something that's definitely in the feasible path that is, you know, with a sizable asteroid, with enough time, we have a whole strategy to deflect it, you know. And I think, you know, that's a very strong positive because, you know, that shows even in these extreme dangers, we can come together to, you know, make something positive happen and, in this case, divert against that danger.

47:03And that's not the only one. You know, the other one I would argue also is the, you know, ozone layer depletion back in the 80s. You know, we don't hear much of that in the news, but that's, in fact, a success story. Yeah. You know, the whole world came together and said, you know, CFCs are the major problem here. Methane, of course, is as well. Yeah. And I've worked to, you know, really cut it down. You know, the ozone layer problem has not been, it's not fully going away, but we're on a positive sort of rejuvenation trend.

47:37And so that's where I still see the hope that when we can come together, when our collective minds can, you know, put ourselves towards addressing these problems, thanks to a combination of science, engineering, policy, and various other talents that come in, we can do great things. But oftentimes, I think we're still a little bit late to the game. Oftentimes, we wait for the danger to happen, turn into a catastrophe, and then we try to re-earn.

48:09Well, and it's funding driven. Let's just, like, name the elephant in the room. Science progresses at the rate of creativity and technology. Creativity, that's based on who is born. We have no influence over that other than making sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to have a career in STEM. But the funding to develop the technology is often not there until there's an emergency.

48:39And this is where I think our recent ability to rapid-fire develop vaccines has been such an amazing point towards if there's an emergency, we can solve these problems. But what if we just provided the funding to have all this stuff sitting on the shelf waiting for the emergency to come? That is the future. I wish we could have, but I know the need to fund other things than science gets in the way of what I dream of and what it sounds like you dream of.

49:16If you could have infinite funding for any one technology, what would you love to see generated? I would say getting ourselves artificial gravity capability with spacecraft in space. And maybe closely associated is addressing the radiation shielding problem in space as well, those two.

49:50So in other words, solving two of the big hurdles of habitability in space, if we can address those two, then I would argue there could be something to be said about us attempting this whole new push, a larger scale push into space into starting off with livability experiments and the sciences, but turning this into practicality, turning this into habitable domains and really the terrariums we were talking about and the space future.

50:31I think we're all imagining and dreaming, I think those would be all near-term goals we could potentially achieve that just needs sort of focused effort. And at the moment, rightfully so, I mean, we face a scattering of challenges all at the same time. It's true. And so without necessarily enough resources to solve them all. Yeah, yeah. And that's why I think creativity is the potential advantage to doing this.

51:10I think you can sort of win back the game by winning a bunch of quote-unquote blockbusters that then sort of completely flip the situation, right? That perhaps changes what we have as an energy scarcity problem into energy abundance problem. Yeah. You know, and so on. So I think the limit there is, again, creativity. And I think rightfully, as you pointed out, there's also the economics of it.

51:41Creativity is, you know, is a daydream till it becomes real, till it has legs once. Yeah. You know, there's a funding pathway, but also, you know, technology and science behind it, of course. It's a brave new world that isn't this world that we're aiming towards. This has been a tremendous hour.

The Artemis generation

52:02As a reminder to everyone, this episode is inspired by the July 20th anniversary of human beings setting foot on the moon for the first time during the Apollo program, which was well before I was born. I'm guessing it was well before you were born as well, but I'm not sure. A little bit before, yes. Yeah. And we are now the Artemis generation. We are returning to the moon again.

52:33China is out there working at the same rate. They're getting ready to land a rover on the South Pole to do in-situ resource utilization studies to figure out, can we use the lunar regolith to generate the kinds of things that we need to survive in space?

52:51It's, I'm not going to say a space race. I'm going to say it is a space innovation era. It is a new industrial revolution where the industry is the new space economy. You are part of this, and I really appreciate you joining us today. Folks, you can learn more by going to spacetrex.arizona.edu. That's TRAX, T-R-E-X, spacetrex.arizona.edu. What is the next big thing that you hope to share with the world?

53:23We're looking towards, you know, some series of experiments to sort of roll out lunar construction capability on sort of one end. And the other things we've been trying to also address, you know, similar to what I've been talking about with artificial centrifuges is certainly trying to advance component technologies in that realm as well. So those have been two of my, you know, personal pet projects, as you could imagine.

53:59And as a group, you know, we do a lot more broader things. And so I've sort of voiced what my, you know, personal pet projects have been in that sense. But, you know, a lot of the others have been more aligned towards, you know, what are problems of the day or what are problems of the next five to ten years and so on. And really the space field doesn't have enough talented researchers at the moment.

54:30It's a very small community, but it's a very inviting community, I would argue, that, of course, you know, needs a lot more people really to achieve that ignition stage. And in some sense, you know, we look to the semiconductor industry and the computer hardware boom that has happened as sort of a, at least in terms of growth as a, you know, potential pathway for success that could be possible.

55:03And so I leave it there. I mean, if there's, you know, potential ideas, there's potential interests, I think there are, you know, lots of opportunities out there in the space and particularly this whole, you know, lunar initiative to see that become real. And so I leave it there. Thank you. Thank you again. It has been my pleasure. The new space economy is coming true. Thank you.

55:33And thank you, everyone out there in the audience who's been here. And for those of you who are watching this on YouTube, you know what to do. Like, subscribe, leave us a comment. And hopefully the algorithm will let you know when we have more science to share. Bye-bye, everyone. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you again.

Credits and patrons

55:55This week, we would like to thank the following patrons. Ambius. Borey Andro Leveswald. Brock Young. Christopher L. Todd. Eric Lee. Gordon Dewis. Hannah Tackeray. James Bedian. Jason. Jill Holstein. Kimberly Rack. Mark Sykes. Mike Ailes. Patrick Young. Richard. Sandra Stans. Semyon Torfesson. Time Lord Iroh. And William Fitcher. Escape Velocity Space News is executive produced and written by Dr. Pamela Gang.

56:38The This Week in Aerospace segment is written and researched by Eric Mattis and Dave Ballard. Audio engineering is provided by Allie Pelfry. Escape Velocity Space News is a production of the Planetary Science Institute, a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to exploring our solar system and beyond. We are here thanks to the generous contributions of people like you. The best way you can support us is through Patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. Patreon benefits include exclusive access to ad-free podcasts, full-length guest interviews, weekly video chats with our production team, and other bonus content.

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57:41The 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. Audio post-production is by me, Richard Drumm. Project management is by Aviva Yamani. And hosting is donated by LibSyn.com. This content is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial 4.0 international license. Please share what you love, but don't sell what's free. This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you.

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