A Red Moon?

ENTHUSIASTS FOR space travel tend to be unfamiliar with the Military Mind. Indeed it comes as a shock to realise that a soldier will habitually think in quite a different way about space to a scientist, an industrialist or a would-be tourist. China's success in putting a man in orbit has activated the lunar military thinking. Paranoid fears seem to have replaced feelings of excitement and adventure. An American-Chinese ``race '' to acquire the Moon for military goals appears to have begun. Consider this recent newspaper report: ``Some experts in the United States speak ominously of a `red Moon' - the possibility that China may one day launch military astronauts into space with the aim of setting up a Communist lunar base.'' And Chinese military opinion is just as trenchant. Luan Enjie, director of the National Aerospace Administration which is part of the People's Liberation Army, calls the Moon ``the focal point wherein future aerospace powers contend for strategic purposes.''

A red moon?

I get the impression that these military bureaucrats know far less about the Moon than readers of this magazine, that they have never looked at it through a telescope, and have perhaps merely glanced at it with the naked eye and concluded that it is just a small rock. They seem unaware that the Moon is a very large place, and that a ``Communist lunar base'', or even a dozen such bases, however well armed, could never prevent other people from landing there and doing whatever they wished. Its surface area of 14 million square miles makes it slightly larger than Africa, or more than three times larger than Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic, or only fractionally smaller than the Americas from the southern tip of Chile to the Arctic Circle. For the Chinese or anyone else to occupy it and repel all boarders would take hundreds of thousands soldier-astronauts with weaponry and mobility of extraordinary sophistication and prohibitive cost. But does this matter? Maybe we should welcome this trend. For decades after the glorious Apollo programme ended we have bemoaned the refusal of governments to return to the Moon. If now, at last, they have decided to do so, it would be churlish to complain that their reasons are absurdly militaristic and unpractical. Let governments go to the Moon with their weapon systems. They will soon discover that this new world, being so huge and so far from Earth, is totally unsuited for war or threats of war. Their weapons will be abandoned for want of use, and the Moon will be open for civilian exploitation. Occupation of the Moon, learning to live on another world, will bring tremendous advantages to mankind. And it will be an essential step towards going on to Mars. Colonising the solar system is a matter of learning from experience, and in this we are hugely fortunate in having such a large natural satellite. As the late Krafft Ehricke put it: ``If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, He would have given man a moon.'' And if the only way we can get there is to follow the footsteps of peak-capped military types, well, that's the way life is.