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The Moon has no atmosphere - or virtually
none. Yet much of the material to be found on its surface is made of
oxides, compounds of oxygen with iron, aluminium, titanium and silicon.
Lunar explorers in science fiction stories routinely extract oxygen from
these compounds, but no one, as far as I know, has yet done it in real
life.
Now Nasa, in collaboration with the
state-owned Florida Space Research Institute, is offering a prize of
$250,000 (surely a pitifully small reward) to the first team than can
extract five kilograms of oxygen from simulated lunar soil by June 2008.
And at long last, Nasa has decided to
carry out experiments in artificial gravity. That is to say spinning a
manned spacecraft, or part of it, to produce centrifugal force that
would give Mars-bound astronauts some form of gravity so that they don't
arrive on the Red Planet as basket cases after months of weightlessness.
Nasa's plan to build Crew Exploration
Vehicles that will replace the space shuttles is not having a good
press. According to space historian Robert Zimmerman, quoted in the Wall
Street Journal on May 25, 2005, winning contractors will have to
submit 129 reports and ``tangle with a snarl of red tape.''
The journal added: "Minority hiring,
small business support and outreach in public education have nothing to
do with cutting edge research, but they found their way into the
application process. Winners will also be expected to maintain a company
programme for drug and alcohol abuse."' The result, Mr Zimmerman
says, is to "discourage some of the more innovative and smaller new
aerospace companies."'
Meanwhile in the private sector there is
a very different atmosphere. Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief
executive of the X-Prize Foundation that last year awarded Bert Rutan's
company a $10 million prize for being the first to fly a manned craft,
SpaceShip One, to a sub-orbital 300,000 feet, said in a recent speech
that within three years of a private manned spacecraft achieving orbital
flight, "you'll have teams of people stockpiling fuel in orbit and
making a beeline for the Moon."'
Whether or not this happens as quickly as
he predicts, it is completely logical. In the long term, space is no
place for governments. Nasa is very good at science - perhaps the only
thing it does really well - but when it comes to exploitation, tourism,
mining and making profits, these are tasks for the private sector.
And as for offering rewards, as we have
seen in the above examples, the latter is 40 times more generous than
the former.
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