(rocket engine roars)
The race is on.
(upbeat music)
To colonize the Moon.
To uncover hidden riches.
And discover if humanity
can really survive on another world.
(meteorite explodes)
(upbeat music)
That's why we're going back.
Not to visit, to stay.
(upbeat music)
The Moon is suddenly the center of attention.
A magnet for mines and money.
China, Russia and the European Union
have each sent probes and orbiters.
In 2013 the Chinese landed a rover,
their goal astronauts living and working
on the Moon by the 2030s.
And they are not alone.
We will return American astronauts to the Moon.
(audience applauds)
The Moon will teach us
how to explore the stars.
The Moon is close, we can go there and develop
the concepts and the technologies.
We can figure out how to live off the land.
We can figure out how we're gonna do that
only three days away then we can go on to Mars
where it's a tougher thing to do.
The Moon is definitely a stepping stone to Mars
and other places but it's a world of its own,
that is also full of resources that we didn't know existed.
The Moon is Earth's eighth continent.
It's like the new world like the Americas were
to the Europeans during the first explorations.
It's an eighth continent and for us to explore.
Like the Americas this new world
has deposits of precious metals.
Gold, titanium, aluminum.
And there's a hidden treasure.
First discovered in soil brought back
by the last astronauts to walk on the Moon.
We leave as we came.
And God willing we shall return
With peace and hope for all mankind.
In 1985 engineers
at the University of Wisconsin studied the soil sample
and found significant amounts of the isotope helium-3.
A rare variant of the helium gas
used to fill balloons on earth.
A lot of people ask what's the treasure on the Moon,
is it helium-3?
Helium-3 is very special because it's a potential fuel
for fusion technology.
Helium-3 is rare on earth
because it's created by the solar wind
which is largely blocked by our atmosphere.
It can fetch several million dollars per pound.
One of the most expensive substances known to man.
But the Moon without an atmosphere
could contain a million tons of helium-3,
enough to power the earth for 10,000 years.
An unlimited source of power.
And unlimited power for whoever masters it.
So returning to the Moon isn't about planting a flag
and leaving a boot print, this is colonization.
And that's a two decade process.
Step one develop powerful rockets
that can make regular round trips.
Rockets that cost a small fraction
of current launch systems.
This allows for step two,
send a swarm of remote-controlled robots
to prospect for water and build primitive habitats.
Habitats that can withstand meteors and cosmic radiation
and temperatures that lurch from above boiling
to twice as cold as Antarctica.
Step three shuttle humans
for increasingly longer stays on the Moon
while avoiding suit piercing space dust
and enduring one-sixth gravity
that leeches away muscle and bone mass.
Step four the lunar outpost becomes a colony.
It ships valuable raw material back home
and makes earthbound investors rich.
If nothing goes wrong along the way.
This is a tough place to get to it's a tough place to stay
and yet that's our goal.
There's a tremendous amount of wealth
that we can create there.
And there's a tremendous amount of resources
that we can bring back.
Returning people to the Moon
depends first on overcoming one of the four
fundamental forces in the universe, gravity.
To get anything out of Earth's gravity well
and past low Earth orbit,
you need to push that object to escape velocity.
25,000 miles an hour.
To build a colony on the Moon,
you have to get tons of material up to that speed.
(ecstatic music)
The only way to get that much mass
out of Earth's gravity well is with a very big rocket.
(ecstatic music)
The Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon,
weighed more than 3000 tones fully loaded.
85% of that total mass was fuel.
Almost 950,000 gallons of it.
Filling three sections or stages
that sat below the crew capsule.
(rocket engine roars)
It took 12 and a half minutes to get into space.
And after two minutes or so it burned all the fuel
on the first stage, so you get rid of that.
Then you burn the second stage you get rid of that.
You burn the third stage, you get rid of that
So on the way the Moon now you've got a command module,
a service module and the lunar module.
Today NASA is spending billions
building a new super heavy lift rocket,
the Space Launch System.
And in early 2018 Russian President Vladimir Putin
signed off on plans for a giant rocket
to be built and tested by 2028.
Super and giant rockets all destined to be used once.
It's like you build a 747 for a billion dollars,
you fly to Hawaii and you throw it away.
Then you build another 747 fly it back
and then you throw it away.
That is not sustainable, it's too expensive.
(plane engine roars)
Aerospace scientist, astronaut trainer
and ultra-marathoner Eric Seedhouse.
has written a dozen books about commercial space flight.
Columbia, Columbia, this is Houston, over.
He knows just how expensive
a Moon mission can be.
You will see a metal the other side in orbit.
Oh roger, sending 62255.
Today we spend $10,000 to get one pound
into low-earth orbit.
You can probably multiply that by five
to get it to the surface of the Moon at least.
(rocket engine roars)
And as the saying goes,
no bucks, no buck rogers.
So the challenge is getting to the Moon without going broke.
What if instead of letting the first stages
of a Moon rocket drop into the sea
you could bring them safely back to earth.
And use them to launch again and again.
It's a problem that billionaires space entrepreneurs
like Elon Musk are pouring billions of dollars into solving.
The launch business is a very competitive business
and they want to reduce costs to compete.
To reduce those cost you need to land those first stages.
(rocket explodes)
You try it, you build it and try it.
Something goes wrong you build it and fix it
and try it again.
(rocket explodes)
Elon blew up three rockets
before he got the fourth one right.
Each time SpaceX safely returns
a reusable rocket to earth.
Each time they prove their technology
using a larger more powerful rocket
humanity's return to the Moon edges closer.
Companies including Elon
they're gonna bring the price down.
Once we get the price down,
there's going to be an explosion of stuff
and people wanting to go to the Moon.
Two minus ten, nine...
Strapped in atop a reusable rocket
the first Moon colonists prepare to launch.
(rocket engine roars)
We've a lift off.
The first crew to begin colonizing the Moon,
won't be landing in an empty area.
The robots will be waiting for them.
It doesn't begin with humans.
It begins with robots, it begins with rovers.
In the years leading up
to the first human arrivals,
a fleet of reusable rockets has already ferried
dozens of robots built on earth
to their new workstations on the Moon.
Bob Richards wants his robots to get there first.
To kick-start a mining operation
that will support a lunar colony.
His space mining company Moon Express
is headquartered in the shadow of the launch towers
that sent men to the Moon decades ago.
To think back to the inspiration
that brought me here to Cape Canaveral,
I would have to go back to my childhood.
My earliest memories as a little boy
walking around the rocket garden
at the Kennedy Space Center.
I was a child of Apollo.
Believing that the future was limitless.
So I really believe that my DNA was set
of exploration and what an honor it is
to be here in this hallowed ground
where the first exploration of the Moon
in the solar system began.
Richard's ambitious plan
begins with the launch of an autonomous lunar lander.
We're looking at the MX-1 robotic Explorer.
It's a robotic spacecraft
that launches from Earth on a commercial rocket.
And once released in the earth orbit
can light up its main engines and fly to the Moon.
Richards and others are eyeing
the Moon's South Pole as a good place
for humanity to put down roots.
There are soaring mountains and valleys
that would make the Grand Canyon look like a tributary.
It's hard to land there but on the tops
of some of these mountains and some of the rims
of some of the great craters that are there,
are very unique pieces you really see out of the Moon
We call them peaks of eternal light.
The earth tilts 23 and a half degrees
on its axis, that's what gives us our seasons.
And six-month periods of light and dark at our poles.
The Moon is tilted only one and a half degrees.
Areas near the equator get alternating
two-week periods of light and dark.
But the polar Peaks are bathed in sunlight
more than 90 percent of the year.
And dark times are never more than five days long.
A great place for robots that run on solar power.
So what it gives you is continuous energy
from the sunshine.
And our goal is to set up our first lunar outpost
a robotic outpost, with a Robotic Explorer,
land on one of these peaks of eternal light.
And start prospecting for the elements that are there.
The MX-1 has thrusters
so it can hop from place to place on the lunar surface,
where the gravity is only one-sixth as strong as Earth's.
And it's designed to collect samples,
then fly them back to earth for further analysis.
Like any new frontier it's not gonna be easy
at the beginning.
And the robots hopefully won't complain too much.
The first robot prospectors
won't be looking for helium-3.
Instead they're on the hunt for something more familiar,
but potentially just as valuable, water.
In the time period of Apollo
we thought don't have any water.
(garbled audio)
We were wrong, boy were we wrong.
(ebullient music)
It turns out that hydrogen from the solar wind
bonds with oxygen atoms locked in the lunar rocks
to create H2O.
Maybe several billion tons of it.
It's a billion with the B.
The water becomes the gold of space.
Instead of the gold rush days to Alaska is after the water.
If Richards can extract water from the Moon,
it will save the enormous expense
of hauling it from earth.
Not just for use as drinking water,
but as a lucrative source for rocket fuel.
Separate the water into its elemental pieces,
hydrogen and oxygen.
Cool the hydrogen to just below
negative 423 degrees and it becomes a liquid,
liquid hydrogen.
That becomes rocket propellant.
Is the most powerful rocket propellant we know today.
(rocket engine roars)
That's where the real money is.
Lunar refueling stations,
where customers like SpaceX and NASA
will pay top dollar for the liquid hydrogen they need
to get back to earth or elsewhere in the solar system.
Water is like the oil of the solar system.
And we're after our first gusher.
The next wave of millionaires and billionaires
just like we had the oil billionaires
of the past will be the water billionaires of space.
(gentle music)
And this is how it all begins.
A crew of four completing a journey
not taken since the 1970s.
(rocket engine roars)
They're here to make the Moon into humanity's
first permanent home on another world.
And from the first small step
survival is a constant challenge.
Imagine talcum powder made of broken glass.
That's the lunar soil known as regolith
and it eats space suits for lunch.
On Apollo 17 the seals on the pressure suits
were badly affected by the regolith, by the dust.
They brought lunar dust into the lunar module.
You get those small particles of silica
deep in the respiratory tract
and it causes a lot of irritation.
The regolith isn't just hard and sharp,
it's also radioactive.
Cosmic rays bombard the Moon every second.
Looming over every colonist is the prospect
of early death from radiation related diseases.
It's a very harsh radiation environment
and spacesuits do not protect against radiation.
Astronauts walking around the Moon all the time
in spacesuits, that's not gonna happen
That's why when the first human colonists
arrived on the Moon, a shelter is already waiting for them.
These astronauts are opening the door
on a new era in human history.
(buttons beeping)
This is humanity's first home on another world.
In 2015 the European Space Agency
unveiled a visionary concept for a lunar village
inhabited by astronauts and robots
from countries around the world.
To prepare the colony robots could be sent
to construct habitats years in advance
of the first human arrivals.
We can't take all the building
materials from Planet Earth, concrete is kind of heavy.
Rather than that we want to use the material
that's already there, the soil the dust materials.
And 3D print that into building blocks,
bricks on the Moon.
The robot assembled habitat
will support the colonists at first.
But soon a delivery arrives,
the colony is about to expand.
Inflatable fabric shelled habitats
are a logical solution to quickly adding more workspaces
and living quarters to a Moon base.
But can any fabric stand up to the stresses of space?
This man may have the answer. Wow!
Maxim De Jong designs fabrics for space.
Sometimes he tests them himself.
De Jong's fabrics not only keep him up in the air
they are the key component of his prototypes
for inflatable lunar habitats.
With an inflatable habitat we can package it
in the nose of a rocket, we can make it small.
On orbit it deploys and we can make it huge.
You pump air in it and it blows up like an air mattress.
But this is more than a guest bed.
De Jong's prototypes are made of Kevlar
and other high stress, high impact materials.
When fully inflated like a pneumatic tire
the outside feels as tight and tough as a concrete wall.
NASA designed inflatable space habitats decades ago,
but the projects were abandoned along with the Moon.
In the early 2000s hotel magnate Robert Bigelow
bought the patents and developed them further.
De Jong's company Thin Red Line
helped design the first functioning
inflatable habitats for Bigelow.
A fabric structure like this Bigelow module
on the International Space Station
can weigh half as much as a metal habitat.
So it takes less fuel and money to launch it into space.
And it can be compressed to half its width.
That frees up payload space and also saves money.
At Thin Red Line's headquarters in British Columbia,
De Jong is working to perfect his habitats
for deployment on the Moon.
When it comes to the extended stay six months or longer
on the lunar surface it can't leak.
This unit for example is using
full fidelity life support grade gas barrier.
Only one thin layer of five thousandth of an inch,
and yet this has been inflated at roughly
the same pressure for eight years.
To make sure they'll be safe
for deployment in space,
De Jong pushes his test habitats to the limit.
(explodes)
But can future colonists really trust these habitats
to protect them from every danger on the Moon.
Out there in space we have micrometeorite showers
and they come at you at speeds tens to hundreds times
the speed of our high-power rifle.
Everybody thinks balloon is going to pop.
(dramatic music)
In reality the shell of the habitat
acts like a bulletproof vest,
distributing the energy of the impact
through multiple layers of high strength material.
A micro-meteoroid hits it so hard
that it basically almost vaporizes.
De Jong is confident that in the near future
his designs can be safely deployed on the Moon.
All right.
Although on the Moon safety is never guaranteed.
Sometimes the surface is rocked
by earthquakes like tremors called moonquakes.
No one knows how they're caused or when they'll strike.
But these quakes can reach 5.5 on the Richter scale.
And can go on for ten minutes or more.
And there's a danger that's even more destructive.
See those craters they're not all billions of years old.
(dramatic music)
Just in the last few years several meteors
have hit the Moon so hard, the impact was seen on earth.
A 90-pound rock can slam into the Moon
with the force of five tons of TNT.
(dramatic music)
(meteorite explodes)
(alarms beeping)
To ensure long-term survival,
at least some of the colony will need
to be located underground.
Orbiting space probes have found
more than 200 tunnels under the lunar surface,
with natural entrances called skylights.
They are lava tubes from long dead volcanoes,
similar to ones found on earth.
We have lava tubes in Hawaii all over the place.
They run 20 or 30 miles.
Some of the ones that are here 15 feet in diameter.
Thanks to the Moon's one-sixth gravity
some lunar lava tubes can be even bigger.
A Japanese orbiter recently discovered a skylight
leading to a lava tube big enough
to hold the city of Philadelphia.
There are also lava tubes on Mars,
so if we can learn to live in them on the Moon
it will pave the way for future colonization
of the Red Planet.
But before you can build a habitat in a lava tube
you have to fully explore and map it.
And the futuristic technology to do that
is being developed in a surprising place.
America's former industrial heartland,
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
By a company headquartered in what was once
a steel stamping facility, Astrobotic.
Unlike the older generation of space racers,
CEO John Thornton wasn't inspired by men but by machines.
I still remember the Mars Pathfinder landing
on the surface of Mars and I was just awestruck.
I remember in the fifth grade my teacher
assigned the project to build something related
to the news and I chose the Mars rover
and I built a little Lego model of that.
Thornton is overseeing
several next-generation lunar probes.
Including a drone that can fly by itself through a skylight.
Explore a lava tube and report back
on whether it's suitable for human habitation.
Flying a drone in and out of a cave
is very, very challenging
because of the high-speed nature that's involved
and the amount of computing that's required
in the sensing that's required.
They're testing the guidance system
on a custom-built propeller-driven drone.
But the final version won't be able to use propellers.
There's no atmosphere on the Moon
so propellers won't work.
So that propulsive means on the surface
of the Moon will potentially be a cold gas propulsion system
or some other chemical means to get in and out.
Drones will need to guide themselves.
But how can they do that in total darkness?
That's the other major problem Astrobotic is tackling.
My group is working on a very small propulsive vehicle.
Sometimes we call it Batbot
because basically you're giving the machine
the capabilities to navigate in the dark.
So our concept involves a Lunar Lander.
This Lander would land close to the edge of the skylight.
And once it landed it would deploy a smaller spacecraft
that would be capable of exploring this lava tube.
Once you're inside your GPS denied,
you won't know what it looks like before you get there
and it's also gonna be extremely dark.
That means Batbot will need sensors
connected to AI to register the tubes twists and turns.
Make sure it doesn't run into walls.
Detect areas that could possibly drill for resources
or find resources inside a lava tube.
We send the data back to earth
and we could start to plan how to build
a colony inside this lava tube.
But even this won't protect colonists
from the Moon's most insidious danger.
The way it's one sixth gravity eats away at the human body.
Leeching away bone and muscle mass.
Lunar colonists exercise at least 2 hours a day
or they'll become too weak to work.
And living underground taxes the minds of the colonists.
Who have flown a quarter of a million miles
to find themselves cooped up inside a cave.
I think we should build two Moon bases,
one in the north and one on the south.
How we'll live on the Moon in the long term,
not just survive from hour to hour
is a key problem being tackled
at the International Moon based summit in Hawaii.
What we all believe in is that the giant leap
the foundations are being laid right here.
It's a gathering organized by Dutch visionary
and entrepreneur Hank Rogers.
The man who brought the video game Tetris
from Russia to the world.
Now he wants to bring humans back to the Moon.
I believe that to survive in space,
to survive on other planetary bodies like the Moon and Mars
we have to create the most amazing spaces
that people have ever been in to make it attractive.
There's gotta be a kitchen.
Of course, yes.
It can't just be like a replicator or whatever.
Something that spits up, meal is ready for eating.
You're absolutely right, that the human being
first needs too feel comfortable.
My plan for that is to have windows
in the underground structure that look out
into fake scenes of Earth.
Just like in a flight simulator.
So I would put cameras on earth
and record a week's worth of someplace.
And then play that in all of the windows
of the Moon base.
With a safe and sizable habitat
established underground, the base grows.
(gentle music)
The initial group of four astronauts
is now a settlement of 40,
each working on the Moon for a year
before rotating back to earth.
(gentle music)
The Moonbase enters its second decade,
the human colonists spend most of their time underground,
while robots work 24/7 above-ground.
With billions to be made,
control of these robot miners
is the key to the Moon's treasure.
At the headquarters of the European Space Agency
in the Netherlands, engineers are developing ways
for astronauts to prospect
the lunar surface by remote control.
(upbeat music)
They've experimented with advanced joysticks,
but more complex maneuvers require
a closer melding of man and machine.
This is the Sensory Arm Master or SAM,
an exoskeleton with sensors
at each of its seven joints.
They transmit precise movements to a robot arm.
It's designed in the smart way, alright.
And there's also more direct correlation
between your shoulder, your elbow, the hand.
And the shoulder, elbow and hand of the robot, right?
Yes, and I can also receive the force feedback
from the robot set on all the joints.
Force feedback sensors on the arm
give the robot a sense of touch
that the controller can feel.
There's also safety attached to it
like if I have a stuck rock here.
It's stuck like that I don't know how big it is, right?
I pull on it and nothing happens,
perhaps I want to stop pulling on it
before this thing snaps, right?
Exactly so you actually gets a sense of touch
and this is the power of the human in the loop.
With this technology lunar astronauts
are firmly in control and out of harm's way.
You're gonna be living in the bunker
operating the robots by remote control.
You won't be doing long excursions
on the surface of the Moon.
For those hoping to strike it rich
on the Moons helium-3,
the highest soil concentrations
are only 50 parts per billion.
We might have to excavate more than 200 square miles
of the Moon to get enough to power
all of the United States for a year.
That's one reason China is interested in
exploring the far side of the Moon.
It's exposed to more solar wind
which might have created higher concentrations of helium-3.
China estimates the Moon may have enough helium-3
to take over the world's entire electrical grid
for the next hundred centuries.
You have to process a lot of regolith
to get a little bit of helium-3
but it's potentially a game-changer.
For the colonists it will be a non-stop
struggle to keep the mining robots operational.
On the Moon the dust is electrostatically charged
which means it's more likely to stick to our robots
and our cameras and our solar panels
as we operate on the surface.
Humans can wipe dust off with their hands
but typically robots aren't designed to do that.
So we are worried about the dusts accumulate
on the surface over robots over time
and reducing our ability to operate.
The contrast between day and night
doesn't make things any easier on the robots.
At night the temperatures are liquid nitrogen cold,
during the day they're as hot as a low temperature oven.
And electronics batteries and even mobility components
like drivetrain components are a challenge to survive that.
If replacement parts can't be assembled
or 3D printed on the Moon they'll need to be delivered.
The colony's survival depends on a reliable
delivery system between the Earth and Moon.
On earth delivering a spare part
or any other package is routine,
thanks to reliable vehicles guided by GPS.
That kind of infrastructure doesn't exist on the Moon.
But that's what the team at Astrobotic is building.
(gentle music)
This is Pelegrine our lander
This is the delivery vehicle that will carry payloads
up to the surface of the Moon.
So payloads attach above and below
these this deck right here.
So some Rovers will attach underneath
and drop down to the surface.
Some payloads will stay attached on top of the vehicle.
We have 12 small attitude control thrusters
scattered all over the vehicle high and low.
These are used to orient the spacecraft in space.
So we use that to make sure that the spacecraft
is pointed in the correct direction.
We have five 100-pound force engines
that provide the thrust to slow the vehicle down
as it approaches the surface of the Moon.
For lunar deliveries to become routine,
Thornton needs his fleet of delivery vehicles
to land autonomously.
On earth you can use GPS to automatically
position a spacecraft for a precise landing.
But on the Moon there are no GPS satellites.
So are autonomous landings even possible?
Thornton is about to find out.
This is the first full test of Astrobotic's
landing guidance system.
It uses cameras to scan the surface
and match the features it sees
to onboard maps stored in its memory.
What that allows us to do is our spacecraft
can navigate down to the surface of the Moon
and know where it is at all times.
Once it locates the intended landing area,
it's designed to automatically
reorient itself to avoid hazards.
Like the rocks strewn across this desert landscape.
As we're descending down to the surface of the Moon
that same technology can be used to look for rocks
and obstacles and slopes
that might interfere with a safe landing.
If this test succeeds it will be the first time
a free-flying rocket-propelled vehicle
has landed autonomously without the aid of GPS.
Our sensors were looking out over the field
as we were descending and looking for obstacles.
The spacecraft saw some rocks that we had
placed in the area.
(ebullient music)
And it landed successfully.
And that was the very first time that that occurred live
on board of a propulsive free flyer here on earth.
That means that we can do landings
on the surface of the Moon to very precise spots.
(rocket engine roars)
While some delivery vehicles
will be launched directly to the Moon,
others will bring their cargo to a point in space
about 38,000 miles beyond the far side of the Moon.
This is a Lagrange point,
named for an 18th century French mathematician.
It's one of a handful of areas
between the Sun, Earth and Moon
where gravity is basically balanced.
It's a gravity neutral point.
So if you can go there you don't need a lot of fuel
to stay there and you stay at the same point over the Moon
instead of going round and round.
The Lagrange point becomes a wait station in space.
A place to store fuel and supplies.
And for cargo deliveries a port of entry,
where it takes only a small amount of thrust
to get down to the lunar surface.
The delivery of the much-needed replacement part
means a rare opportunity to step outside.
Every once in a while we'll send the astronauts
out to do a repair mission.
(gentle music)
The repair mission has to be fast.
Radiation exposure needs to be kept to a minimum.
(dramatic music)
And there are less predictable dangers.
A moonquake, 5.5 on the Richter scale
and there's nowhere to run.
A hundred years ago in the heroic era
of Antarctic exploration when people died,
it was just an accepted part of exploration.
Accept the fact that people will die
and that's the price you pay.
In space death is the cost of doing business.
And as long as money can be made,
the colonizing will continue.
Mistakes will be learned from, technology will advance.
Stronger habitats and spacesuits will be built.
Risks will never be eliminated but they'll be reduced.
If the Moon is the 8th continent
then it'll be developed like one.
With an eye on the bottom line and the expectation
that today's 330 billion dollar space industry
is only the beginning.
What we wanna do at Moon Express
is move the economic sphere of Earth outward
from Earth orbit to the Moon,
and that will transform our society
and benefit everybody here on earth.
By the end of a century
what started as a primitive Moon base
has grown into a colony where dozens of people live
for more than a year at a time.
And the first colony has been joined by others,
a European village, a Russian base,
a Chinese mining operation.
Each colony mines helium-3 and ships it to earth
providing energy to millions and a fortune to investors.
And each mixes Moon made propellant
and flies it to depots parked at a Lagrange point
to refuel rockets headed for Mars.
The Moon is now a stepping stone to other planets.
The Moon is the place we're gonna go
to extract resources and turn that
into useable things for us.
To refuel our spacecraft and go deeper into space.
So the Moon is our gateway to our solar system.
It's the stepping stone.
We have to become a multiplanetary species
for safety reasons for lots and lots of reasons.
If humankind wants to expand,
we've got to get off this planet.
It's this epic right now where all future generations
of humanity we'll look back and say this was the time
that we moved out to space permanently.
(gentle music)