The Moon Page #5

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the origins of life on Earth today

seem to have come

to the conclusion

that the most likely place

for life to have begun

is at a hot vent on the ocean floor

and we could have the same sorts of organisms on

the floor of the ocean of Europa, at a hot vent.

And if you've got bacterial life, you

could have something eating the bacteria.

You could have a whole eco-system

down there.

like sharks grazing on smaller fish eating worms

and the worms eating the bacteria. We don't know.

There could

be all kinds of things there.

But if you want somewhere

warm and cosy

for bacterial life

to get started and to survive,

Europa is probably the best bet we've

got in the entire solar system.

It wasn't just Jupiter's moons

that were attracting attention.

When the Voyager probe

flew past Saturn,

it captured an image

of its largest moon, Titan.

It was strangely fuzzy.

It looked as though Titan

was shrouded in an atmosphere,

just like our own planet.

Scientists were desperate

to know more.

What lay beneath

this thick atmosphere?

Could it have

other similarities to Earth?

They didn't get their chance

to find out

until 20 years later,

when Cassini lifted off.

It was one of the biggest rockets

ever launched,

but even so, it took

seven years to get to Saturn.

And then,

it turned its attention to Titan.

Cassini dropped a probe called

Huygens through the Titan atmosphere

onto the hidden surface.

It revealed a world

that scientists believe

could be strikingly similar

to the early Earth.

Pictures revealed by Huygens

on its parachute descent

towards the surface of Titan

showed, at one point,

a network of valleys.

You could have been floating

over many parts of the Earth.

We've got hills

and valleys in between them

and the valleys converge

and drain into a sea.

So we can see landforms on Titan

that look very familiar to people

who do landform studies on Earth.

The valley networks are very similar to what

you get produced by rainfall on the Earth.

The extraordinary images

of distant moons

revealed them to be places

of great beauty

and tantalising possibilities.

They had volcanoes,

ice-covered oceans,

active geysers

and thick atmospheres.

There was even

the possibility of life.

Moons were the most exciting places

in the solar system.

And so, scientists began to wonder

whether our own long-abandoned moon

was perhaps worth another look.

So, in 1994, a small

unmanned orbiter, Clementine,

was sent back to the moon.

The first spacecraft to make

the journey in more than 20 years.

And this mission

would go somewhere new.

Technology had moved on

since the seventies.

And so, Clementine would be able

to reach an area of the moon

that had never been seen

in detail before -

the lunar poles.

Clementine spent two months

bombarding the moon

with radio waves,

and in doing so, it made a discovery

that scientists had never dreamt of.

They found what appeared to be

patches of ice.

Its radar was getting signals being bounced

back from the surface very strongly,

in a way consistent with there

being patches of ice down there.

And, er... it's not a lot of ice.

It could... could fill plenty

of Olympic-sized swimming pools,

but if you were to melt it and

spread it all over the lunar surface,

it would be a millimetre thick.

You're not gonna produce oceans

on the moon from this ice.

But enough for humans to exploit.

The existence of water on the moon,

even if it was frozen,

changed everything.

The bleak and barren landscape

wasn't so inhospitable after all.

Suddenly,

the possibilities seemed endless.

With life-sustaining water,

the moon could one day

be a base in space,

a stepping stone

to the rest of the universe.

Humans might even live there

one day.

The love affair was back on.

AUDIENCE APPLAUDS

As if to drive home

the renewed fascination,

45 years after President Kennedy's

famous pledge to take us to the moon,

another US President

launched a new mission.

Returning to the moon

is an important step

for our space programme.

Establishing an extended

human presence on the moon

could vastly reduce the cost

of further space exploration,

making possible

ever more ambitious missions.

The moon is a logical step

toward further progress

and achievement.

Human beings

are headed into the cosmos.

AUDIENCE APPLAUDS

It may have lacked some of his

predecessor's rhetorical flourish,

but 35 years after

the last man stepped off the moon,

we are finally going back.

NASA has already started planning

the new lunar mission.

And it's going to be big.

We are planning to go to the moon

in a particularly different way

than what we did with Apollo.

Apollo was short sortie missions.

And we're planning

to go to the moon to stay.

It'll be a permanent presence, where

each mission adds more capability.

And, eventually,

we'll just have people living there.

This time, the aim is to turn

the moon into a home from home.

And when this new lunar base

is established,

the moon will become our launch

padto the rest of the solar system.

The moon is near.

It's three days away. And we

can go and practice and perfect

all the techniques and the tools

and the things that we need to do

to go off and explore

our first foreign planet.

We'll bring tools and we'll bring...

some basic machineries

and then we'll use those machineries,

along with the lunar resources,

to make what I refer to as the

brute force and ignorance materials.

Bricks - one of the first uses of

lunar material will be making bricks.

So you can have someplace to live

without being zapped by cosmic rays.

But there doesn't seem to be quite

the same urgency as in the 1960s.

NASA's plan is to get

back to the moon by 2018.

We have to develop

a new lunar lander,

we have to develop and establish the

infrastructure on the surface of the moon

that will allow us to live there

for long periods of time.

So, as we start

the development process,

if we could develop it

all at one time,

then we could do it quicker, get

to the moon much quicker than 2018.

But given that we have to do this

somewhat serially,

we build infrastructure for travel,

then we have to build

the lunar pieces,

it'll take between now

and about 2018 to get there.

But NASA's public sector plod to the

moon isn't quick enough for some.

Now the moon is back in fashion,

NASA have got competition.

The players in the new space race

are a mixture of dreamers,

hard-headed businessmen,

and publicity seekers.

But they've got one thing

in common - they want action now.

This barren desert

in a remote corner of Utah

is the site of a unique experiment.

For one week, it's standing in

for the surface of the moon,

complete with mock-up moon base.

This is the Moon Society -

a collection of scientists

and space enthusiasts

who are already preparing for a

commercial mission to the moon.

Putting on a spacesuit

is a two-person job.

And, er...

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