Holding the Moon: The High Ground of Space

August 19, 2018 – In 1958, a Strangelovian American military commander stated in a speech, “He who controls the Moon, controls the Earth.” Now sixty years later a U.S. President is executing on that strategy with the formation of a military Space Force with its likely targeted high ground, the Earth’s Moon.

The last time Americans visited the Moon was 1972. At the time they came “in peace for all mankind.” They explored, took pictures, picked and packed some rocks, left scientific instruments on the surface, and then left. For a long time, the attitude of the United States about the Moon was “been there, done that.” But now President Trump has his latest hot notion to create an American Space Force. Suddenly the Moon has become a strategic military and natural resource asset that must be protected by the United States. What doesn’t matter is that the creation of the Space Force would be a contravention of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to which the United States is a signatory.

The American Space program, it seems, is returning to its roots which began as a military exercise in response to the launching of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union in 1957. The first American attempts to put satellites into space came on military rockets. America saw Sputnik in military terms. The Soviets would hold the high ground of space and would spy on everything the United States was doing. Eventually, Americans saw the Soviets as weaponizing satellites to fire missiles on American cities and military installations. That threat remained on the mind of the American military throughout the 1960s.

The beginning of the thaw came when the United States civilian space program under NASA beat the Soviets to the Moon in a series of lunar landings with astronauts aboard. The Soviets waved the white flag in the Space Race. Soon to follow was a thawing of the Cold War first in space and then on the ground. In both nations, Soviet and American space programs became more civilian in nature. That cooperation continued leading to today’s International Space Station.

Military activity in space hasn’t gone away. Spy satellites have been launched by both countries over the years to check each other out. But no weapons have ever made it into space, the notable exception, a Soviet rifle which was brought along by cosmonauts just in case when they landed on Earth and opened their Soyuz capsule, they weren’t going to be staring at a hungry bear. Today, outer space is dominated more by satellites studying land use, Earth resources, and weather, and delivering telecommunications services to billions on the planet below, than by payloads sent aloft to spy.

The Moon through all this post-Apollo time has remained sacred, unspoiled ground, equivalent to Antarctica here on Earth. Antarctica, if you are not aware, is collectively shared by all the nations of the world. Its resources are not to be exploited. The few humans living there carry on scientific research. The 1967 outer space treaty used Antarctica as its model. If the Moon was to receive human explorers it would be for scientific purposes. No country could make a land claim. No country could mine there.

But it seems that is changing. Why?

Because satellites sent to orbit the Moon have discovered valuable resources for use by humans here on Earth. The most important is Helium-3 which can only be produced in nuclear fission reactors down here on Earth. But on the Moon Helium-3 can be scraped off the surface and shipped back to Earth. There is enough Helium-3 for the next great energy revolution to happen, the dawning of the nuclear fusion age providing unlimited power for at least 500 years. In addition, the Moon has revealed that it has water stored as ice at the lunar poles where it lies in the shadowy bottoms of craters. And there is a lot of it. So suddenly the Moon is no longer a scientific curiosity, but rather a resource to be exploited by the first nation to plant its flag. The purpose of the Apollo missions with flag raising ceremonies at each landing looks pretty suspicious in that light.

But there’s more. Something else was discovered by satellites orbiting the Moon. When they look back at Earth they have a bird’s-eye view of everything in low-Earth and geocentric orbit, as well as human activity on the surface of the planet and in the oceans. Talk about the high ground of space, the Moon now looks like the ultimate military outpost. With a satellite in lunar orbit or at a fixed point of cislunar space, it becomes possible to keep an eye on everything going on below.

With a Space Force deployed on the Moon or in its environs, it would mean world dominance. And that doesn’t even count exploiting the resource potential of the surface. Helium 3 would accelerate development of nuclear fusion on Earth. It would become an important resource in the development of next-generation nuclear propulsion systems allowing humans to get to Mars and beyond far faster than the chemical rocket propulsion systems in use today. And the use of the Moon’s water resources would ensure the sustainability of human presence on the surface.

In light of the above, it becomes awfully tempting for Americans to buy into President Trump’s Space Force. One can only hope that the other spacefaring nations of our planet aren’t equally inclined to proceed the same way. An arms race in space would have unintended consequences.

Here on Earth, the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States led to MAD, a condition of agreed to mutual assured destruction should these weapons be used. Thus the world has avoided the Doomsday scenario of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being repeated on a global scale.

But in the name of defending space resources, what would stop space force adversaries from deploying and using nuclear weapons on or near the Moon? Without the equivalent danger of MAD in the vacuum of space what is there to stop a wrong-headed general or president from using a nuclear weapon to protect assets there? The consequence of such an action could then trigger the unintended scenario of MAD back here on Earth?