Original subtitles

After decades of study,

it's become clear that the moon

offers a wealth of valuable resources

from water that can be converted to rocket fuel

to precious metals, rare earth elements,

and more exotic materials such as helium-3,

which could be a major ingredient

in the fusion power of the future.

They all add up to the creation of a new

and lucrative industrial revolution,

a revolution that some say will eventually and inevitably

lead to the colonization of our nearest neighbor.

(dramatic music)

But that journey of discovery and development

is expected to be a long one,

measured in many decades rather than a few years

and in the moon business,

every step of the way will follow a detailed plan

known as the lunar exploration roadmap.

From its inception, the roadmap was designed

to be incremental, cumulative, and affordable.

So what we decided was the way to do this is to

take advantage of one of the biggest attributes of the moon

and that is that the moon is close.

It's only a quarter of a million miles away,

400,000 kilometers.

Round trip radio time is three seconds.

So if I execute a command for a machine on the moon,

I'll see the reaction to that

three seconds after I give the command.

That's almost near real time.

So our big idea is to send a swarm of different robots

all with different functions to the poles of the moon

and let them begin the task of preparing the moon

for habitation and to start mining the water ice.

So the first missions go and prospect the moon.

I want to know where the highest grade water deposits are,

I want to know where the near permanent

sunlight regions are.

Those are the zones where I'm going to set up my equipment,

those are the zones where I'm going to put down my outpost.

Each robot will be operated by an operator on the other.

They'll be teleoperated, they won't be autonomous.

These operators will steer the machines,

they'll lead them into the areas where they're gonna work

and they will supervise the work through remote control.

So over time, we build up more and more

of these robotic assets.

In our architecture, we plan to send two missions per year.

So we're landing two robotic assets at the poles every year.

By the time we get to year eight,

we have largely have a completely up and running system

that's harvesting water probably at a rate

of about 100 metric tons per year.

It's not very much, but that's enough to make the fuel

that would allow you to go to and from

the lunar surface with a lander.

Every year we're adding assets,

every year we're increasing the amount of water we produce.

At one point, we send the habitat,

the robots assemble that, they install it,

they put the pieces together, they run power to it

and then finally ready to receive people

and I think our first arrival of people

comes about nine years after the robots have started work.

They will initially stay for only a few days

just to make sure everything's running

and plant the flag and pet the robots on the back,

tell them to keep up the good work

and then but eventually our goal

is to have rotating crews of four

that come twice a year and stay for 90 days each.

Dr. Spudis calculates that

the break-even point for his plan comes at year 16

when his plant is generating over 150 tons of water,

which in turn is being converted to liquid hydrogen

and liquid oxygen for rocket fuel.

But many international moon watchers suspect

that by that time, other outposts will also

have been established across the moon.

A number of spacefaring nations have made it clear

that they intend to plant their own boots on the moon.

The Chinese, the Russians, and the Europeans

all have well-developed proposals for settling there,

all employing their own distinctive approach

to habitat construction.

One of the most imaginative has been suggested

by the European Space Agency

targeted on the moon's south pole.

The plan calls for two relatively new

technologies to work together,

autonomous robotics combined with 3D printing.

The habitat is contained within a cylinder,

which will be positioned on the lunar surface.

Inside the cylinder is an inflatable dome

that will form the internal scaffolding of the habitat.

Two robotic printing machines will set to work

covering the inflated dome with lunar dust or regolith.

As they work, the 3D printing head

will stabilize the regolith with resin,

creating a honeycomb of rigid membranes that resemble

the internal structure of bone, light but strong.

The whole process is expected to take about three months

by the tend of which time the dome will be covered

in two meters of bonded regolith,

which will protect the inhabitants

from meteoroids and radiation.

While maintaining a breathable,

temperature-controlled atmosphere,

the cylinder which contained the inflatable habitat

now acts as the airlock for which the astronauts

can come and go as they please.

Eventually, a number of these habitats

can be constructed and linked together,

creating what has been described as a lunar village.

The idea of using lunar regolith

to shield and protect habitats

from the harsh lunar environment is not new.

Engineers and architects created detailed plans

in the 1980s to demonstrate the principle.

The problem they faced, however,

was that the technologies didn't exist

to achieve their ambitious plans

although they did know,

thanks to the material brought back by Apollo,

that lunar regolith just might turn out

to be a rather useful building material.

There were experiments done in the 1980s

where people took lunar material and microwaved it

and it actually forms a very nice cinder material,

very nice ceramic kind of aggregate.

Another person took a lunar material

and made concrete out of it.

He added earth water to lunar soil

and actually made concrete and it held up very well,

very fine grain, very good concrete.

So there have been experiments with it,

but of course no one has built anything with it on the moon.

So that's the simplest kind of product

you might get from the moon.

But simple, homegrown concrete

is far from being the only valuable resource on the moon.

Surveys have shown that moon dust is rich in platinum,

titanium, gold, and rare earth elements

crucial to the semiconductor industry.

Initial analysis suggests that many of these products

exist in concentrations that would make

extracting them from the moon

to be at least as profitable as mining them on Earth,

but there's one substance that moon dust contains

that can't easily be found on Earth.

It's thought to be a possible key

to fueling future nuclear fusion reactors

and it's a rare isotope of helium known as helium-3.

Valued at over three billion a ton,

it's the most costly substance known to man.

Just 100 kilos of helium-3

could power a major city for over a year,

which is why multi-national corporations

as well as nations are studying the viability

of setting up their own outposts on the moon.

So this has been looked at in some detail

and it's not totally crazy, it can be done.

It's estimated that the amount of helium-3

that would fill a shuttle cargo bay,

which is about 20 metric tons,

would provide the entire energy consumption

of the United States for one year.

So helium-3 is potentially a source of fuel to generate

commercial electrical power sometime in the future

after all these engineering problems are solved,

but they're not solved yet.

So these are some of the things

you can imagine coming from the moon.

Water is the first thing because it's the easiest

and it's initially the most valuable,

but a wide variety of other products

can be made from the moon as well.

The two-decade long lunar exploration roadmap

is ambitious, yet practical,

visionary, yet carefully pedestrian.

It requires the slow, incremental development

of capabilities on the moon, much of it benefiting

from evolving 21st century technologies

such as semi-autonomous robotics and 3D construction.

It also involves a bold view

of humanity's place in the cosmos.

Two or three decades from now,

space may be buzzing with activity.

So what do you have at the end of this time?

You have a working outpost on the moon

that's largely operated by machines

controlled from the earth,

you have permanent transportation elements

that are going back and forth,

the transfer ship is going from

low lunar orbit to low earth orbit,

the other rockets are carrying crews

to and from the space station,

they're transferring, they're going up to low lunar orbit,

they're transferring to land

or they're going down to the surface.

All of those different activities are supported

because I now have a transportation system

that can get people and cargo and machines

wherever I need them.

All this works in theory.

It works on paper.

But no one's ever done it.

No one's ever built a big system,

a system from small robotic elements.

Nobody's ever extracted water

from extraterrestrial materials

and then used it in some application.

Nobody has ever put together

an outpost on a planetary service

using robotic machines controlled from somewhere else.

Yeah, it all works in theory, but does it work in practice

and if it does work in practice, what are the pitfalls,

what are the problems,

what big difficulty have we overlooked

because there's no doubt in my mind

that we have overlooked some difficulty

and that's why you need to have NASA do that

because that's what NASA's in business for.

They are in business to do

engineering research and development

and this is an engineering R and D project.

You're going back to the moon, not to mine the moon,

but to determine if the moon can be mined.

On July 21st, 2069,

it will be exactly 100 years since Neil Armstrong

became the first human to set foot on the moon.

That's one step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

And by 2069,

if the lunar exploration roadmap

plays out according to plan,

mankind will have returned to the moon

and will have been developing its potential

as a source of water, rocket fuel,

metals, rare earth minerals and helium-3

for over four decades.

The population on the moon will have grown

to include not only astronauts and engineers,

but doctors, managers, farmers, and chefs.

People will be choosing to live permanently on the moon,

a crucial milestone in Dr. Spudis' opinion.

That's when the lunar outpost becomes a colony,

when you have inhabitants that live there by choice forever.

Now at what point might that be?

Well I would think that it would probably be at a point

where you've got a significant number of people involved

doing a wide variety of different activities

and you are exporting a product

that's actually making money.

If you have a foothold on the moon

and you for example you're mining water

and you have a company that has the rights

to export that and sell that product

to various users in cislunar space,

then you may decide well I'll just stay here

to make sure that my operation runs smoothly.

Is that a colonist?

I would argue that you are

because effectively you decided

for reasons that are perfectly understandable

that you need to live on the moon.

You need to be there to make sure

your business operates correctly.

So you're a colonist.

So the transition from an outpost to a base.

A base is just a big outpost,

these things are very flexible definitions.

But a colony implies permanence.

It implies that you're going to live there.

It implies perhaps your family will live there with you.

That may be sometime off yet.

And what of the possible pitfalls

that Dr. Spudis expects to encounter?

Some would argue that the sheer hostility

of the moon's environment combined with

its fractional gravity, barely 1/6 of Earth's,

are hazards that can't be ignored

if people are to survive and thrive on tomorrow's moon.

(dramatic music)