- Howe, Steven D.
Honor Bound Honor Born.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2011.
ASIN B005JPZ4LQ.
-
During the author's twenty year career at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, he worked on a variety of technologies
including nuclear propulsion and applications of nuclear
power to space exploration and development. Since the
1980s he has been an advocate of a “power rich”
approach to space missions, in particular lunar and Mars
bases.
Most NASA design studies for bases have assumed that almost all of the
mass required to establish the base and supply its crew must be
brought from the Earth, and that electricity will be provided by solar
panels or radiothermal generators which provide only limited
amounts of power. (On the Moon, where days and nights are two weeks
long, solar power is particularly problematic.) Howe explored how
the economics of establishing a base would change if it had a compact
nuclear fission reactor which could produce more electrical and thermal
power (say, 200 kilowatts electrical) than the base required. This
would allow the resources of the local environment to be exploited
through a variety of industrial processes: “in-situ resource
utilisation” (ISRU), which is just space jargon for living off the
land.
For example, the Moon's crust is about 40% oxygen, 20% silicon, 12%
iron, and 8% aluminium. With abundant power, this regolith can be
melted and processed to extract these elements and recombine them
into useful materials for the base: oxygen to breathe, iron for
structural elements, glass (silicon plus oxygen) for windows and
greenhouses, and so on. With the addition of nutrients and trace
elements brought from Earth, lunar regolith can be used to grow crops
and, with composting of waste many of these nutrients can be
recycled. Note that none of this assumes discovery of water ice
in perpetually shaded craters at the lunar poles: this can be done
anywhere on the Moon. If water is present at the poles, the need
to import hydrogen will be eliminated.
ISRU is a complete game-changer. If Conestoga wagons had to set out
from the east coast of North America along the Oregon Trail carrying
everything they needed for the entire journey, the trip would have
been impossible. But the emigrants knew they could collect water,
hunt game to eat, gather edible plants, and cut wood to make repairs,
and so they only needed to take those items with them which weren't
available along the way. So it can be on the Moon, and to an even
greater extent on Mars. It's just that to liberate those necessities
of life from the dead surface of those bodies requires lots of
energy—but we know how to do that.
Now, the author could have written a dry monograph about lunar ISRU
to add to the list of technical papers he has already published on
the topic, but instead he made it the centrepiece of this science
fiction novel, set in the near future, in which Selena Corp mounts
a private mission to the Moon, funded on a shoestring, to land
Hawk Stanton on the lunar surface with a nuclear reactor and what
he needs to bootstrap a lunar base which will support him until he
is relieved by the next mission, which will bring more settlers
to expand the base. Using fiction as a vehicle to illustrate a
mission concept isn't new: Wernher von Braun's original draft
(never published) of
The
Mars Project was also a novel based upon his mission
design (when the book by that name was finally published in 1953, it
contained only the technical appendix to the novel).
What is different is that while by all accounts of those who have
read it, von Braun's novel definitively established that he made the
right career choice when he became an engineer rather than a
fictioneer, Steven Howe's talents encompass both endeavours. While
rich in technical detail (including an appendix which cites
research papers regarding technologies used in the novel), this is
a gripping page-turner with fleshed-out and complex characters,
suspense, plot twists, and a back story of how coercive government
reacts when something in which it has had no interest for decades
suddenly seems ready to slip through its edacious claws. Hawk is
alone
and a long way from home, so that any injury or illness is a potential
threat to his life and to the mission. The psychology of living and
working in such an environment plays a part in the story. And these
may not be the greatest threat he faces.
This is an excellent story, which can be read purely as a thriller,
an exploration of the potential of lunar ISRU, or both. In an afterword
the author says, “Someday, someone will do the missions I have
described in this book. I suspect, however, they will not be
Americans.” I'm not sure—they may be Americans, but
they certainly won't work for NASA. The cover illustration is brilliant.
This book was originally published in 1997 in a
paperback edition by Lunatech
Press. This edition is now out of print and used copies
are scarce and expensive. At this writing, the
Kindle edition is just US$ 1.99.
May 2014 