Australian Geographic
Adventurers, Explorers and Trail Blazers
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a new era of space exploration that's looking
to the Moon and beyond.
Sophia Casanova is designing
missions to prospect for, and mine,
water ice on the Moon and on Mars.
When she began her doctorate topic in 2017, it was considered science fiction. Now, she will likely have the pick of jobs in the booming space resources field around the world. That’s partly because the US space agency NASA has committed to return humans to the Moon during the 2020s under the Artemis program (see opposite), building a base there as a precursor to crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s.
NASA is also partnering with Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada to build the Lunar Gateway, a space station in lunar orbit, and has commissioned nine private companies to develop landers that can deliver payloads to the Moon and return to Earth. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency (ESA), which is headquartered in Paris, has announced plans to mine the Moon for water and oxygen from 2025.
There’s also a general boom underway in the global space industry that’s being driven by the falling cost of launches as well as a burgeoning demand for broadband, navigation services, satellite observation and even tourism. It’s a market that’s expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 5.6 per cent and is forecast to be worth US$558 billion by 2026.
“When I started my PhD, there was no interest in the Moon, and I thought it was something that might happen in the next 30 or 40 years,” Sophia says. “Now, there’s a whole lot of start-ups, and it’s a struggle to keep up with everything that’s happening. It’s very exciting. There are all these opportunities out there, in all different directions.” ►
When light from the Sun is absorbed and reflected back, the wavelengths of that reflection are split up to reveal the composition of surface material. This three-colour composite of near-infrared light was collected in 2009 by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, an instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission, and has since been confirmed by three other missions.
“When we say, ‘water on the Moon’, we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles,” says Dr Carle Pieters, the instrument’s principal investigator at Brown University.
“Water on the Moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimetres of the Moon’s surface.''
power from banks of solar power collectors
on the Moon’s south pole, in preparation
to establish the Artemis Base Camp.
New generation spacesuits – Exploration
Extravehicular Mobility Units (xEMU), the
design of which also considers the physical
needs of women astronauts – provide greater
mobility and flexibility.
In space, water may play a similar role to gold. Surface liquid water cannot persist in space because it’s quickly dissipated by vacuum effects and sunlight. But large quantities of water ice have been detected in cold, permanently shadowed craters, especially at the Moon’s poles where sunlight rarely reaches. There’s also good evidence that water, in low concentrations, is embedded in lunar soil over much of the Moon’s surface.
Water, or H²O, isn’t useful only for drinking or growing food in future human habitats. It can be split into its constituent molecules to create breathable air and oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel. That’s where the goldrush analogy arises.
Space is a very expensive business because Earth’s gravitational pull is so strong. A rocket has to travel at 29,000km/h just to reach orbit, so it burns a lot of fuel; in fact, about 90 per cent of a rocket’s launch weight is fuel. That’s why launches can cost US$2500–25,000 per kilogram – and that’s just to reach low Earth orbit, up to 2000km up.
Asteroids are another location option. These have almost no gravity at all. In fact, capturing an ice-rich asteroid and putting it into lunar orbit – so it can be mined for water, fuel and oxygen – has already been proposed. Suddenly, space travel, including missions to Mars, the Moon and even refuelling old satellites, becomes more feasible.
“If you’re able to provide fuel along the way, you are saving yourself an enormous cost,” explains Professor Andrew Dempster, director of UNSW’s Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research. “If you could produce fuel on the Moon or from an asteroid, maybe store it in lunar orbit, you could refuel lunar missions or head off to Mars, saving yourself quite a lot of launch mass from the surface of Earth.”
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Together with Andrew, Serkan has been pioneering space-mining research in Australia. They have been collaborating with scientists around the world for the past five years, and between them have 12 doctoral students working on it. “The unique approach we bring is that we’ve being applying mining engineering approaches to space missions, which makes resource extraction more feasible, and ultimately makes them commercially attractive to investors,” Serkan explains.
Although the Artemis program was the focus of those meetings, there’s also other widespread interest. “Multiple space agencies are planning missions, and we’re seeing a lot of interest from private companies as well,” Serkan says. “The Moon is sexy again.”
FRONTING ADELAIDE’S North Terrace grand boulevard is the heritage-listed art deco McEwin Building. It once housed the old Royal Adelaide Hospital’s surgical block but is now home to the Australian Space Agency (ASA), created in 2018 to capitalise on the booming global space business. Australia is late to the game: of the world’s 36 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, we alone did not have a space agency.
Another geologist, Dr Megan Clark, is the first head of the ASA. Previously the first female chief executive of the CSIRO, Megan and her team have been busy, creating partnerships with NASA and the ESA, as well as their counterparts in France, Canada, the UK, Italy and the United Arab Emirates. The ASA has already signed agreements with large aerospace and satellite companies such as Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Thales and10 others, including Australia’s largest oil and gas concern, Woodside Energy.
Along with a four-year, $41 million budget, the ASA has a $150 million kitty to help NASA advance its Artemis program. By showcasing Australia’s technical capability in such a high-profile space endeavour, it hopes to snaffle a bigger share of the global space economy, now worth US$345 billion annually. Currently, Australia’s share is just 0.8 per cent but the ASA plans to triple the size of the domestic industry to $12 billion by 2030 and create up to 20,000 local jobs. ►
QUENTIN JONES / UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
new Australian Space Agency, is working
to snare a bigger share of the global space
economy for Australia.
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“If you look back 40 years, 80 per cent of investment in space was by government space agencies and defence. hat’s completely fipped: now more than 75 per cent of investment is commercial.” Megan cites companies such as SpaceX, Kepler and Swarm that are building constellations of small satellites for broadband and to communicate with growing sensor networks on farms, remote mining sites and at sea. “We’re seeing the industrialisation of low Earth orbit,” she says.
Adjoining the ASA’s offices on its top floor is a mix of open-plan workspaces, breakout areas and meeting rooms for the SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). This is a newly formed powerhouse of industry research, bringing together 17 universities, the CSIRO, Defence Science
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In the lobby outside, a glass display wall highlights Australian space milestones, including a life-sized model of WRESAT, which, in 1967, became the first Australian satellite and made us only the fourth nation to launch one from its own territory (after Russia, the USA and France). Sadly, that early lead was abandoned, and it took 31 years
JAMIE TUFREY / UNSW; OPPOSITE PAGE: NICK CUBBIN
model of WRESAT, Australia’s first satellite.
Launched from Woomera in 1967, it made Australia
the seventh nation to launch a satellite and the
fourth to launch one from its own territory – after
Russia, the USA and France.
That changed in 2017, when Australia sent up four mini-satellite CubeSats. Built with off-the-shelf parts and cheap but powerful computer chips made possible by smartphone technology, CubeSats have a dizzying variety of uses, from disaster response to climate monitoring. They can also be flown in swarms, collecting multiple measurements from ground or sea sensors simultaneously. “Collecting data from space was once what governments and large companies did, because it was diffcult and expensive to launch a satellite,” says Andy Koronios, CEO of SmartSat CRC. “But it’s a thousand times cheaper than it was 15 years ago, because launch costs have fallen, and you can now get a thousand times more computing power in a small package.”
That’s changed the equation for Australia, he says: “We have a strong pedigree and long history in space with excellent capabilities in instrumentation and communications. But that research hasn’t been brought together to build an industry for Australia or capitalise on the rapid growth of the global space economy…which is what we’re doing.” Whether it’s for monitoring bushfires or predicting crop yields, Australians have long relied on buying time on other people’s satellites. Despite Australia’s large size and technological prowess, the nation has very little presence in space.
Getting into space requires launch services, and here Australian companies are emerging too. One start-up is Melbourne-based Equatorial Launch Australia, headed by Carley Scott. It’s developing a commercial spaceport near Nhulunbuy, in the Northern Territory, on land leased from Yolngu traditional owners. “They’re fantastic partners, with an ancient culture and ancient stories of the stars,” Carley says about the Yolngu. “To see those old stories mixing with new will be really exciting.” Being near the Equator gives rockets an extra boost from Earth’s spin, reaching geostationary orbit with less fuel. The area’s low population and proximity to the ocean also makes for safer launches and easier payload recovery. Its first order is from NASA.
Adelaide-based start-up Southern Launch is chasing the market for polar, rather than equatorial, orbits. These are ideal for Earth-mapping, observation and reconnaissance. Industry analysts estimate 6200 satellites will need to be launched in the next decade, at a cost of US$30 billion, with half the market looking for polar orbits. ►
MINING THE MOON with robots won’t be easy. First, it has no atmosphere, so temperatures at its poles range from 120°C during the day to –232°C at night, and radiation is three times higher than on Earth. Also, as Apollo astronauts discovered, lunar dust is extremely fine and very abrasive, so moving parts need protection. But lubrication and cooling is tough because most oils, cooling fluids and greases disintegrate or evaporate into the vacuum of space.
What’s more, mining robots need to be small to keep launch weights down, and not be too power hungry, because they rely on batteries and solar panels, which will need to be protected from the lunar dust kicked up by mining. They also have to operate long term with minimal maintenance. It’s a huge engineering challenge, which is why it’s so attractive to young researchers such as Sophia Casanova. While doing a stint at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where in 2017 she got to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, home of the Mars rovers, Sophia took part in a student competition to design a mining operation on the Moon. Although the technology has progressed further since, she stays abreast of new ideas.
“First, the robot covers a site with an airtight cap, then drills a core into the regolith [the Moon’s ‘soil’, a mixture of fine dust and rocky debris],” she says, using her hands to sketch out the scene of a mining operation designed by Honeybee Robotics, a New York-based spacecraft equipment manufacturer. “Instead of extracting that core, the robot heats it from within, and that sublimates the water ice into a gas, which it captures and stores in an onboard tank.”
The process is repeated until the tank is full, leaving a trail of pockmarks but very little waste and debris. “The benefit of Honeybee’s approach is there’s not much handling of material, and it minimises dust plumes, which, because you’re in a very low-gravity environment, can cause visibility problems,” Sophia adds.
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First, NASA will need to rethink exploration. “When you say ‘exploration’ to a mining person, you’re talking about what a lay person would consider ‘prospecting’,” says UNSW’s Andrew Dempster. “You say ‘exploration’ to NASA, and they hear ‘science exploration’. These are two quite different things.” To locate and extract viable water ice deposits on the Moon or on Mars, space agencies and companies with long-term plans for colonies on Mars will need to do exploration in a way that prepares them for mining. “Most missions to the Moon are preliminary science-type missions, with scientific objectives of interest to geologists and the like,” Andrew adds. “But what they need to do is collect data as if they’re a commercial operation. You have to think about the ice as an ore body, and how you can define its extent and extractability.”
The ASA’s Megan Clark agrees, explaining that learning how to mine water ice in space “is one of the most significant initial steps to be able to live on the surface of the Moon and of Mars. Establishing a long-term lunar presence will also test how we undertake human exploration of Mars, and what we will need for long-duration missions. That will be a primary focus of the Artemis mission.”
And that will bring many benefits back to Earth, says UNSW’s Serkan Saydam. “Mining in space – because it has to be much, much more efficient – forces us to completely rethink how it’s done here on Earth. Achieving this would create spin-off technologies that would improve terrestrial operations, where it’s urgent that we reduce the environmental impacts of mining and make it more sustainable. That’s what really excites me.”
THE LAST GREAT WILDERNESS
Indigenous rangers, scientists, conservationists and pastoralists are working together to ensure the Kimberley remains one of the world’s great wildlife havens.
Ultimate survivor
The short-beaked echidna is found from deserts to mountain peaks; from Tasmania, across the Australian mainland to southern New Guinea. Its unique backwards-pointing feet give it an advantage when digging. Echidnas also use extended claws on the second toes of the hind feet to scratch and groom between the spines.
WALKING WITH FIRE
Linton Burgess performs a traditional dance during patrula, a return of important cultural fire practices to farmland on the midland plains of Tasmania for the first time in 200 years.
Running Man Rock
IT WAS ABOUT SIX YEARS ago that I first discovered him, purely by chance. At an hour and a half out of Sydney, my commercial flight turned north-west towards Darwin. And there he was in all his rampant majesty. Running Man Rock, I call him.
Travel with us
It’s one of Earth’s most complex natural systems, home to countless animals. And to the rest of the world it’s one of the most identifiably Australian places. We all know what it is – the Great Barrier Reef (GBR)– and that it’s under pressure. But how can we frame its intricate natural architecture in a new way that inspires people to love it enough to care about its future?