Back to the Moon-ARC

Chapter 12

Launched twelve months previously on an Atlas V unmanned rocket, the thirteen-thousand-kilogram Lunar Mapper spacecraft had been doing its job of mapping the Moon with quiet precision. Flying just fifty kilometers above the lunar surface in an orbit carrying it from pole to pole, the spacecraft’s high-resolution cameras photographed most of the lunar surface. Multiple overflights of the same terrain at different times during the lunar day, and with a slightly different viewing angle due to the Moon’s slowly changing orbit, allowed stereoscopic images to be created of most of the lunar surface. With Earth-based processing, a 3-D map of the Moon was created.

The scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, had been studying the images for weeks as they worked to narrow down the landing-site options for Bill Stetson and his crew. They knew the landing would be somewhere near the Moon’s equator, selected because it was easier to reach this region of the Moon than the higher latitudes, and because that was where the Apollo missions had explored. They knew that it could be done, so doing it again would be the best and safest way to begin the return of NASA’s astronauts to the Moon. For NASA’s critics, it would just be another example of NASA’s inability to do anything new and different.

On this day, the site-selection team was preparing their final recommendation for NASA Administrator Calvin Ross. Ross had been appointed by the President and had the distinction of being the only former United States senator to be appointed as NASA Administrator. The President had not made NASA a priority, and appointing his former colleague in the Senate, one who had recently been defeated in his reelection campaign, was a signal that he was not taking the direction of America’s space program seriously. Ross was neither an engineer nor a scientist. Before becoming a senator, Ross had been an attorney at a prominent Billings, Montana, law firm. Many viewed Ross’s appointment as a simple payback for some previous political favor or favors. Few in NASA appreciated his political savvy, and fewer still realized how hard he fought for the agency.

The lead scientist for the site-selection team, Dr. Henry Morton, was standing before a wall-sized mural of the Moon made from images returned from the Lunar Mapper spacecraft. He was wearing 3-D glasses and studying carefully no less than six potential landing sites.

Morton was a career scientist from the prestigious Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. He began his career in the late 1970s, when exploring the Moon was no longer “hot.” In fact, at that time, studying the Moon was considered career suicide. Funding for lunar research had dried up with the death of Apollo, and Morton kept his interest alive by winning small research grants and by convincing his management to keep his work funded, although at an embarrassingly low level. Morton had quietly waited in the wings until interest in the Moon resurfaced in the mid-2000s. He then quickly rose in prominence to become America’s leading expert on all things lunar. It helped that he was also virtually alone in the field. Without consistent funding for lunar science, there simply weren’t many others around. It was easier to be a big fish when there was a small pond. And the pond for lunar science had been very small indeed.

“You’d think that since the 1950s we’d have developed a better way to view 3-D than by wearing these god-awful glasses,” said Morton to no particular member of his team. They were all assembled and themselves looking at the wall mural. And, without surprise, no one responded directly to his comment. He was prone to complaining about the glasses.

“I’m just amazed that we can see Surveyor and all of the Apollo sites,” was the closest thing to a response. The comment came from one of the junior members of the team, Saul Britenstein. He continued. “Look here. As I’ve been saying, if we land near the Apollo 17 site we can show continuity with our last mission, and maybe even bring back the picture Cernan left on the surface. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“And the science benefit is what?” asked Mariam Upchurch, senior member of the team. Morton had heard that she had begun her career as a lunatic, as lunar scientists were sometimes called, back in the early 1980s, when even the International Space Station was yet to be built. Upchurch was interested in the science return of Project Constellation, not the cool technology and the “fun” things that the astronauts might accomplish there. She also had absolutely no inhibitions about sharing her strongly held opinions.

“We’ve been through this all before, people,” said Morton, quickly losing patience with the continuous disagreement among his team about where the Altair should land and where people should again walk on the surface of the Moon. Morton showed his visible frustration by entering what many had come to call his “lecture mode.” To an outside observer, his demeanor would have appeared astonishingly similar to that of a parent lecturing a recalcitrant teenager about the dangers of having unprotected sex.

“We know we have to be near the equator. We know we want to be near one of the Apollo sites because we want to bring back a piece of hardware to assess how being on the Moon affected it. And Apollo 11 is out of the question. It will be a historical landmark, and we aren’t to mess with it in any way.” Morton broke out of the lecture mode to ask a real question. “Saul, other than the picture, what’s the benefit of going back to Taurus-Littrow and Apollo 17?”

Morton considered Britenstein to be brilliant. In fact, the twentysomething scientist from the University of Arizona was on Morton’s short list of future recruits for the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Britenstein was tall, frighteningly thin, and certainly not among the most attractive half of the human species. Morton more than once wondered how such a brilliant and obviously awkward young man had managed to marry the quite attractive medical student that was his wife. But Morton didn’t want to be distracted by that thought at the moment.

“Well,” began Britenstein, “it was from this area that Schmitt found the rocks that gave us the best history of the Moon to date. I think there is more to be gained from going back here and collecting more samples for comparison. I’ve shown you the data, and most of the selenologists agree. If you want to better understand the formation of the Moon, this is the place to start. Or, restart, as it were.” It was not Britenstein’s most eloquent response, but they had all seen his data before. There was no need to repeat it to this group.

Morton, still peering through his 3-D goggles, was looking closely at one of the few lower-resolution images on the Moon mural. Though the Lunar Mapper had been in orbit about a year, there were still a few areas on the Moon that had escaped multidirectional imaging. Some of the gaps were caused by one-of-a-kind mission anomalies; others were caused by the vagaries of the Moon’s orbital rotation rate and the slow evolution of the spacecraft’s orbit around it. The portion of the image at which Morton was staring was one of those low-resolution areas that would soon be corrected with an upcoming flyover of the spacecraft.

“Look at this,” said Morton. His tone was inquisitive, and this drew more of a response from his teammates than his frequent, though never really negative, wry comments and complaints.

“It almost looks like there is another lander here. See the odd shape of this rock? The reflectance data I just pulled up doesn’t match a natural rock formation. It looks more like the remains of a spacecraft. But the image is simply too poor to make it out. I looked in the catalog, and there are no known missions that landed near here, neither Soviet nor American. And if the Europeans or Japanese had done it in the last several years, then we would know about it. Very odd.”

“Hmm,” Upchurch responded, “do you think we’ve found a crashed flying saucer or something? Hardly likely. More likely another ‘Face on Mars’ that will go away when we get the better imagery. I’d recommend you forget about it for now.”

“Probably not aliens, you think?” Britenstein laughed. “If the data rate were higher, we could watch the Altair land on the surface almost as soon as it actually happens. The cameras on this bird might even be able to resolve Stetson as he takes his first walk across the surface. Now that would be cool.”

“Mariam, you’re right. With only low-resolution data, we cannot recommend the site for a landing anyway. Too risky…Too bad,” Morton added. “Now, back to the task at hand. We have two excellent choices that meet all mission criteria. Which shall it be?”

The debate resumed, and the remains of China’s failed attempt to land a robot on the Moon remained undiscovered.

Meanwhile, some 240,000 miles away in lunar orbit, the Lunar Mapper spacecraft was following its slowly repeating trajectory around the Moon. Its camera was working flawlessly after nearly a year on the job. If someone had been there looking around, they might have noticed a glint on the horizon, occasionally captured by the spacecraft’s primary camera. The camera was pointed toward the lunar surface, and not out into deep space. The glint was photographed a few more times over the next several minutes as the images were sent back to the Earth in nearly real-time by the spacecraft’s onboard telemetry system. Data analysis was not conducted in real time, so there was no one looking when the small projectile collided with the Lunar Mapper spacecraft at a relative velocity of four kilometers per second. While the projectile was traveling at less than half the velocity of a spacecraft in low Earth orbit, it was moving eight times faster than a bullet, packing sixty-four times the destructive energy. The collision obliterated the little mapping spacecraft.

Only after the data stopped did anyone look at the last few images sent back to the Earth from lunar orbit; it was then that the “glint” was observed and the idea put forward that the Lunar Mapper was victim to either a piece of space junk or an errant meteorite. Both were incredibly unlikely events, but the reality was something so unlikely that no one even considered it.

The Lunar Mapper spacecraft, set to continue taking high-resolution images of the Moon for at least another half a year, was the victim of a piece of depleted uranium deliberately sent to collide with it. The uranium projectile that impacted the spacecraft had been launched several days before from China. The launch was hailed by China as a lunar flyby mission that would use the Moon to slingshot the spacecraft toward the sun for future solar-weather observations. But unbeknownst to the rest of the world, the real goal of the mission was stopping all high-resolution mapping of the Moon for at least the next two years. Building upon their demonstrated capability to destroy a satellite in Earth orbit, which they did in 2007, China had quietly developed a capability to intercept and destroy any spacecraft in the Earth-Moon system. Lunar Mapper was the first target; no one in China asserted responsibility for the attack or even acknowledged that an attack had taken place. And though analysts in the National Reconnaissance Office later suggested in appropriately classified memoranda that China was responsible, no one at NASA had a clue.