Mission to Mars by Buzz Aldrin Page A

on the moon to generate economical fusion power on Earth. He advocates a public-private partnership to extract the nonradioactive isotope on the moon.
    Veteran space industry entrepreneur Dennis Wingo agrees. He is CEO of Skycorp Incorporated, a small commercial company located at the NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field, California.
    “Thinking about what can be done with the moon is a lot more practical than complaining about the difficulties,” Wingo suggests. He is firmly convinced that the economic possibilities of the moon are great. What remains to be determined is how the moon can be leveraged to solve the 21st-century problems of sustaining and expanding the reach of civilization here on Earth for the nine billion people who will be living here within a single generation.
    “It is my firm conviction that the industrialization of the moon is the necessary and logical first goal of the second American space age,” Wingo maintains. “The industrial capability of the moon and its near-space environs can now be developed. The industrialization of the moon paves the way for reusablehuman interplanetary spacecraft, large communications and remote sensing platforms in geosynchronous orbit, and the settlement of Mars.”
Building a New Lunar Vision
    There are many others who envisage groundbreaking activities on the moon. I can attest to the fact that the moon is a Disneyland of dust. The more time you spend there, the more you get covered from helmet to boots with lunar dust.
    But despite its apparent grunge face, the lunar regolith—surface material that’s composed in part of rock and mineral fragments—is rich in silicon, aluminum, magnesium, and other useful elements that can be usefully extracted. Two leaders in the use of lunar resources for energy generation on the moon are Alex Ignatiev and Alexandre Freundlich of the Center for Advanced Materials at the University of Houston. Since energy is fundamental to nearly everything that humans would like to do in space, for scientific purposes, commercial development, or human exploration, they are seeking raw materials on the moon that can be utilized to create solar cells on the spot. The moon is an ultrahigh vacuum environment, thus an appropriate setting for the direct fabrication of thin-film solar cells. The lunar vacuum negates the need for vacuum chambers within which to undertake thin-film deposition processing.
    The ability to fabricate solar cells on the moon for use on its surface as well as in cislunar space, the researchers believe, can result in an extremely energy-rich environment for the moon.
    Ignatiev and Freundlich have looked into the machinery needed to deposit solar cells directly on the surface of the moon. This can be accomplished by the deployment to the moon’s surface of a moderately sized cell paver/regolith processor system with the capabilities of fabricating thin-film silicon solar cells. The system could extract needed raw materials from the lunar regolith and prepare the regolith for use as a substrate.
    Evaporation of the silicon semiconductor material for the solar cell structure directly on the regolith substrate is done by the paver, with deposition of metallic contacts and interconnects finishing off a complete solar cell array.
    This on-moon fabrication process will result in an electric power system that is repairable and replaceable through the simple fabrication of more solar cells, therefore allowing for the expansive use of the moon.

    Circular solar panels and tubular habitations in a visualization of a lunar outpost
    ( Illustration Credit 4.9 )

    A power rover could harvest lunar materials for solar cells
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    ( Illustration Credit 4.10 )
    All this is good news for another lunar visionary, David Criswell, now retired director of the University of Houston’s Institute for Space Systems Operations. He has long advocated solar power stations built on the moon as a way to provide sustainable and affordable electric power