NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Alan Binder, Principal Investigator of NASA's Lunar Prospector mission, part 3 of 4

Yeah, that's okay, and what do you do you want to go? The significance of John Glenn's flight as far as I'm concerned is the fact that he showed that anyone could go, and that you can be quite old and still do this, it's not something that's impossible, and that makes me happy because I want to go, and if we get a lunar base started in 10 years then I won't even be 70 and I would go absolutely. There's probably a lot of scientists that want to go, who's going to be first in line out? Well, who's going to be first in line if I am in the head of a program, in the builds of the first lunar base, you can bet I'm going to be the first to go back. Great, fantastic.

I'd like you to make the point for me about the role of science, that in your scientists this is a scientific mission, and yet in a sense it is secondary. Oh, okay, sure. If we go back to the reason we did prospect, there are many programmatic reasons, there were the scientific reasons, but that was not the interest, that's not why we did prospectors. I mentioned earlier, we wanted to prove a number of things, and you could do this in a commercial mode, that you could do it cheaply and expensively and efficiently. Those were the things that counted, and they're the things that count to me now. The success of this mission is the fact that we've built a very inexpensive and perfect spacecraft that has flown a nearly perfect mission. Science primary? Science is wonderful, we are producing data which are about 10 times better in quality than I had promised NASA, but that's still not the reason I did it. Clearly, I'm a scientist, I want the science, but I was trying to prove that we could do more science. Just doing this one mission would not have been a satisfactory result. I want to be able to do more missions and get the cost of doing lunar and Mars and mercury

exploration, cut it by a factor of 10, then we can do 10 times as much. That was the real goal, the demonstration of this capability. That's the insight you have about science, having to sell it. I guess I'm not sure which means. Do you feel that science needs to sell it to the world? I came to the realization quite a while ago, probably 10, 20 years ago, that science is a business, and the product that we sell is information, and that we have to learn to sell it. You can't just sit in ivory tower at a university and expect grants to keep you going. If we're going to explore the moon and Mars and the rest of the solar system, the way you're going to have to actually make it useful for humanity, you have to get it in a commercial mode. I've turned into a businessman, so to speak, and my business is doing science and selling the information. When I say the scale that you need to explore these planets to make them useful, when you think of what an oil company does to open up a new oil field.

They don't go to one little place, make one little measurement, and then set up a complex, drill many, many wells, and build a refinery. They go and explore and spend millions of dollars getting very detailed information because they have to know, again, how much oil is there? Is it worth doing? And we have to explore the moon and the planets to that level. If we're going to actually have human beings live and work there. Are there resources? Are we going to be utilizing resources from space in the near future of 10, 20, 30 years? I mean, is that viable? Are we going to be using resources from space? When that question comes up, I have a very interesting answer that just occurred to me. Humanities' first tools were made from meteoritic iron, and so we have already used to help build our civilization extra-trust-real materials. But to answer the question in the way you really mean it is, yes. We can use lunar resources in three ways.

First of all, to build the lunar bases and lunar colonies because you cannot afford to take that amount of material to the moon, so that makes it feasible to build structures on the moon. Secondly, as you are aware, there's been a lot of work down the shuttle and mirror space station on space manufacturing. Well, there's two aspects of this. Again, if you're going to build big, complex structures up there to do manufacturing, it costs too much to bring the material from the earth. If you have a lunar base or a lunar colony where you can make the structures, send them down into lower orbit, it cuts your cost by again, a factor of ten, or maybe even twenty or more. So you can build structures, then if you're going to make things like perfect ball bearings and things of that nature, you can get the raw materials from the moon again cheaply. So you will not send lunar resources from the moon to the earth directly, you will send them to low earth orbit or geo-sync, or you can manufacture these fantastic products which then can be brought down to earth in a relatively small expense.

There is one thing that is so valuable, potentially, that just bringing it to earth would be worth it, and that is helium-3. Helium-3 is an isotope of helium, which is hypothetically the best fuel for nuclear fusion. Well, we don't know how to do nuclear fusion yet, obviously, and we're spending billions of dollars trying to learn to do that, because that's the energy of the sun. It's clean, it's efficient, there's plenty of hydrogen around hypothetically in the water, but you can't use just hydrogen to do this. There's very little helium-3 on the earth. The moon doesn't have a whole lot, but it has a lot more than the earth, and Harrison Schmidt, and that's one of the reasons Harrison is interested in this issue, is this solar-winning planet material, because the helium-3 he's seeking is solar-wind material, if there's a lot of extra solar-wind hydrogen, there's going to be extra helium-3. So as Harrison has been pushing for some time, so I agree with him. If we can start harvesting helium-3 and bring it back, the value of one shuttle payload, if we use that as a kind of scale, would be several trillion dollars, and going and

getting that, you see, even if it costs 100 billion, which is, I'm greatly exaggerating, but you see, if you're going to get trillions of dollars of value out of it, then even it costs 100 billion. Well, it's not going to cost that. If we have a lunar base, the cost will come way down, and so you could bring helium-3 down to earth to a great serviceman, because you'd have pollution-free, inexpensive energy for the entire world. So the moon can't help us in many, many ways, and it will. And that, by the way, is why we call lunar prospect, or lunar prospect, that we wanted to make the public aware that this was not just science, that we were interested in finding a return on investment, even though we're not investing right now. Fantastic. But, very interesting. I was going to ask you about helium-3, but you. We monitor and control the spacecraft.

There are at least one and usually two people here, 24 hours a day, to monitor the spacecraft, to monitor the communications that they were. All the science data, which I'll discuss in a moment, comes down all the engineering data coming down to this point, displayed, and put out the computer so that my co-investigators can get the science data, of course, so that my team and I can monitor the spacecraft and control it. Periodically, I take command control of the spacecraft. It is, as you know, a very simple spacecraft, which does not require much attention, but periodically, we have to correct the orbit of the spin, et cetera. And then I take command control. We send up a series of commands to fire the engines, to do whatever we want to do, and

we monitor that very carefully. The data that we're getting, of course, as I mentioned, is engineering data in part of a very small part of it, and that tells us temperatures and pressures in the tanks and the battery current, the battery voltage and the solar-ray current, things of that nature, just to help with the spacecraft. There are five science experiments on Prospector. We make sure the magnetic field with two instruments. One is a magnetometer, and the other is an electron-reflectometer. My colleagues at Berkeley and the University of Arizona and Goddard's Base Flight Center are responsible for that, those two experiments. It's really a tandem experiment. They work together, and so they work with those data. Then Bill Feldman at Los Alamos is my co-investigator who built the three spectrometers. The three spectrometers are a gamma ray spectrometer, which measures the composition of the moon, the neutron spectrometer, with which we discover the water ice, i.e., we map the hydrogen sumas water. The third is an alpha-particle spectrometer, which we're looking for gas release events. The moon does release gas periodically, and we're trying to understand that.

For two reasons, one is interesting scientifically, of course, but more importantly, the gases may be nitrogen and carbon dioxide, which are life-support gases, again, a resource that we would need if we were going to be able to learn colony. Those data from those spectrometers come down, along with the rest of it, and, again, Bill and his team pick it off and make the maps that we're working on. The other experiment that we do use is a tracking of the spacecraft, and this is so-called Doppler Gravity Experiment. We, of course, have to know where the spacecraft is at all times, so we track it very carefully, and those data tell us the gravity field of the moon. The gravity is changed if rocks are more dense or less dense, so we can actually map the structure in the crustal density of the moon and determine how big it's chorus and things of that nature. So, those are the things we're doing with this very simple, very small spacecraft. Great. Okay. Let's change over to, number four, to you to do what you're doing. How important is the computer to this?

Well, everything we do runs on computers, and so without them, we couldn't do this. The reason we can do this was such a small step is partly because of the capabilities of small computers, but mainly because lunar prospect is so very simple. If it were much more complicated spacecraft, you couldn't do it with a small number of people. Could you done it 20 years ago? I don't think so. No. You just didn't have the capacity to do this, but there's another answer to that, which is not related to computers, and that is, I built prospect, there are a lot of stuff that existed. There was nothing new in prospect, in fact, the tanks, the first time they were built was 20 some years ago for TRW satellite. The battery is a standard nickel-cadmium battery, the propellant I'm using as a standard high-duty, and the engines have been built, hundreds and hundreds, about probably thousands of these engines have been built, and their attitude control engines on bigger spacecrafts for me, though, in my main engines. See, if there was nothing new in this spacecraft, but 20 years ago, that wouldn't have been the case.

So, it isn't just the computers. No, the simplicity is because of the spacecraft. That is the key to the whole thing. What did Apollo mean to you, of course? Boy, that's a question which is very easy to answer. To me Apollo was the greatest event in the history of humanity. It was the first time we went to another world. My background is astronomy, and I was the little kid I wanted to be an astronomer to stay the moon in the planet. Of course, in a very nice way, when I grew up, in fact, Sputnik was launched when I was a freshman in college. And so, all this began, and I had been a part of it, and one way or another, practically from the beginning. But Apollo, you see, took us from that world of just looking remotely and getting a little bit of data to a world which is real. The leap in knowledge that we had, because of Apollo, was orders of magnitude. We could just forget what happened before, and start with Apollo.

That's where lunar science really began. The tragedy is, as we've discussed before, the fact that we just stopped dead in our tracks over a quarter of a century ago, and are just getting started again. But Apollo was the, to me, a beautiful thing in every way. Do you remember where you were the night, the first, the night of the first planet, and tell me about that? Where was I? I was certainly watching it. Do you remember how you felt, what it meant to be? Oh, well, it was a magical moment. I mean, first of all, I wanted to be there. I obviously didn't get to go, and it meant to me everything I had dreamed about since I was a little kid. I wanted to explore the planets, and the tools I wanted to use was me. And I can't do that. I use spacecraft to do that. But I would, you know, love to go to the moon, Mars elsewhere. You know, the moon is the one that I think we can get to now, so to speak, and I'd be very happy.

So it was sort of a fulfilling of everything I believed in and wanted to do, and it opened the door and said, hey, this is possible. You can do it. How about Kennedy's speech to do, did you say, oh my god, this might actually happen? Did that bring a bell with you? Well, no, because, well, I believed it, because the space program was moving ahead very rapidly. The space race, the Russians, you know, were ahead of us, it was clearly had to do this. It was kind of funny, because when I was a student, you know, there was this human cry, why can't Johnny read? Why are the Russians better than us? And, you know, the emphasis of we need scientists and engineers, and so we were the golden boys. And, you know, wow, you're in space science, you're an engineer, you're this or that. And so we were doing the stuff that was going to save, you know, the world from those nasty commies. As such, this was the expected thing. And it was no surprise, we were certainly moving in that direction, we were clearly happy, because it gave us hope that we could get to the moon, and more importantly show that we were superior to the communist system and all those things, which I believe didn't still do.

But, no, I was not surprised. This was something I had grown up with since I was 10, 12 years old. It was reality to me, I knew it could happen, would happen, the question was when. And I was pleased that it was now. Okay. What's the significance of clementine these are being prospered, how do you have a clementine effect possibly? Well, that's an interesting question. Clementine versus lunar prospect, or clementine played a very interesting role. You understand that the reason we did prospector and tried to do it as a philanthropic effort was to show that there was a much better way of doing things than the NASA way. Clementine had exactly the same objective. The people who ran that I know very well were also tired of the fact that we were doing nothing, the NASA programs took so long, and we're simply getting nowhere. And they said, we're going to do a real cheapy using military hardware and show NASA up. It was meant as a slap in the face, quite frankly. And it was an embarrassment to NASA. NASA participated, of course, but it was still not exactly the way NASA liked to do things.

From my own standpoint, we had started prospectors several years before, and of course, we were a bunch of struggling scientists and engineers doing a mission that was really not possible. You understand trying to do a mission outside the government was unheard of. And we thought it could be done, obviously, we did, but we did end up getting government support through NASA. And so, while I was happy to see clementine go, I would still like to have been the first mission to go back to the moon. Now, not to be unfair to clementine because it did useful things, but it was a test of military hardware. The cameras, the altimeter, and everything on it were not designed to do science. The science that we got was what you could get given their capabilities. The multispectral imaging, the regular imaging, the topography, have to be all done over because they were not done at the proper resolutions, they did not have the proper spectral resolution.

In other words, when you're given something, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but on the other hand, it's not what you want. Prospector in the other hand, I designed it to do this job. It was a science mission from day one. I picked my payload first. I designed to find the satellite, to support the science. And so, this was science first, second, and third. This was not a demonstration of engineering, as I mentioned earlier. I've used everything that was off the shelf, cheap, proven, inexpensive, nothing innovative in the spacecraft at all. It was a science mission, and that's why we're producing science as 10 times better than we said we could do. Fabulous. How do you feel about NASA, what are their future moon missions and what's your relationship with NASA? Not contractual. No, no, I understand. Well, emotionally, I'm not a fan of NASA. I haven't been for years.

I do not believe that you can do things with a big bureaucracy. It has cumbersome, it's conservative, and in fact, the reason that the Discovery Program was initiated in NASA was to define new ways of doing things, and they turned the missions instead of having a NASA mission, I'm quoting West Hunters, basically from the news conference when a prospector was announced as being selected for flight. West said that in the past, there had been NASA missions that were supported by the scientific community and aerospace community, NASA ran them, they defined the mission, and ran the mission. In the Discovery Program, NASA was asking for suggestions. They gave the principal investigator the responsibility of the mission. He hired his industry partner, and if he wished to, a NASA center partner, and you did it. It was possible to NASA, so it was turning it completely over to us. And of course, NASA doesn't really let go of the rains, and even though prospector has been very successful, and compared to any other mission that's ever been flown, I had pretty much free rain, but it's still not complete lack of control.

I don't like that. I want to do the follow-on missions in a purely commercial mode where NASA buys, or in the European Space Agency, or the Japanese, or the Brazilian, because all these countries are interested in this stuff, they're my customer. I do the job the way I want to do, in the fashion I believe in, with the efficiency I know we can achieve, and demonstrate we can achieve, and keep the bureaucracy out of the way. NASA, of course, provides a very necessary function in developing the technology. You see, if NASA hadn't developed the stuff that I'm using 10, 12 years ago, I'd have to develop, and then this mission would not be $60 million, they would be $3, $4, or 5 times that. NASA's job, and this is where I think we're going, will be always to push the technological frontiers. You're aware, of course, of Deep Space One, which was launched a few months ago, which is to test an engineering test of ion rockets. Well, we need that technology, it's the most efficient way, it's slow, but it gets you

there, and it's very, very efficient. So NASA's job and charter is to push the technological frontier, and this is why this concept of commercial missions works so well. They push the frontier, do the development of the new technologies, make it available in an expensive way to the commercial community, we come along behind and fill in the void. Now, NASA has no interest in the moon. If you have listened to the various news conferences we've had about winter prospector, someone from the audience always asks, what are your follow-on plans? And NASA says, we have not, we're not interested in the moon, we've been there, done that, our interest is Mars, the space station, and the outer part. It's a solar system. So they are leaving this arena open for us, I'm not saying they're doing it intentionally, but it's leaving a nice vacuum in which we can pursue these commercial goals. So even though I don't like working in bureaucracies and really, you know, shape it a bit, and NASA notices, their way of doing things is fine for what they want to do, but I want

to do the things that I can do without that encumberment. Now, let's get one more on, we're out of film, but we're not going to change over, we're just going to get you on audio, so we're going to do it the same, I'm going to have to actually change audio. Oh, okay, we're going to show you.