Who said you could pave my Moon?

A little background, for those of you who don’t semi-obsessively follow NASA’s doings: assuming the agency’s funding isn’t cut, the Space Shuttles are due to be retired in a few years (2010) with a lunar orbiter going up sometime next year (2008) and serviced during a couple of the last Shuttle missions. Their next planned lunar landing isn’t until 2020, but the Lunar Airborne Dust Toxicity Advisory Group is racing to find a way to keep those astronauts who do get up and out from inhaling.

Wait, that didn’t come out right. Lunar dust, it seems, is toxic to humans—they’ve known that at least since Apollo 17. And as technology improves, they keep finding more evidence of just how toxic it is, to the point that they’re considering some things I, for one, find rather excessive.

Like “paving” parts of my favorite satellite. Technically, the proposal is to use microwaves to melt particles into lunar glass and then using those paved areas as landing pads and foundations for structures. It’s an idea that actually sounds pretty neat, as in SF, but that I don’t think I appreciate in real life. Too, it wouldn’t prevent dust from being stirred up, as anyone whose ever driven through dry country can tell you. While the moon doesn’t have much in the way of wind to do that stirring, vehicles do a fine job of that, and even suited people can kick up more than a bit.

I’m no rocket scientist, but...it’s the finer particles that would tend to move most, isn’t it—those same ones they’re most concerned with? With reason, I hasten to say. Breathing tiny little mineral particles is never a good idea, as any number of black-lung sufferers would tell you if they were around to do so. Plus, many of those tiny particles have jagged edges which cling to lung tissue worse than mine-dust or asbestos ever could, and they’re so small a person might not actually be able to tell when they were present. And it’s not only the lungs that are vulnerable; some lunar dust particles have the rather appalling property of being able to displace iron in the bloodstream, with effects I don’t care to contemplate. Not to mention all the usual SF-nal concerns about substances to which humans have no natural defenses... So, yes, it’s a real concern. But paving the moon?

Some of the Group’s other plans, like the giant magnetic vacuum cleaner, seem more reasonable to me. (Okay, so it’s more like an industrial air filtration system. Once they get to the bits about tubes sucking up dust...) At least it would be inside the modules, instead of messing with a perfectly innocent celestial body that was just minding its own business!

I vote we send the whitecoats and their engineer compatriots back to the drawing board. Not, of course, that anyone asked me. They didn’t even invite me to their lunar dust workshop this spring, and I was just up the road. But they did have the kindness to put a bunch of their results up on their website (nasa.gov), during the reading of which, I came up with a new official job title for a character in my perennially unsubbed SF series: I think I’ll make someone a Regolith Disposal Engineer. So much classier than Space Janitor, no?

Of course, if they paved over the all the celestial bodies, there wouldn’t be any extra-terrestrial soil to be disposed of. And all those wonderful SF classic titles with Stardust and so on would have to be changed.

Nope, can't have that.

In this activist society of ours, surely there’s a group out there somewhere protesting the industrialization of our nearest extra-terrestrial resource? Not that I have any objection to NASA—or their equivalents in other governments, or the private space exploration societies—landing, exploring, running tests. I just think they should leave the land unspoiled for the next visitor.

Who knows? It might be me.

pxj