The Moon

1972 was the year a great love affair ended.

The human race fell out of love with the moon.

It was a classic case of familiarity breeds contempt.

There'd been six moon landings,

and we'd grown bored.

To this day, no-one has been back.

The moon did turn out to be dull.

It's... What do you see? A barren, colourless landscape

with fragmentary rock all over the place.

Our eyes wandered to other more intriguing worlds.

Throughout the solar system, scientists found many more moons

that seemed far more exciting than our own dull pile of grey rock.

For 35 years, our own moon has been abandoned.

But now, all that's about to change.

This is the story of our love affair with the moon.

What inspired it, how it faded away,

and how now we're slowly, but surely,

falling in love all over again.

Our love affair with the moon s an ancient one.

It is Earth's constant companion in the dark emptiness of space.

The moon has looked down on the whole of human history.

And throughout history, we have looked up at it.

It has inspired great myths and legends.

We've feared it and we've worshipped it.

5,000 years ago, in a remote corner of the Outer Hebrides,

a Neolithic community made its home.

We know very little about these people,

but they've left us an enduring symbol of their profound relationship with the moon.

Islanders Margaret Curtis and her husband Ron

have devoted their lives to understanding that relationship.

I find a link with these people -

that our minds seem work along the same ideas.

This has been very much a detective story - sorting it all out.

They may not have had writing,

but they've set the stones up in such a way

that we can fathom out what they were after.

No-one knows for certain what the Standing Stones of Callanish represent.

But their positioning suggests that they're a tribute to the moon,

part sacred site and part ancient observatory.

These stones at Callanish are a sort of lunar computer -

a lunar calendar.

And it's a computer that's still working after 5,000 years,

which is more than we can say for the computers we've got nowadays.

The stones seem to be arranged so they track the movements of the moon through the sky from month to month.

Nowadays, we're not fully aware of what the moon's doing in the sky.

We know short days in the winter, long days in the summer.

But the moon's plodding on, doing the same sort of thing over a much longer cycle.

Whereas we nowadays aren't fully aware of where the northernmost moon rises or sets, or the southernmost,

our prehistoric ancestors - 5,000 years ago -

did know and they set these stones out

to mark these extreme positions of the moon.

Most of all, the stones could predict the timing of a spectacular and rare lunar event.

To the south of Callanish is a range of hills

which resemble a woman lying on her back.

Every 18 years, the full moon rises out of the hills.

It rolls along the woman's body... and then vanishes.

But moments later, it is re-born -

right in the centre of the stone circle.

Legend says that anyone who witnessed this magical event

would be blessed with the gift of fertility.

It has always been the full moon,

above all else, that has stirred the human spirit.

Yet the moon has no light of its own.

Its glow is simply reflected sunlight.

As it orbits our planet,

the portion of the sunlit surface that we see changes.

This gives us the phases of the moon -

a twenty-nine-and-a-half-day cycle that waxes to full

and then wanes back to new.

When the moon is full, the night sky glows ten times brighter

than when it's new.

On this night, the same full moon can be seen all over the Earth.

It has always inspired awe.

In times gone by,

the full moon was believed to bring out our darker selves

in a monthly wave of madness and bloodshed.

The word lunacy derives from the Latin for moon

and crimes that happened at this time

were looked upon more leniently.

But when it comes to nature, the moon's impact isn't legend.

The full moon triggers a frenzy of activity.

It is the time of the highest tides.

And in the oceans, the full moon's bright light

is a mating call for sea creatures all over the world.

The full moon governs the very reproduction of these species.

And now, scientists have discovered it may be doing the same for us humans.

Research suggests that the full moon may play

a significant role in our own cycles of fertility.

In the late 1970s, scientists studying female fertility

noticed a baffling coincidence.

We knew that the moon cycled

every twenty nine and a half days,

and we knew...

a twenty-nine-and-a-half day cycle

was the most fertile woman's cycle length.

That a woman who had a 26-day cycle, or a 40-day cycle,

or a 60-day cycle,

was much less likely to be fertile in that cycle.

At the time, it was unclear whether this was a chance phenomenon

or whether the two were related.

But further research on women with twenty-nine-and-a-half day menstrual cycles

threw up even more links with the patterns of the lunar cycle.

In that group of women who cycle as frequently as the moon,

they tended to start their periods in the full moon, at the day of the full moon.

And as you move away from the full moon toward the new moon,

a smaller and smaller and smaller proportion of the group

is starting their menstrual period.

That was a very exciting natural biologic phenomenon,

that said there's something in nature about the moon

that coincides with women getting their period at the full moon.

The fertility cycles of women are related to the moon cycle,

and I don't think women's fertility drives the moon,

I think it's the other way around.

No-one knows for sure why this phenomenon exists,

or how it works.

It is one of the moon's many mysteries.

Until very recently,

the moon remained an enigma.

And it was this mysterious quality which fuelled our fascination.

Where did it come from?

What was it made of?

And the biggest question of all - was it a world like ours?

Did it harbour life?

For millennia, it was impossible to know.

No-one even knew what the surface of the moon looked like.

All that changed in 1608, when an Italian astronomer made a primitive telescope.

For the first time, he was able to get a close-up look at the moon.

His name was Galileo Galilei.

And what he saw shattered conventional wisdom.

At the time, the Church insisted

that all heavenly bodies were perfect, unblemished spheres,

and that the Earth was the only body in the universe that was flawed.

But Galileo's close-up view of the moon's surface

revealed a world that was far from perfect.

He described it as "Rough and uneven, just like the surface of Earth itself."

Perhaps it WAS a living world, like our own.

Hundreds of years later, our knowledge of the moon had barely improved.

Just how ignorant we were was revealed in 1835.

An American newspaper published a front-page story

announcing that herds of bison had been observed tramping across the lunar surface.

Readers were entranced by this vision.

A few days later, it was revealed to be an elaborate hoax.

The only way to find out what was really on the moon

was to go there and take a look.

But over 100 years later, it still seemed an impossible dream.

All that finally changed in the early 1960s.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal,

before this decade is out,

of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

Kennedy's bid for the moon came out of a Cold War battle

to win over peoples' hearts and minds.

It was an inspired move, tapping into an ancient dream.

Finally, we would find the answers to the moon's great mysteries.

How was it formed?

What was it made of? And was it a home for some form of life?

The moon had always been the symbol of the remote and the unreachable.

And here,

people are going to leave Earth and go to the moon!

But, if they wanted to lay claim to the moon,

the Americans had a lot of catching up to do.

Their Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, was way ahead.

The Russian's ambitious space programme produced a string of firsts,

including the first satellite in orbit and the first man in space.

And in 1959, they'd set out to solve one of the moon's greatest mysteries -

something that had kept humans guessing for centuries.

What was on the far side of the moon - the side that always faces away from us?

To find out, the Russian mission would have to circle the moon for the first time.

On the 7th of October,

the probe disappeared behind the far side of the moon,

and its cameras leapt into action.

For 40 minutes, it snapped away

whilst scientists waited on tenterhooks.

When the images were transmitted back to Earth,

they had their answer.

The far side was actually just the same as the near side.

But the lack of surprises didn't matter.

These blurred images made history.

And the mission consolidated the Russians' lead in the space race.

The Americans weren't keen on second place.

I guess the American people are alarmed that a foreign country,

especially an enemy country, can do this. We fear this.

-Definitely alarmed.

-Do you admire the Russians for doing it or not?

No. We should've been first to have it.

The Russians had all the headlines.

But landing a man on the moon was an entirely new challenge.

At the time when Kennedy made his famous speech,

scientists knew so little about the moon

that the prospect of sending a human there seemed almost reckless.

Their knowledge of lunar geography was so sketchy,

they didn't know where they could land safely.

They didn't even know whether the moon's surface was strong enough to support a space-craft,

or even a man.

They needed answers quickly.

The first step for the Americans was a series of probes called Ranger.

They carried on board television cameras

to take detailed close-up pictures of the lunar surface.

But it wasn't exactly a sophisticated approach.

The Rangers went in hard, crashing kamikaze-style into the surface,

furiously filming away until the moment of destruction.

The 4,300 images taken by the Ranger probes

were the clearest views we'd ever had of our moon.

It was now clear it was a harsh and hostile world.

But the pictures were vital to prepare for the ultimate goal -

the moon landing.

It was an epic endeavour.

No expense was spared.

At its peak, the moon programme employed more than 400,000 people in America

and cost over 25 billion, nearly 150 billion in today's money.

People were electrified

by the race to the moon. And the United States was spending...

I think it was 4.5% of our entire national budget on space.

But most Americans were 100% in favour of,

let's push on and whatever it costs, let's get to the moon.

Ten...nine...eight...

By 1968, NASA was ready for a test run.

..four...three...two...one...

Zero!

We have commenced! We have lift-off!

Lift-off at 7.51am Eastern Standard Time.

Apollo 8 wouldn't actually land on the moon,

but it would go into lunar orbit.

Although they weren't going to touch down,

this would be the first time

that humans had ever visited another world.

This transmission is coming to you personally halfway between the moon and the Earth.

Back on Earth, people watched and waited and listened.

And the astronauts didn't disappoint.

Hovering just above the moon's surface,

their broadcast was from the book of Genesis.

"In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.

"And the Earth was without form and void.

"And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

"And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light."

I don't know. It just caught the country by surprise.

It was so moving

and...comforting.

And I think, at that point,

we realised the importance of a space mission

for bringing self-confidence to people.

On their fourth orbit around the moon,

the astronauts saw something no human eyes had ever seen before.

It was the Earth, rising out of the blackness of space.

The pictures they took changed the way we viewed our planet forever.

We have commenced! We have lift-off!

And then came the big one.

On July 16th 1969,

Apollo 11 was launched.

Oh, I remember watching it.

It was like, "Wow!" Like watching science fiction come true.

On its final descent to the moon's surface,

unknown to the watching audience,

a series of alarms went off inside the lunar module.

NASA decided to over-ride them.

The gamble paid off.

Houston, er...

..Tranquillity Base here.

The eagle has landed.

I'll now step off the ladder.

It's one small step for man...

..one giant leap for mankind.

More than 600 million people watched the broadcast worldwide.

HE SPEAKS IN ITALIAN

The experience bonded the human race in a way which had never happened before. Or since.

It was one of those rare occasions

that brought the whole nation...

and, in a sense, the whole world,

together in a shared experience.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin only walked on the moon for less than three hours.

But on that night,

people all over the Earth looked up at the night sky

and knew that there were two men up there, looking back at them.

I remember the night of the landing.

And I looked up from the parking lot and there was the moon.

And you could see the little dark smudge,

over on the right side of the moon,

which is the Sea of Tranquillity,

and you knew that there were two men -

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin -

by that time trying to sleep in their lunar module

on the surface of that smudge

that you can see from Houston.

Over the next three years, five more missions landed on the moon.

Each one was more ambitious than the last.

Whereas Armstrong and Aldrin had only taken a few tentative steps from the lunar module,

the astronauts on later missions travelled miles across the surface.

They spent days at a time on the moon, visiting different locations,

collecting samples of rock and soil,

and setting up scientific experiments.

Guess what we just found?

-I think we found what we came for.

-Just old rock, eh?

-Yes, sir.

But down on Earth, with each mission,

the public interest was starting to wane.

By the time it came to Apollo 17,

NASA even had to pay the American TV networks to cover the mission.

By the fourth or fifth time that we had gone to the moon,

it was probably page two or three news.

You know, it certainly wasn't headline..

There is more soil!

People were getting bored with going to the moon.

Once you've seen astronauts collect rocks for a few times,

it ceases to fascinate.

Going to the moon had been done.

And there was a feeling that it was now time to do other things.

There's a state of apathy in the United States now. People just don't care.

I think that we are spending too much money on the moon.

I think they could use the time, energy and money better here in the United States.

There's lots of room for improvement here.

Rather than spend all that money exploring space when people are starving here,

that money could be put to very good use in improving life here.

When we finally got there,

it turned out our moon didn't harbour life or even water.

It was not the home of the Gods or rampaging herds of bison.

It was a barren and bleak place - a dead rock in the sky.

We'd built it up in our imagination for tens of thousands of years.

And the disappointment was crushing.

People thought maybe...

there were people alive on the moon,

maybe there are things up there.

But what we learned when we got there is what we saw was the case.

It's a very cold place

and it's desolate and it's not capable of supporting life as we know it.

Hey, team...

# I was strolling on the moon one day... #

When astronaut Gene Cernan stepped off the lunar surface for the last time,

it was no giant leap for mankind,

but the last stumble of a dying era.

NASA cancelled the next three moon missions

and quietly drew the Apollo programme to a close.

Cernan was the last human being ever to walk on the moon.

To this day, no-one has returned.

The love affair was over.

But although the public's relationship with the moon had gone sour,

for a small band of dedicated scientists,

the romance was just beginning.

They now had actual pieces of the moon to study.

Nearly 400 kilos of lunar rock

had been brought back by the astronauts.

They hoped that these rocks would unlock the unanswered mysteries of the moon.

Because, despite the moon landings,

scientists still didn't know the answer to the big questions.

Where had the moon come from?

And how had it formed?

One of those starry-eyed young scientists was Gary Lofgren,

a geologist working for NASA.

He was given the job of cutting up each sample ready for study.

You just had no idea what you were going to see,

looking at these really strange-looking rocks

that were just jumbles of debris.

It was a chance to really look at them closely,

to not actually touch them, but come very close,

and we realised we'd never seen anything like that on Earth, or never recognised it on Earth.

Most scientists had assumed that the moon would be similar to Earth.

There'd be a mixture of young and old rocks,

formed in many different ways. They were in for a surprise.

It turned out that our thinking about the moon was really wrong.

Science had not done a very good job of guessing what the moon was going to be like.

People did think it was probably fairly old,

but they didn't realise it was as old as it turned out to be.

We found rocks that are almost four and a half billion years old,

almost the age of our solar system.

Some of these rocks formed just 50-100 million years after the beginning of the planet.

We just don't find rocks that old on Earth.

The moon was an ancient, fossilised world.

Its rocks hadn't changed for billions of years.

Scientists were thrilled.

Basically, the surface of the moon kind of froze roughly three billion years ago

and preserved the first one and a half billion years of its history.

The moon tells us very much about the early history of our solar system.

It's probably one of the best recorders of the early history of our solar system.

This ancient fossil was a scientific gold mine.

Because the moon was so well-preserved,

it meant scientists could finally answer the question that had come to obsess them.

How was the moon formed?

At the time, there were two competing theories.

The first was that the moon and the Earth were formed at the same time,

from the same cloud of dust and gas.

The other theory was that the moon was nothing do with the Earth,

but was wandering alone in space

until the Earth sucked it in with the power of its gravity.

But the rocks themselves didn't seem to support either theory.

They were different enough from rocks on Earth

to make it unlikely they were all formed at the same time.

But they had enough similarities to make it equally unlikely that the moon was completely foreign.

Eventually, scientists came up with a new theory that explained these strange rocks.

It was a brutal tale.

It takes us back four billion years,

to when the solar system was a young and volatile place.

There were many planets and asteroids circling the sun.

One of these was a young Earth.

But there was also another young planet, a bit smaller.

The two were on a collision course.

Eventually, they crashed together.

It was the biggest bang the solar system had ever seen.

The impact was so massive

that it spewed out millions of tons of molten rock and gases.

As this debris circled the Earth,

it came together, forming a separate body - our moon.

When it first formed, the moon was ten times closer to the Earth than it is today.

So it appeared much bigger in the sky

and its gravitational pull was much stronger.

But, over time, it slowly drifted away from the Earth

to its present position, about a quarter of a million miles away.

And there, its orbit seemed to have stabilised,

its distance from Earth fixed for all time.

But a little-known Apollo project has blown that cosy theory away.

Deep in the wilds of West Texas,

Jerry Wiant coaxes his elderly motorbike up to the top of the Davies Mountains.

He and his trusty bike have made this same journey to work

every night since the Apollo programme.

He is on his way to the Texas Laser Ranging station.

This small outpost is one of only three of its kind in the world.

We're the last living Apollo project.

Many people think, "The Apollo projects?

"Oh, they're dead and gone." That's not true.

We're still getting valuable data.

Scientists all over the Earth are still using that data.

So we're still operating, in spite of the fact

that everybody's forgotten what the word Apollo used to mean.

Each clear night, Wiant focuses his telescope on the lunar surface

and fires a powerful laser straight at the moon.

This will measure the exact position of the moon in space.

All right, we're ready to fire the laser.

What we hope is that our beam goes from here to the moon surface

and it comes back and our goal is to measure how long does it take

for our light to go from here to the moon and back.

Their target is a simple device

placed on the moon over 35 years ago.

The Apollo astronauts left behind some simple glass reflectors,

rather like the reflectors on a bicycle light.

This is a chunk of glass that's a corner reflector.

And you can see it. It's three sides and this would be the front side.

So light entering here will go directly back to its source,

and then, our telescope gathers that light

and then feeds it to our detector.

There are four panels of reflectors on the moon,

placed at four different sites.

This one I'm holding in my hand is one.

And you can see there's a row of ten by ten.

This a panel of a hundred of these individual corner reflectors.

Look at the footprint.

You can see the astronaut's footprint in the moon's surface here.

This is an Apollo 14 site, the second site.

And, I don't know if you can see it,

but there's a...there's a bag... there's a Ziploc bag right here.

You can see the red seam.

The astronauts were not required to pick up their litter.

So there's a free Ziploc bag if anybody would like to have it(!)

If the moon's orbit was fixed, then its distance from the Earth

should have stayed the same

ever since Jerry began his measurements.

But it hasn't. The moon, it seems, is on the move.

The moon is receding at a certain rate per year.

3.8cms per year, I believe,

that it's moving out,

moving away, receding.

It doesn't sound like much.

But over time, it's going to bring some big changes.

As the moon pulls away, it'll put an end to one of nature's most glorious spectacles -

a total solar eclipse.

The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun.

But at the moment, it's also precisely 400 times closer to the Earth than the sun is.

This amazing coincidence means that, when the moon passes directly in front of the sun,

it appears exactly the same size.

We are living at the only time in the history of the solar system

when this unique spectacle is possible.

As the moon drifts away from us,

this awe-inspiring sight will be over forever.

So, over the years, scientists continued to make new discoveries about our moon.

But somehow, it was never enough to reignite our passion

for our closest neighbour.

And that was partly because our attention had turned elsewhere.

There are over 150 other moons in the solar system,

and, by the late 1970s, we were starting to explore them.

The results were spectacular.

The journey of discovery began with the Voyager probes.

They were sent to explore the outer solar system -

the gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.

Until now, these extraordinary worlds

had been seen only through telescopes.

It took two years for these probes to reach their first port of call - Jupiter.

Scientists all over the world were gripped,

waiting for the first close-up pictures of the great giant.

But when Voyager started transmitting pictures back to Earth,

they were in for a surprise.

It seemed it was Jupiter's moons, rather than the planet itself,

that held the most exciting secrets.

We thought the moons would be lumps of ice covered in craters.

And that was about it.

But when Voyager started transmitting back pictures of Jupiter's innermost moon, Io,

there was a strange anomaly.

A young NASA scientist spotted an odd-looking bulge on the moon's side.

I came in about nine o'clock that morning to the navigation area

and the pictures the spacecraft had taken a day before were on my desk.

I put them on the computer system and I displayed them,

and I could see that Io, the moon of Io, was a crescent,

as very often our own moon is a crescent in the night sky.

And I went and enhanced the brightness,

and there appeared beside Io an object -

a huge object that looked like something I couldn't recognise

and could never have expected

and it completely captured my attention.

I wanted to know so badly what that was

that I had to ask myself, "My goodness! What is that?!"

And the answer that occurred to me first

was it looked like another moon, peeking out behind Io.

But when she looked closer, she realised it was something completely different.

When I explored it, I was able to find

that this large, strange object

was this huge plume of a volcanic eruption

arising 270km over the surface of Io and raining back down onto it.

So I had discovered the first ever volcanic eruption

ever seen on another world besides the Earth.

Io's vibrant volcanic activity

is caused by the massive gravitational pull

exerted by Jupiter, which squeezes and heats the moon internally.

You could actually see, looking at the edge of Io,

plumes of what turned out to be sulphur dioxide gas

shooting up into space, about 100 miles,

and dropping all this sulphur dioxide snow back onto the surface,

and the whole place is stained red and yellow with sulphur.

It's an incredible place.

Here was a moon to swoon over.

It was far more exciting and exotic than our own boring, lifeless moon.

And Io was just the beginning.

Soon, another of Jupiter's moons - Europa - was also wowing scientists.

Europa's surface had no craters.

Close up, it was covered in cracks and canyons.

Europa clearly had a very young surface.

We could tell that there weren't many large impact craters

and the surface was relatively smooth and cracked.

Not chasms going deep down into it,

but cracks filled with something darker.

A recently active surface.

Looking at it, scientists realised it was similar

to scenes they knew from Earth, from the poles.

Europa was covered in ice.

And because there were no craters,

they knew that the ice must have melted and refrozen many times.

And that could mean only one thing -

there had to be liquid water,

the crucial ingredient for life on Europa.

It got even more exciting when scientists began to speculate

where the heat to melt the ice was coming from.

Again, the answer lay within our own planet.

On the floors of the oceans of the Earth,

scientists had discovered "black smokers" -

volcanic heat sources coming from below the Earth's crust,

warming the water from below.

Perhaps hot vents like these could exist under Europa's icy crust.

Scientists could barely contain their excitement.

Liquid water and a volcanic heat source

sounded like the kind of conditions

that many believe gave birth to life on Earth.

The people who work on the origins of life on Earth today

seem to have come to the conclusion

that the most likely place for life to have begun

is at a hot vent on the ocean floor

and we could have the same sorts of organisms on the floor of the ocean of Europa, at a hot vent.

And if you've got bacterial life, you could have something eating the bacteria.

You could have a whole eco-system down there.

like sharks grazing on smaller fish eating worms and the worms eating the bacteria. We don't know.

There could be all kinds of things there.

But if you want somewhere warm and cosy

for bacterial life to get started and to survive,

Europa is probably the best bet we've got in the entire solar system.

It wasn't just Jupiter's moons that were attracting attention.

When the Voyager probe flew past Saturn,

it captured an image of its largest moon, Titan.

It was strangely fuzzy.

It looked as though Titan was shrouded in an atmosphere,

just like our own planet.

Scientists were desperate to know more.

What lay beneath this thick atmosphere?

Could it have other similarities to Earth?

They didn't get their chance to find out

until 20 years later, when Cassini lifted off.

It was one of the biggest rockets ever launched,

but even so, it took seven years to get to Saturn.

And then, it turned its attention to Titan.

Cassini dropped a probe called Huygens through the Titan atmosphere

onto the hidden surface.

It revealed a world that scientists believe

could be strikingly similar to the early Earth.

Pictures revealed by Huygens on its parachute descent

towards the surface of Titan

showed, at one point, a network of valleys.

You could have been floating over many parts of the Earth.

We've got hills and valleys in between them

and the valleys converge and drain into a sea.

So we can see landforms on Titan

that look very familiar to people who do landform studies on Earth.

The valley networks are very similar to what you get produced by rainfall on the Earth.

The extraordinary images of distant moons

revealed them to be places of great beauty

and tantalising possibilities.

They had volcanoes,

ice-covered oceans,

active geysers

and thick atmospheres.

There was even the possibility of life.

Moons were the most exciting places in the solar system.

And so, scientists began to wonder whether our own long-abandoned moon

was perhaps worth another look.

So, in 1994, a small unmanned orbiter, Clementine,

was sent back to the moon.

The first spacecraft to make the journey in more than 20 years.

And this mission would go somewhere new.

Technology had moved on since the seventies.

And so, Clementine would be able to reach an area of the moon

that had never been seen in detail before -

the lunar poles.

Clementine spent two months

bombarding the moon with radio waves,

and in doing so, it made a discovery that scientists had never dreamt of.

They found what appeared to be patches of ice.

Its radar was getting signals being bounced back from the surface very strongly,

in a way consistent with there being patches of ice down there.

And, er...it's not a lot of ice.

It could...could fill plenty of Olympic-sized swimming pools,

but if you were to melt it and spread it all over the lunar surface,

it would be a millimetre thick.

You're not gonna produce oceans on the moon from this ice.

But enough for humans to exploit.

The existence of water on the moon, even if it was frozen,

changed everything.

The bleak and barren landscape wasn't so inhospitable after all.

Suddenly, the possibilities seemed endless.

With life-sustaining water,

the moon could one day be a base in space,

a stepping stone to the rest of the universe.

Humans might even live there one day.

The love affair was back on.

AUDIENCE APPLAUDS

As if to drive home the renewed fascination,

45 years after President Kennedy's famous pledge to take us to the moon,

another US President launched a new mission.

Returning to the moon

is an important step for our space programme.

Establishing an extended human presence on the moon

could vastly reduce the cost of further space exploration,

making possible ever more ambitious missions.

The moon is a logical step

toward further progress and achievement.

Human beings are headed into the cosmos.

AUDIENCE APPLAUDS

It may have lacked some of his predecessor's rhetorical flourish,

but 35 years after the last man stepped off the moon,

we are finally going back.

NASA has already started planning the new lunar mission.

And it's going to be big.

We are planning to go to the moon

in a particularly different way than what we did with Apollo.

Apollo was short sortie missions.

And we're planning to go to the moon to stay.

It'll be a permanent presence, where each mission adds more capability.

And, eventually, we'll just have people living there.

This time, the aim is to turn the moon into a home from home.

And when this new lunar base is established,

the moon will become our launch padto the rest of the solar system.

The moon is near.

It's three days away. And we can go and practice and perfect

all the techniques and the tools and the things that we need to do

to go off and explore our first foreign planet.

We'll bring tools and we'll bring...

some basic machineries

and then we'll use those machineries, along with the lunar resources,

to make what I refer to as the brute force and ignorance materials.

Bricks - one of the first uses of lunar material will be making bricks.

So you can have someplace to live without being zapped by cosmic rays.

But there doesn't seem to be quite the same urgency as in the 1960s.

NASA's plan is to get back to the moon by 2018.

We have to develop a new lunar lander,

we have to develop and establish the infrastructure on the surface of the moon

that will allow us to live there for long periods of time.

So, as we start the development process,

if we could develop it all at one time,

then we could do it quicker, get to the moon much quicker than 2018.

But given that we have to do this somewhat serially,

we build infrastructure for travel,

then we have to build the lunar pieces,

it'll take between now and about 2018 to get there.

But NASA's public sector plod to the moon isn't quick enough for some.

Now the moon is back in fashion,

NASA have got competition.

The players in the new space race

are a mixture of dreamers, hard-headed businessmen,

and publicity seekers.

But they've got one thing in common - they want action now.

This barren desert in a remote corner of Utah

is the site of a unique experiment.

For one week, it's standing in for the surface of the moon,

complete with mock-up moon base.

This is the Moon Society -

a collection of scientists and space enthusiasts

who are already preparing for a commercial mission to the moon.

Putting on a spacesuit is a two-person job.

And, er... not only because it's difficult.

It also is an opportunity to have somebody else verify

that you have all your connections secure and safe.

Hmm...

Not sure what this is, here.

Their aim is to establish not just a human colony on the moon,

but a full-scale industrial complex.

So they spend their days in the Utah desert testing out the technology

that could one day be part of their mission to the moon.

I think you always start with kind of a thought experiment.

What would it be like to go to the moon?

And what would it be like to live on the moon?

What would it be like to work on the moon?

Then you take it to paper, start making drawings,

and then you take it to the next step.

Eventually you get to a life-size prototype

and you try to make things more and more realistic as time goes on,

so that you flesh out the problems in order to get there.

So the more realism you can introduce,

the more of your homework you can do ahead of time to make sure the mission's successful.

And as they trundle around practising being on the moon,

they can't help but dream.

People on the moon would be involved in using resources

to start manufacturing...

First of all, they wanna manufacture their own building materials

and other things that they need.

Anything they manufacture there would be cheaper

than it is to bring up from Earth's surface.

They could also, you know, if we were to start a settlement on Mars,

the moon and Mars could trade,

and they'd be much more viable together than either one separately.

But there's a problem.

They don't actually have a spaceship.

Or any money.

But their optimism is unquenchable.

It's WHEN people move to the moon.

It's not a... It's an eventuality.

It's not something that's probably going to happen or might happen,

it WILL happen.

Others are less ambitious than the Moon Society.

For some, the moon represents a straightforward commercial opportunity.

We started out as a group of engineers and space enthusiasts,

got together online

and posed ourselves the challenge

of what is the lowest-cost but commercially-viable lunar mission

that we could come up with?

We came up with the Trailblazer Mission.

Unlike the Moon Society,

Trailblazer have at least found a rocket to take them to the moon.

Although not an entirely conventional one.

The launch vehicle is a converted SS18 Satan ICBM.

That's a Cold War nuclear missile.

They essentially take the missile out of the launch silo,

remove the warhead,

recondition the payload bay to accommodate commercial payloads.

But these commercial payloads do not include people.

Instead, the converted missile

will deliver much cheaper, lighter items to the surface of the moon.

This is a line of cosmetics.

This is actually a lipstick.

You can see the obvious space theme.

One of the more popular cargo items is with artists.

This is from a gentleman in Minnesota who has an art gallery.

And this is Alchemist

and this is Intelligence Of Beauty.

These are original artworks.

We also have several customers who have asked us to carry

representative samples of cremated remains...

from loved ones to the lunar surface.

Your going rate for cargo is 1000 a gram,

including handling and packaging

and delivery to the lunar surface.

It's not immediately clear what the point is of delivering lipstick to the surface of the moon.

But if someone's willing to pay, the technology is there to do it.

This is the Penetrator,

which will carry cargo to the surface of the moon.

Down the middle of the Penetrator

is a 1 inch, 2.5cm, open cargo space

into which we can load various objects

to be carried to the surface of the moon.

It's carried internally inside the spacecraft,

and when the spacecraft impacts at the end of the mission,

this will punch through the front

and come to rest about ten metres into the lunar soil.

This is very much a commercial proposition.

They're even offering to deliver business cards to the surface of the moon.

Or rather, ten metres under the surface.

We have a standard rate for regular-sized business cards.

One business card just happens to weigh about one gram.

We expect these items to be there practically forever,

unless somebody goes up and removes them.

But the big prize is still to get a person back to the moon.

And there is one private sector challenge to NASA's moon monopoly that might just succeed.

Government always plays a big role in getting things started.

But after a while,

the citizenry has to take over.

I mean, after all, the world and the universe belongs to all of us.

It's not just individual governments.

So I think you're starting to see that now.

Greg Olsen has already been to space.

But he's not an astronaut and he's never worked for NASA.

He's a businessman.

Last year, he paid 20 million for a week-long trip

to the International Space Station.

I know, with my spaceflight,

the money I thought about for five minutes,

and it was a simple yes or no decision,

and once I made it, I never thought about money.

Olsen is one of the new breed of explorers -

the space tourists who are prepared to spend millions of dollars

to fulfil a lifelong dream.

And now, there's a company who aim to make their dreams come true.

They've already sent three people into space

and now they're adding a new destination to their brochure.

It gives me great pleasure to be here today to talk to you.

Because today is a historic day.

Space Adventures is going to the moon.

The moon mission is open to the public,

meaning anyone who has the financial capability

to afford the price of the seats. They're each priced at 100 million.

At the front of the queue is Greg Olsen.

Who wouldn't want to see the moon up close?

You may not want to go through the space ride to get there,

but just imagine if you could look out and there's the moon,

there's this big moon, the way we're looking at the Earth now.

Just...to me, it would be mind-boggling.

I'd really like to do it.

And the company thinks there'll be no shortage of takers.

You really don't have to sell a moon mission.

It's making history, it's going where less than 30 people have gone before.

You really don't need a sales tactic for that.

In a neat twist from the Cold War rivalry of the 1960s,

the company works in partnership with the Russian Space Agency.

Rich clients provide the funds and the cash-strapped Russians provide the hardware.

And it's technology straight out of the 1960s - the Soyuz Rocket System.

The Soyuz Rocket System

was first designed in the 1960s

for the Soviet lunar programme.

Once the Americans landed on the moon,

the Soviet's lunar programme was almost just abandoned.

But one of the reasons why it was abandoned

was that the Soviet manned lunar programme of the 1960s was a failure.

Not only did they fail to get a man on the moon,

but they also failed to even put a man into orbit around the moon,

despite 18 attempts to make the technology work.

They hope that the cash injection from the rich Westerners

will help them do better this time.

Everything in life is a risk.

There's various degrees.

The Soyuz was designed for lunar orbit,

so it's certainly capable of doing it.

The Russians have a great space programme -

great instruction, great cosmonauts -

so I would have a lot of confidence.

This private-sector mission has a fighting chance of at least putting a person into orbit around the moon.

But even they could be overtaken by a new dark horse.

A late entry in the new race to the moon - China.

Its economy is booming.

It's a global superpower.

And now it's turning its attention to space.

In 2003, the Chinese put a man in space

and brought him safely back to Earth.

In 2005, they did it again.

Now they say they want to put a man on the moon.

Few would bet against them.

With China coming up, um...

we've had astronauts, and cosmonauts in Russia,

and now taikonauts in China.

Now, they've had two orbits of the Earth and, you know, that's nice.

And people say, "Well, it's primitive technology,"

But you wait ten years and see where those people are with space flight.

Whoever wins the race to get back to the moon, there's little doubt

that our most ancient love affair is back on.

In many ways, it's a relationship that's finally grown up.

We've been through infatuation and courtship.

We've had a bit of a rocky patch.

Now, the relationship has emerged stronger than ever.

And this time, it looks like we're in for the long haul.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2006

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