Inside NASA's Plan to Bomb the Moon

and Find Water

Short on time and tight on money, a team of NASA engineers aims to solve the
mystery of lunar ice in late winter—by crashing its low-budget kamikaze
spacecraft into a crater.
By Michael Milstein
Published in the September 2008 issue.
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KEYWORDS

• Moon
• spacecraft
• Northrop Grumman
• NASA
• Future Of Space
Northrop Grumman engineers in Redondo Beach, Calif., lower the LCROSS spacecraft into a vacuum chamber that simulates
conditions in space. It will be destroyed while seeking water ice on the moon.

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Astronomers hate the moon. It's so bright that it blinds telescopes like the sun in a
driver's eyes. There's no atmosphere, and the geology is basically dead. Maybe that's
why, decades after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked there, we have clearer maps
of Mars than of our nearest neighbor.

But now, NASA needs to know more. The agency plans to return astronauts to the lunar
surface in 12 years as the first step in establishing a permanent outpost. The base could
be an ideal location for manufacturing processes best suited for low gravity, or for
helium-3 mining to fuel future fusion reactors. The agency also sees the moon as the
perfect construction site and launchpad for eventual manned journeys to Mars.

Water is a key ingredient in these grand schemes, because it can be broken down into
oxygen for lunar bases and fuel for rockets. In 1998 a probe called Lunar Prospector
spotted tantalizing signs of hydrogen in craters at the lunar poles. But no one's sure if
the hydrogen is the chemical signature of water ice, possibly deposited by comets and
meteors.

NASA's first step toward a moon base is the $491 million Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter (LRO), a satellite designed to map the terrain in intimate detail. In January
2006, after several years of development, LRO engineers decided to use a larger Atlas V
to launch LRO, creating 2200 pounds of extra cargo capacity. The agency put out the
word to its 10 research centers: What can you come up with to make use of that space—
before the earliest LRO launch window in October 2008?

Winning a Free Ride

Dan Andrews, a rangy, plain-spoken Silicon Valley native with 21 years at NASA,
reacted quickly to the call for proposals. He and other engineers from Ames Research
Center near San Jose, Calif., formed what they called the Blue Ice team and met in an
old Navy dorm, hoping to dream up a project that would probe the polar craters for
water.

There was more at stake than proving water ice existed on the moon: "It was to get back
in the game," Andrews says. Ames's aging wind tunnels and battleship-gray buildings in
Silicon Valley, once hotbeds of aeronautical research, sit in the technological shadow of
nearby Google and eBay. NASA has cut its programs and threatened it with closure.
Now, Ames had a shot at retooling itself as a shop for fast, cheap missions.

Andrews had no budget for an expensive lander to seek water, and conditions in the
eternally dark polar craters would kill rovers, with temperatures close to minus 300 F.
Instead, Blue Ice and its partners at Northrop Grumman came up with a concept to bring
the lunar floor out in the open. A bare-bones spacecraft, dubbed the Lunar Crater
Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), would sit beneath the LRO atop the Atlas
rocket. After launch, with the LRO safely bound for the moon, LCROSS would remain
attached to the Atlas's spent upper-stage rocket, known as the Centaur. Using the moon's
gravity, LCROSS would maneuver the Centaur—"like a VW steering a school bus,"
Andrews says—into an elongated orbit around Earth that assured a collision with one of
the moon's poles.

Nine hours before impact, 24,000 miles above the lunar surface, LCROSS and the
Centaur would separate. The 5000-pound Centaur would crash into a dark crater at
twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kicking up a plume of debris more than 6 miles high.
Four minutes later, the heavily instrumented LCROSS would ride the plume, checking
for water and relaying data to Earth until it, too, slammed into the lunar surface.

Just three months after NASA called for proposals, LCROSS beat 18 other submissions
from leading centers such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight
Center. Now all they had to do was assemble a first-of-its-kind spacecraft at a breakneck
pace (30 months) for a bargain price ($79 million). "Whatever had to happen," says
Marvin Christensen, acting chief of Ames, "had to happen at warp speed for NASA."

(Editors’ note: The LCROSS mission has been delayed until late February or early
March 2009, due to delays in the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. But that’s not
stopping its engineers....)