Scientists float plan to blast water to moon

Clean water act
SLAM could even serve as an emergency, launch-on-demand service, Stern continued, for lunar-situated crews in need of a rapid recharge of oxygen, hydrogen or liquid water to drink.

SLAM is also, in a way, a "clean water act" for the moon. There's no telling what the quality of water ice, bacteriawise, might be in those darkened polar craters — if indeed it’s there.

Another ballistic bonus of SLAM is creation of a calibrated comet impact crater. The shot-to-the-Moon ball of ice is a little comet, Stern noted.

Moreover, scientists could study the transport efficiency of water on the moon. Molecules of water that are introduced into the lunar environment from outside sources hop around like droplets on a griddle — but some of those molecules make their way to the poles. The survival rate of those water molecules is a great scientific question, Stern said.

"SLAM is a nexus of three or four things in exploration and science," Stern said. "I defy you to find a space mission that’s cheaper or simpler" than a mission that essentially involves just two things: a rocket and a garden hose left behind at the pad.

Cutting the Gordian knot
Rockets lifting thousands of gallons of water skyward has been part of U.S. space history.

In the early 1960s, test missions for the Saturn 1 booster involved hurling water-filled upper stages into space, even dumping loads of water into Earth’s upper atmosphere under Project Highwater.

"SLAM was designed to take advantage of the high-performance and precision-injection capability of the existing Atlas 401," said Bernard Kutter, manager of advanced programs at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in nearby Denver.

Kutter explained to Space.com that, by utilizing existing Atlas capabilities, SLAM can provide a low-cost, low-risk, novel lunar science mission furthering our understanding of the moon and water transport around the moon.

The Southwest Research Institute’s Stern emphasized that SLAM is the output of roughly a dozen people that tackled a set of issues … to cut the Gordian Knot that's tangled up the value of polar volatiles and the difficulty of polar operations.

"To us it made a lot of sense. We couldn’t find an obvious flaw in it … not to say that it doesn’t have pros and cons," Stern explained. One constraint is that an Earth-to-moon ice ball strike must take place during lunar night, he said, with mining recovery necessary before sunrise to prevent ice sublimation after impact.

That’s a practical, real-world problem, Stern observed, just as deep ocean drilling here on Earth has its problems, too. In exchange for those troubles there are great rewards, he said.

"We’re proud of the SLAM idea," Stern concluded. "It’ll be up to others to see if this concept, I guess you could say, 'holds water.'"

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