In 1962, President John F. Kennedy called to put a man on the Moon by decade’s end, and to “shift our efforts in space from low to high gear.” Clearly, the U.S. met his challenge; however, he was addressing a world very different from that of today. As he also said in his speech, “There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet.”
We are in a new Space Race, where one key event is being the first to establish an occupied lunar camp. The Chinese and Russians have invited international partners to participate in their lunar base, which has an ambitious timeline. They expect to see site selection by 2025, a decade of construction, and then full operation after 2036. Counter this with the lethargic and slipping timeline of the U.S.’s effort to return a person to the Moon by 2024. This is not a race that the Western world can lose. The country that arrives first will get to lead the discussion on the norms of interplanetary life—consider how the internet would be different if China had established initial norms.
To compete in this renewed Space Race, including the entirety of the U.S. government is critical. NASA is the lead, but there is a greatly overlooked opportunity within the federal government that should provide more consultation to the program, and that could do so without requiring the development of new programs: the Department of Defense (DoD). While the Outer Space Treaty says the Moon and celestial bodies shall be used for “exclusively peaceful purposes” and “the establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications … shall be forbidden,” it also says “military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purpose shall not be prohibited.” Therefore, the use of military personnel, expeditionary experiences, and knowledge to assist NASA in planning and executing a lunar base are well within the confines of what’s considered the peaceful use of space.
DARPA’s recent LunA 10 project to identify risks and commercial solutions for a future lunar economy is a positive step towards incorporating DoD capabilities. However, this study is intended to bring in new technology to the race when there is already great, underutilized knowledge in the larger DoD.
The DoD has extensive experience in planning, executing, and sustaining operating locations in harsh, contested terrestrial environments around the world at the extreme ends of long and contested logistics lines. Just consider the DoD’s doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, education, personnel, facilities (DOTMLPF) investments, which have resulted in a significant infrastructure of strategic understanding and subject-area knowledge that could benefit NASA in its push for a lunar settlement.
The DoD heavily invests in doctrine and publications to plan for and conduct operations. For the space race, existing strategic documents and guidebooks including Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Planning, and Joint Publication 4-0, Logistics, are simply the highest-level examples of the documented intellectual capital, wargaming, experimentation, and lessons learned for remote operations with embedded concepts such as the Time Phased Force and Deployment Data (TPFDD) which is how the DoD organizes personnel and cargo movements over time around the world. Below this tip of the doctrine are a plethora of subordinate publications such as the Multi-Service Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Airfield Opening; and then, each Service has its own publications as well — all a wealth of knowledge not yet utilized in the race for a lunar outpost.
The DoD is organized for expeditionary, power projection capability. for example, personnel (operators, engineers, logisticians, etc.) in the U.S. Transportation Command, the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division or Joint Task Force-Port Opening, or the Air Force’s Air Expeditionary Task Force are trained, educated, and well-rehearsed to ensure remote operations are successful.
Working with the defense industrial base, remote basing materiel is one area into which the DoD has invested significant research, development, and purchasing over the last 20 years. The Army and Air Force both deploy and continuously improve self-contained base camp kits that include all electrical and mechanical fittings, life support facilities, and limited initial repair capability, all while working to minimize the transportation footprint. The DoD has also invested heavily in the development of soil stabilizing for helicopter landing zones to reduce the risk of brown outs. While obviously these cannot be directly employed on the lunar surface, the considerations and lessons learned that went into building out the requirements and the solutions could be applied with the assistance of the defense industrial base.
Behind all this research, development, doctrine, and materiel is a government and higher education research ecosystem that contains personnel, centers, and labs that outnumber the Artemis research labs seven times over (113 to 16, to be specific). If the research already accomplished by the DoD on remote basing planning, opening, and sustaining could be applied to the lunar basing research, and the different teams aligned to jointly focus on new challenges, the U.S. might have a chance to catch up. As in Kennedy’s Space Race, the DoD does not need to take the lead. But without increased collaboration and prioritization across the federal government, the U.S. will not see the same success in this Space Race as it did against the Soviet Union.
Colonel Matthew H. Beverly is an Air Force Civil Engineer with 24 years of experience. He has planned and executed initial base construction, base expansion, and sustainment across the United States, Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific. Most recently he commanded the 1st Expeditionary Civil Engineer Group directing heavy construction and maintenance across nine Middle Eastern countries. He is a prior Assistant Professor at the U.S. Army War College where he taught military strategy and campaign plan development. He also co-led research sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD R&E) and Army Futures Command to improve the DoD’s Science and Technology strategy.
Lt. Col (Ret) Patrick C. Suermann, PhD, is the Interim Dean of the Texas A&M School of Architecture. Before his appointment as interim dean, Suermann served for four and a half years as head of the Texas A&M Department of Construction Science. Suermann is an established researcher who has published numerous journal articles, national standards, book chapters and presented at various professional conferences including the American Society of Civil Engineers Construction Research Congress as well as the Earth and Space Conference, and more. Suermann retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2017 as a Lieutenant Colonel after a distinguished military career of building runways in remote areas of the world or teaching engineering to future leaders of character. Suermann regularly publishes in high profile journals on civil engineering, construction, and lunar construction/materials and was most recently quoted in the New York Times for the future of lunar architecture.
Captain Arpan Patel is the 560th RED HORSE Director of Operations in Charleston S.C. leading the highly mobile, heavy construction unit to build heavy horizontal or vertical infrastructure in austere locations world-wide. He previously served as the Branch Chief of the Air Force Airfield Pavement Evaluation Program where he and his teams were responsible for evaluating structural capabilities and conditions of over 200 airfields across 6 continents. Arpan additionally serves as a Board Director for the Society of American Military Engineers, a global organization that integrates government agencies with industry to improve relationships, build outcomes and streamline large infrastructure efforts and projects.
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