Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt has a warning about China

Only 12 men have walked on the moon — all during the Apollo program from 1969 to 1972 — and just four are still alive. Schmitt was the only geologist, spending 21 hours over three days collecting samples and exploring “a beautiful valley” deeper than the Grand Canyon on Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon.

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Schmitt told the Washington Examiner that China is maybe five years from landing a man to the moon, and that NASA won’t be able to catch up unless it undergoes a management shakeup and sheds civil service rules that make a federal job a near-permanent gig.

The U.S. needs a young engineering workforce and to streamline oversight processes before it can return to the moon in the near future, he said, calling for Congress to exempt NASA or a moon-focused program from traditional civil service job protections.

President Trump’s space policy directive ordering a return to the moon and ultimately Mars is promising, Schmitt said, but could be doomed without structural reform.

After he returned to Earth, Schmitt served a single term as a Republican senator from New Mexico. He laid out many ideas for U.S. space policy in his 2006 book Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space, in which he emphasizes exploiting helium-3 — a rare isotope on Earth — for rocket fuel and energy generation.

Washington Examiner: What is your impression of the Trump administration’s emphasis on space exploration?

Schmitt: I think they are recognizing the very challenging geopolitical environment that we live in today, very much like the days of the Apollo missions, except the new competitor for the free world in space is China. And now the real issue is, can NASA organize itself in order to implement a program such as outlined by both the president and the vice president in their various announcements.

Washington Examiner: What’s the biggest challenge in returning men to the moon?

Schmitt: Management. If you have a workable management system you probably can persuade Congress, which in the House is very interested in the president’s initiative.

But unless you put together a management environment very much like we had for Apollo, it’s going to be very difficult, I think, to implement this program and to sustain it and for it to be successful.

Washington Examiner: What would you recommend?

Schmitt: If you go back and try to understand why the management environment for Apollo led to success, you can pretty well define what needs to be done. Number one, you need a young system, young people. The average age for Apollo was in the mid-20s most of the time. A lot of people don’t understand that, but it was really a young person’s program, much like military programs are today and always have been.

Also there was a minimally layered management system, which meant that a good idea at a lower level could move very rapidly to implementation if it was indeed a good idea. That’s very difficult in NASA today, partly because it’s old, but largely because there are many, many layers of management that are probably unnecessary. The basic thing is you need to be making decisions at the lowest possible level to stay on schedule and reduce costs.

With respect to costs, you also need to have a reserve of funding — we call them management reserves — that allow you to maintain schedule milestones while dealing with unanticipated engineering problems. Complex programs are always going to have unknowns, and you need reserves in order to deal with those. Apollo had those reserves primarily because of Cold War incentives, but also because management had made clear to the president and Congress that reserves were necessary, and Congress in a bipartisan way went along with those. That’s much more difficult today.

Washington Examiner: How does a program stay young?

Schmitt: One of the things Congress needs to do and the administration needs to ask for is to change the civil service rules so the agency can stay young. The military can stay young because of the way its personnel system works. NASA doesn’t have that luxury at this time because it works under the civil service rules. But if you’re going to stay young, you’re going to have to be able to move people who reached a certain level of experience to jobs somewhere else.

Right now, it’s essentially impossible to do that under current civil service rules. When Apollo was in full swing the average age of the agency was about 25, 26 and it’s now close to 50 and that’s just because of these civil service rules.

Washington Examiner: What are the top reasons to return astronauts to the moon?

Schmitt: The primary geopolitical reason is because China is going there. There’s no question in my mind that they are going to be occupying the moon as rapidly as they can. They want to be dominant in space and they are moving in that direction. Their program is a purely military program — it’s basically run by their military — and they understand the geopolitical importance of that high ground psychologically, as well as potentially militarily.

There are also resources on the moon that can be very important to us here on Earth, primarily energy resources. But there are also resources you need if you’re going to have a long term exploration program that includes Mars. Those are the consumable resources that human beings and spacecraft need to work — oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, those kind of things — and the moon is rich in those resources. And once you’re established on the moon, it’s going to be much cheaper and easier to produce those resources there than to carry them to the moon or carry them to Mars from Earth.

You also have to remember that we have not had a generation working in deep space for a long time. And people need to learn how to do that. The risks of deep space have not changed, they are still there, and people have to learn how to manage those risks. That’s what Apollo did and it has to be relearned.

You also have to remember we don’t really know how to get to Mars at minimum risk and land there. Mars is going to be a very difficult task. It’s going to take a whole new set of engineering ideas and technologies. There’s just enough atmosphere around Mars to cause problems and not nearly enough to help you very much, as does the Earth’s atmosphere on entry. Also the radiation environment, if you are exposed to it for long periods of time, it’s something we haven’t really figured out how to manage. I think we have some good ideas. One of them is having a great amount of water shield your spacecraft. Well the moon is also a source of water that can provide that rather than trying to bring that from the Earth.

But maybe one of those best ways to deal with that radiation exposure is to get there in a hurry. And so developing new spacecraft rocket systems that can accelerate and decelerate on the way to Mars would be a very important part of it, and there’s a form of fusion power that is nearly ideal for that. It’s called helium-3 fusion. And guess what? The moon has a significant amount of this light isotope of helium, helium-3, whereas we do not have it available to us on Earth except in very small amounts from a very special source. So you can see in learning how to deal with these issues of going to Mars that it’s going to be much better to journey three days away from Earth rather than nine months away from Earth, and the moon is the place to do that.

As you noticed, I haven’t even mentioned the science that comes from going to the moon. That’s frosting on the cake. But if your geopolitical goal is ultimately Mars, then the moon is a very important adjunct and early precursor to making that trip successful, and to managing the risk of deep space.

Washington Examiner: What do we have to learn about mining the moon? Should we worry about removing mass?

Schmitt: We’re talking about a minimal amount of mass, you’ll take more mass there than you would take away. I wrote a book about it 12 years ago, Return to the Moon, it’s a pretty comprehensive book about how you would establish a permanent settlement on the moon to harvest that resource, helium-3, because it has a tremendous value back here on Earth for power production in addition to its value for rocket propulsion getting to Mars.

NASA is now — they were not at the time [of the book] — working on a new heavyweight launch system [and there are now] commercial launch rockets … but it takes a big rocket to get significant mass to the moon. And we aren’t there yet. SpaceX isn’t there, Blue Origin isn’t there, NASA isn’t there with rockets of the size that we need.

Washington Examiner: Why did the U.S. lose interest in going to the moon? Will Trump’s calls to return be remembered as a JFK-type vision?

Schmitt: We will see. Two other presidents tried to get us started again, and those efforts failed for various reasons.

There are several things that happened, but one little technical thing: the Johnson administration only proposed to buy 15 Saturn V rockets and the Nixon administration went along with it. If you only have five Saturn V rockets, you aren’t going to keep going to the moon.

When we finally did [run out of rockets], the politicians lost interest. But you go back to the 1960s and ’70s and you see all the other political pressures put on politicians at the time. The main thing is our education system doesn’t teach history and the lessons of history as well as it should. So it’s awfully hard for politicians and the media to maintain a long term perspective on how important some things like space can be.

So long as the American public is getting information about space, they are quite enthusiastic about it. But once the media loses interest and the politicians lose interest, then the public hears nothing about it.

Washington Examiner: Is commercial space work the future? Or is the government necessary?

Schmitt: So far I don’t think anybody is making money in the commercial area unless the government pays for it.

Right now, [companies including SpaceX and Blue Origin] are able to attract young people and keep young people involved in their programs. That’s probably the main reason for their success, the attraction to young engineers and skilled workers who will work on these very exciting projects. We’ll have to see if they will indeed move into the future. But their primary customer is and will continue to be the U.S. government. And that’s not exactly commercial.

My own feeling is, yes, at the top of the pile there is a very viable commercial opportunity on the moon dealing with helium-3 fusion.

Washington Examiner: What would you tell President Trump about moon real estate?

Schmitt: Under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, of which we are a signatory to, unless you opt out of that treaty you cannot claim sovereignty over any celestial body including the moon.

The United States and its like-minded allies need to come up with a claims regime for the moon so you can encourage private development of areas.

The first private development, I think, that sustains everything else is producing helium-3 fusion fuel for use here on Earth. That I think can be a very profitable enterprise. And the first settlement on the moon is probably going to be very much like many early settlements we have here on Earth. They are going to be company towns, obviously regulated properly by the host country, hopefully the United States. But nevertheless, they would be part of that private enterprise effort.

Now, around those settlements almost certainly would develop other activities, scientific as well as potentially tourist and other opportunities. But the main stimulus is going to have to be, I think, a purely commercial economic stimulus. And the moon fortunately offers an energy resource that’s going to make that possible when someone steps up to the mark.

Washington Examiner: While you were on the moon, did you imagine more progress by the year 2018?

Schmitt: Being the only geologist to have a chance to explore the moon, I was not thinking very profound thoughts about the future while I was on the moon. Since then, I’ve tried to think reasonably profound thoughts about it. It’s going to be a very, very important part of humankind’s future. It’s just a question of who’s going to lead that effort: is it the forces of freedom that are going to lead it, or the forces of tyranny?

Washington Examiner: What are the consequences of an authoritarian nation colonizing the moon or exploiting its resources first?

Schmitt: Psychologically, it’s going to make it very difficult for us to continue to lead here on Earth. That was a major stimulus for the Apollo program, a psychological stimulus, how it affects the minds and hearts of people around the world. And I think clearly that is an important part of the present as well.

Also, there’s an extraordinary opportunity for energy resources — clean energy resources, highly efficient resources — that come from lunar helium-3. And China has talked about that. They make no secret that they are interested in that. This has not been lost on the Chinese at all.

They not only would have the geopolitical advantage, but they might well dominate power production 100 years from now here on Earth. It may not be 100 years, it might be more like 50 years.

Washington Examiner: When does the U.S. need to make big moves before China pulls ahead?

Schmitt: China probably has the capability to put a human on the moon in five years. If you reorganize NASA and get to work on it we could probably do it in five to 10 years, just like the Chinese. But you’re going to have to get to work. And so far, we’re not getting to work.

Washington Examiner: Will humans ultimately colonize other planets, in this solar system or beyond?

Schmitt: I think it’s quite reasonable. Certainly settlements on the moon are well within our reach. Settlements on Mars are almost within our reach. When you go beyond that, though, you start to run into all sorts of realities of physics and the space environment.

But I suspect in the very long term you will see human beings certainly all over the solar system and possibly even the galaxy, we’ll have to wait and see. Physics is a hard master and dealing with the speed of light is something we don’t quite know how to deal with yet. Star Trek got warp speed, we don’t know quite what to do with that.

Washington Examiner: Congress quietly funded UFO research until recently. Do you believe aliens exist?

Schmitt: The statistical chances of there being life in some form, probably carbon-based life like ours, elsewhere in the galaxy and in the universe is very, very high.

But the statistical probability of those lifeforms either being advanced enough or having beaten the laws of physics to come and visit the Earth are very, very small. So you’re fighting two types of statistics.

If there are [more advanced lifeforms], they have failed in their communications skills, or we may not be having this conversation.

Washington Examiner: President Trump has talked about creating a Space Force a branch of the military. What do you think?

Schmitt: Ultimately that environment is going to be as important to our national security — and it probably already is — as any other terrestrial environment. And it will be likely that a specialized Space Force is going to be important at that time.

Whether this is the right time, I’m going to have to let the experts in the Defense Department debate those points and make their recommendations to the president. But ultimately, I think it’s probably inevitable.

Right now, the main military role in space is to protect those assets that provide for our national security — satellites that give us information we need to protect ourselves. That’s certainly the immediate role of the military in space — providing secure communications, as well as secure communications for our economy. Whether you ever get to the point where there’s actual human conflict in space is a little hard to predict.