What does “the dark side of the moon” mean to you? If you are of a certain age and uncertain taste, it evokes a 1973 album by Pink Floyd. If your memory is as pin-sharp as President Joe Biden’s is, you will also recall that in 1968, Americans were the first humans to see it, on the Apollo 8 mission. If you are Vladimir Putin, you will recall that it was the Soviet Union that pioneered our knowledge of it. You may also appreciate that one of your biggest fans in the West is Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who really has gone over to the dark side.
The dark side isn’t actually dark. It is unknown. Its darkness is that of our own ignorance. A Soviet probe took the first photos of it in 1959. The Soviets published a two-volume Atlas of the Far Side of the Moon in 1960 and 1965, and we still use the Soviets’ nomenclature for its many craters. Despite the antagonisms of the Cold War, the Soviets named many of them after Westerners, including Joseph Priestley, H.G. Wells, Marie Curie, and Edward Jenner. Perhaps they thought they were winning.
Jenner invented modern vaccination. These days, his surname is more likely to evoke Bruce Jenner (once an Olympian, now a man with a “neovagina” called Caitlyn, still a Republican) and his daughters Kendall and Kylie (reality TV performers, influencers, half-sister satellites of the Kardashians). The Soviets would have called that “capitalist decadence.” They would have been right. But as they picked the wrong military and industrial policies, they aren’t here.
And we aren’t there. The dark side of the moon is now Chinese territory. In 1969, the Apollo 11 crew planted the Stars and Stripes on the side we can see, notifying the world that President Richard Nixon was the elected ruler of the universe and inspiring the four sides of Pink Floyd’s spaced-out Ummagumma album. On June 5, the unmanned Chinese vehicle Chang’e 6 landed in the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin. It collected 4.4 lbs. of rocks and planted a Chinese flag.
The Soviets named the Aitken Basin for the American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken (1864-1951). Aitken invented the study of double stars. These come in three types. “Visual binaries” are paired in mutual orbit by gravity, like Kim Kardashian’s backside. “Optical doubles” are, like the Jenner-Kardashian clan’s business ventures, unrelated but appear to align when viewed from sufficient distance and earthly perspective. “Non-visual binaries” are pairings that, like Bruce Jenner’s testes, cannot be seen but whose prior existence can be inferred by science.
These are the kind of stars that Americans really care about. The language of double stars is also an exploitable resource for metaphors about the Cold War and the current American-Chinese rivalry, but all that is far too serious. When Newt Gingrich ran for the Republican nomination in 2012, he was mocked for suggesting that the U.S. should build a base on the moon before someone else did. Ex-President Donald Trump was ridiculed for establishing the U.S. Space Force in 2019.
The presumption, expressed by then-candidate Biden in 2019, is that China is “not competition for us.” That is the darkness of ignorance. It is dawning on us that the Chinese have been serious for years, and not just about the moon. Elbridge Colby, ex-deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, warned last week that China is “operating at the forefront of human development”: artificial intelligence, green tech, drone and hypersonic weaponry, and of course vaccine research. Soon, a presidential scriptwriter will hit upon the metaphorical potential of saying that we are on the side of the light while they are on the dark side. As Pink Floyd put it, “Us and Them.”
The exploitable resources on the dark side include the gas helium-3. A 2022 paper from the University of Alberta notes that helium-3 is rare down here, plentiful up there, and handy for running a nuclear fusion plant. Mix 2.2 lbs. of helium-3 with 1.5 lbs. of deuterium, and you can produce “19 years of megawatt energy — enough power to run the United States for a whole year.” Deuterium is not available at Home Depot, either, but it composes 1 in every 6,500 atoms of seawater, so it soon should be. It will be sold under its old name, “Heavy Water,” which sounds like a Pink Floyd album.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Department of Energy is working on deuterium-tritium fusion. Tritium is the radioactive hydrogen isotope that supplies the phosphorescence on the dial of your wristwatch. Tritium is not available in Home Depot, because it also boosts the power of nuclear detonations. It is produced naturally when cosmic rays strike nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere, but we can capture it from a nuclear explosion. You can already guess which method the DOE will pick. You can already imagine the protests, the regulatory tangle, and the court cases that will delay Pete Buttigieg or some other genius from implementing fission energy in the U.S. while the Chinese import helium-3 and corner the global energy market.
Also on June 5, Boeing launched its Starliner “space taxi.” It set off five years behind schedule and with three “unidentifiable” helium leaks. Be serious.
