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Why a moon colony? | |
| Building a moon colony would obviously be a giant achievement for mankind, but would it have any scientific or economical use? According to PERMANENT (Projects to Employ Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near Term), a moon colony would serve an economical purpose: Getting lunar material in orbit so that it can be sold to support space development. According to Plattsburgh students working on their Genesis project, which is a study of a possible lunar colony, we will go to the moon because we are instinctively driven: |  |
| People have been expanding, almost constantly, like natural gas when not in a container. The natural phenomenon of natural gas is that it is always expanding. The gaseous phase of matter has no definite shape, and neither does our society. We have never stuck with one way of existence. We have been moving, settling, shifting, and exploring since the very beginning of our time. This raises the current problem; we have nowhere else to go. We have covered the lithosphere (with the exception of Antarctica, which is kind of cold), plumbed the highest reaches of our atmosphere, searched the depths of our seas, and now we are at a stand still. Where do we go from here? Up, out, and away. | |
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Furthermore, they say, lunar colonization is a matter of survival. Surely, people will die if we embark on a journey to the stars,
but it is also a way of escaping the dangers of the earth: diseases, warfare and other threats to the earth. To read their entire rationale, go to their Genesis Project website
http://www.plattsburgh.edu/acadvp/honors/Space/genesis.html. | |
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Eureka! H2O!In 1996, the Pentagon announced that Clementine, a NASA space probe, had found frozen ice on the moon's poles. This was a discovery of enormous magnitude, as this means a tremendous decrease of costs in building a moon colony. Water is not only a primary requirement for life, it's also possible to convert it into oxygen and even fuel. If it hadn't been present on the moon, the costs of a future moon base would be ten times as much. If you click on the images in the left column, you can see the photos made by Clementine. |