Moon, Bitches

10:24 pm EST December 4th, 2006 | Politics | 9 Comments

This sounds hell-a cool to me.

NASA unveiled plans yesterday to set up a small and ultimately self-sustaining settlement of astronauts at the south pole of the moon sometime around 2020 — the first step in an ambitious plan to resume manned exploration of the solar system.

This past weekend I finally watched the movie, The Dish, and if you’re a space nut like me and love the idea of man on the moon, check it out.

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9 Responses to “Moon, Bitches”

  1. jerry says:
    December 4, 2006 at 10:28 pm

    If they had planned this 14 years ago for today, I would have thought this was cool.

    But now, 2020, 14 years from now? This idea is crap. Complete crap. Um, unless they plan on letting 60 year olds live up there. Then it’s cool, really really cool!!!!

  2. Sirkowski says:
    December 5, 2006 at 7:24 am

    The Moon Liberation Front is pleased.

  3. Lettuce says:
    December 5, 2006 at 3:06 pm

    A Moon base to aid the trip to Mars.

    Excellent.

    They can balst all that materiel from Earth to the Moon so they can launch from the Moon and thereby avoid Earth’s gravity.

    Except…

    How they getting the stuff to the Moon factory so they can build it?

    This is stupidity raised to the highest level.

  4. Iceman says:
    December 5, 2006 at 3:26 pm

    It doesn’t sound cool at all as far as I’m concerned – it’s a huge waste of money. Unmanned space flight can accomplish virtually all of the scientific advances of manned space flight at a tiny percentage of the cost, let alone the cost of a permanent moon base. They should put these Mars and Moon fantasies aside, and send only machines into space from now on.

  5. Southern Quaker says:
    December 5, 2006 at 5:21 pm

    The *only* reason we are thinking about going the Moon/Mars route is because Bush was casting around for something legacy-like to inspire folks the way his war-on-terror hasn’t managed (for some reason).

    As a result, we have the politico managers at NASA forcing this stuff down scientists throats and cutting funding to some very important, scientifically valid missions. The astronomical community is publicly making the best of it, but it sucks.

    Thanks for the legacy, W.

  6. RedBastardGod says:
    December 5, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    There has to be an economic reason to return to the Moon. One incentive is to mine Helium-3 from the lunar soil as fuel for fusion reactors. Given the Peak Oil and fossil fuel – global warming problems, a working fusion reactor might be doable by the 2020s.

    Forget about Mars. We won’t be going there for a long time.

  7. zak822 says:
    December 6, 2006 at 11:31 am

    Using solar satellites to produce electricity and transmitting by microwave to Earth was considered feasible even in the mid-seventies. I wrote a term paper on it for a tech school class.

    A moon base, where manufacturing can be done in an environment that you can’t pollute, would greatly cut costs for the construction and maintenance of the satellite system. And it would greatly reduce the costs for placing them in orbit. The Moon 1/6 G is a lot easier to overcome than is a full Earth gravity and it’s a smaller gravity well in the bargain.

    The real world benefits of our not having to depend on oil for electricy production are obvious.

    And it would be a perfect springboard to Mars and the rest of the Solar System. Exploration in the hope of finding riches is as old as the human race.

  8. Bugboy says:
    December 7, 2006 at 9:23 am

    All I have to say is we better get there before China claims squatter’s rights, if you think China will honor the international treaties on claiming territories on the Moon, I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya.

  9. Bugboy says:
    December 7, 2006 at 9:28 am

    @Iceman: If you think they have a hard time getting the public enthused about sending a man to the moon, what makes you think they can get popular support to send tin cans? Manned space travel has one objective: to generate interest in space exploration. A tin can can’t do that.