Timothy Birdnow

I've long called for a moonbase. Actually, what we need is industry on the moon, not just a research base, and no doubt NASA will fail in that; most of their plans are temporary most of the time. We need an actual lunar colony, a permanent place that does more than research but acts as a construction hub for building more stuff on the moon and harvesting materials for building orbital stations and the like. It is far easier to launch things from the moon than from the Earth.

NASA lacks imagination. We built the space station, for instance, using the least imaginative design with no gravity, something the original designs envisioned. Yes, it made it cheaper (you would have to spin a station pretty fast - around ninety miles an hour - to have Earth-normal gravity, but you don't need that much).

As was said by Robert Zubrin (I think) if God didn't intend for Man to go to space He wouldn't have put a planet 240,000 miles above our heads. He was right.

As for this Mars probe, we do need to harness nuclear power for deep space exploration. Right now we use chemical rockets and inertia to get to Mars, which takes too damned long. I'm not sure what type of nuclear propulsion they intend - the article was unclear.

There are several types. There is the Nerva K, which uses a nuclear reactor to superheat plasma for a very hot and fast rocket. We've never built that. Then there is the Orion, and we have actually built non-nuclear prototypes back in the fifties and early sixties. That uses atomic bombs - you chuck an atom bomb under the spacecraft and the detonation moves you FAST! The Orion was a true interplanetary drive, capable of getting to Mars in just a month or two. And it is capable of lifting over a million pounds off the Earth. But international treaties, particularly the Outer Space Treaty, made nukes in orbit illegal, so the program was shelved. There are undoubtedly other types of nuclear propulsion too, but most are illegal because of the dangers of the rocket exploding on lift off and spewing nuclear material hither and yon.

But we are going to need a nuclear drive if we want to reach the planets while we're still young. The Juno mission to Jupiter took 5 years, for instance; we simply have to do better, especially with manned missions. Granted New Horizons took 405 days, much faster than Juno, but that's still over a year. The most expensive and difficult part of space travel are consumables - air, water, food. You cannot dilly dally too long without running out of those. A probe need carry none of that.

So we're going to need a drive that is faster than a chemical rocket.

At any rate I like what I am hearing. We really, really need to settle on the moon.

The moon has problems though; you don't have very much water there, for instance. And the moon is not protected by any magnetic field, neither the Earth's nor it's own (which it is lacking) so interplanetary and even interstellar radiation pummels the old rock ceaselessly. We will have to build underground to protect against radiation, and particularly against solar flares. We can have some surface habitats for temporary use but you have to get your heinie underground damned quick when a flare is detected. Better to build underground.

Which we could do in a lava flow tube. Such tubes exist on Earth but are small - usually just a few dozen yards at most and maybe five feet wide if you are lucky. On the Moon, with the low gravity and no water or air, these tubes grow hundreds of miles long and dozens of miles wide. And their temperature is a constant comfortable -50 degrees, far warmer than the minus 250 of the surface at night and far cooler than the 200 plus temperatures of the lunar day. With no air in the tube it would be easy to heat up a shelter inside that tube to a comfortable temperature.

The lunar Rilles - those radial spokes coming off large craters - are collapsed lava flow tubes.

We could also build domes over craters and cover them with lunar regolith.

At any rate we'd have unlimited free solar power during the day, and if we settle at the poles we would have it permanently. Night time could use stored power, and perhaps solar power satellites in orbit, and even a nuclear reactor. "Renewable" energy aka solar is far, far more reliable in a place with no air.

As for air, we can bake it right out of the rocks. Plenty of oxygen there. Not much in the way of nitrogen but I don't doubt we could solve that. One way would be to use helium, which is, well, not plentiful but abundant enough on the moon (and would be a great export as helium is getting scarce here on Earth and has become quite pricey.) Of course everyone will sound like Donald Duck...

The only thing we can't simulate is gravity, and it's unclear how people will fare long-term in low gravity. It may be we can't live our whole lives in it at all, even with a heavy exercise regimen. And we don't know if it's possible to conceive a child in low gravity, and if we do we don't know if that child will develop normally. It may wind up deformed terribly.

That's why we need to go, to find out.

It would be a shame if we couldn't live on the moon, but then there is always space living. Build big habitats and rotate them for Earth normal gravity. The radiation thing will be tricky, but I suspect we can solve that. We could use the moon as a mine and construction hq for a space colony. Gerard O'Neil, professor at MIT, devised his O'Neil colonies with his students. Forty mile long beer cans with window openings along the long axis. There are other designs; the Bernal Sphere, which would be a globe with varying gravity in different parts of it, the Stanford Torus, which is basically the design of the space station in 2001: a Space Odyssey. There are even designs that look like tops.

We don't know if we can do any of this until we try. But we need to try because we need to expand beyond the Earth. Eventually something horrible will happen; a major asteroid strike, a huge solar flare, a black hole wandering into the solar system, etc. We need to be spread out enough to survive.

So a hearty cheer for NASA for starting this off. Let us hope they don't screw it up with international partners and not getting private industry involved. We need Musk there. We don't need the Russkies or Chicoms or the useless Europeans.

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