Jim came back from the meeting about the future of the moon base. They've decided to put the thing on the rim of Shackleton Crater (which is of course fittingly near the south pole) so that the station can recieve sunlight for the vast majority of the year. This is important because the costs of the engineering difficulties associated with surviving through the lunar night are, if you can excuse my terminology, astronomical. However, the disheartening side of all this is that at the same time that they're removing funding from robotic missions to pursue human exploration, they are still woefully underfunding the moon base. This means that the moon base, if/when it ever gets built, will be sitting up there kind of like a lame duck (kind of like the space station is now). It will be there, and humans will go back and forth, but they don't have any money to send up lunar roving vehicles, meaning that the astronauts will only be able to explore for as far as they can walk (which given the size of their air tanks, is only about 3km). If they do want to take short sorties out to other parts of the moon, these initiatives will have to be funded privately, commerically, by NSF (where we compete with people from every other branch of science) or internationally. Given that the moon base is mainly being built as a show of American dominanace over space, the idea that our international collaborators will jump on board to pay for our sorties seems a little naive.
So it seems as if we're clipping the wings of the moon base before we even build it, and we're giving the task of making it all work to the engineers, who will have to even more drastically cut down on its capabilities in the name of safety, and then we're asking the scientists to be happy about it and to throw money at it, when we never really even wanted a moon base to begin with. The vast opportunities for lunar science that such a base would afford us are the first things that are being cut out of the budget as superfluous.
NASA seems to think that they are going to go to the moon for politics, get there with engineers, and accomplish all of this without the scientists. What they fail to realize is that the engineers can only perform at the highest level when they have a synergistic relationship with the scientists. How can an engineer make use of in-situ moon resources without a scientist telling him where these resources can be found and how they may be extracted? How can he make the right decision about where the base should be and of what material it should be built if he doesn't know the proper constrains or the impact history?

All in all, the plan looks like a hodge-podge mixture of ideas from people who don't know what they're talking about thrust upon other people who are too scared or resigned to protest, trying to be sold half-heartedly to a group of people whom they don't actually like or respect, but whom they expect to magically come up with the funding that they still lack. If things proceed like this, the moon base can only be a costly and monumental mistake.

In the days of Apollo, we did some amazing things. We landed many times on the moon, we dug pits wherein we put networks of seismometers that take data on impacts and moonquakes. We collected samples that told us about the history of the moon and its possible resources. We had automated rovers that ferried equipment from one landing site to the next, stopping to take samples and collect rocks along the way like the Mars rovers are doing now, so that when the next crew came down they would have a huge bank of data ready for them to pick up. We had lunar roving vehicles that allowed astronauts to traverse up to 7km from the landing site.

If all these problems can be remedied, if the scientists and engineers can start to work together again like in the days of Apollo, if we can even regain the amount of technical expertise we had in the days of Apollo (half the stuff we did back then people don't actually remember how we did, the plans for the heavy-lift rockets were lost, and many of those people involved are retired or dead by now), and if the politicians can actually see the long term merit of learning something at the moon instead of just going there, then the moon base could be something truly extraordinary. It could signal the beginning of a new age of space colonization, of life as we know it. Science-fiction could become reality. But the hurdles that we must surmount are not small. I've been asked to give my opinion and suggestions on the matter. Any thoughts?

Tonight is a lunar eclipse. Are you going to try and look for it?
» KkaMA67 on 2007-03-03 05:28:49

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