Word: moone
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...getting hard to find many Americans who remember where they were the last time men set foot on the moon. Not only had most of us quit paying attention to lunar landings by then, but 48% of us hadn't even been born by December 1972, when the last moon walkers left the lunar surface and headed for home...
...shuttle and long-extinct Saturn boosters. The lunar orbital vehicles will be souped-up Apollo command modules and the landers will be similarly updated lunar excursion modules - the lovable, buglike LEMs. Astronauts on Apollos 15, 16 and 17 already showed that lunar rovers could be safely driven across the moon's surface, providing another proven technology that would be essential to a lunar community...
...Space watchers could thus be forgiven for being wary Monday, when NASA announced its plans for a manned moon base in the south lunar pole, a settlement that it says should be up and running in 2020 and permanently occupied in 2024. A manned space program that has done nothing but circle the harbor of low-Earth orbit since 1972 - losing 14 astronauts to accidents in the process - hardly seems likely to pull off something so daring, especially when it's got an 18-year deadline in which funding and governmental enthusiasm for the project could easily melt away...
...Even more promising - if far more speculative - is the mission profile for the crews. All of the Apollos landed near the lunar equator, a comparatively easy target for first-time visitors who don't plan to stay too long. A moon base would have to be built in the harder-to-target poles. The perpetual sunshine in most of the extreme north and south means plenty of light for energy-producing solar panels; the perpetual darkness in the shadowed polar regions means a steady supply of water ice, which can be harvested for consumption and fuel manufacture. Currently...
...There are other, trickier challenges that would have to be overcome. Part of the justification for a lunar base has always been that the moon is rich in helium-3, an isotope of common helium that could serve as fuel in eventual fusion reactors. Astronauts could, in theory, mine the stuff and ship it back to Earth. That's fine, but first we have to, well, invent the reactor. What's more, as the beleaguered crews aboard the International Space Station have discovered, sometimes just maintaining your ship can take all your time and the mission itself - scientific research, mining...