MOON BASE: RECURRING DREAM

Moon Base? Old news.
In his hotly antic­i­pated announce­ment Wednesday, President Bush ordered NASA sci­en­tists to plan for a manned “foothold on the moon.” They might look through their old fil­ing cab­i­nets to start. Because the U.S. gov­ern­ment and its con­trac­tors have been plan­ning lunar colonies since long before Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind in 1969.
Since word of Bush’s space plan leaked last week, polit­i­cal rivals and some space-​​policy experts have assaulted it for being too expen­sive and grandiose.
But the 2004 plan sounds down­right meek com­pared with a 1959 scheme to use nearly 150 rock­ets to out­fit a mil­i­tary out­post on the moon. A 180-​​person lunar com­mune prob­a­bly isn’t in the works, as was pro­posed in 1972. And it’s hard to imag­ine a replay of 1975’s idea to build a 100-​​ton, magnetic-​​levitation train for toss­ing bags of freshly mined lunar soil into space, where it would be processed into indus­trial sup­plies.
My Wired News arti­cle has looks at some of history’s kook­i­est moon plans.
THERE’S MORE: Ben Bova, Greg Bear and other science-​​fiction lumi­nar­ies are fired up about the new space plan.

January 15th, 2004 | Retro-Futuro, Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.