Permanent Moon Base - Why or Why Not?

The main driving force for anything as ridiculously expensive as a
moon base will be just a plain old "gold" rush . Only this will
probably be a "Helium" rush.

The Earth is rapidly running out of Helium , to the point that within
100 years you aren't going to see those inflatable baloons in fairs.
The moon on the other hand has huge amounts of Helium-3 , which is the
best material for nuclear fusion.

Also the moon has large almost pure Iron deposits because there never
was any water on the moon . So its the sort of Iron where you spend
next to nothing to get Steel or other exotic Iron alloys from.

Ultimately i think space tourism will provide a driving force , but
the real push towards Solar System exploration will be good old
resource hunting. Once the economics for Huge Carrier class resource
ships works out , we can expect 3-4 year space trips to the asteroid
belt to strip some asteroids off easy to mine rare metals.

Perfect to satisfy both the environmentalists and get a virtually
limitless supply of raw materials .

T wrote in message m...
I'd think it would be important and worth doing.

- Underground for the most part, partly for structural simplicity and
also for protection.

- Sunlight 'up there' is strong and free. Collecting it wouldn't be, at
least not at 1st.

- Potentially harmful experiments (say new types of energy production)
or experiments needing isolation away from Terrestrial sources could be
staged on the back side.

- Lunar based Astronomical Telescopes & other types of detection
equipment. Wouldn't necessarily need to be on the Dark Side, maybe dug
in deep down a long shaft. Freed from lots of Earth based light
pollution as well as atmospheric distortion we might well peer father
and farther back and out into time. Also, things would be a lot easier
to repair/upgrade/maintain.

- New Tech could create trade in the future, well of course things would
be very lop sided for a long time.


And while I am rooting for most all things American I would like to get
the Moon declared (not just on paper) a Weapon & Political Free Zone.
(Yeah, right.) Still, it's at the beginning of things when they can get
off on the right foot.


TBerk