It’s only taken 20,000 years for Homo sapiens to migrate to the American continent and then decided to industrialise the Moon. Just imagine what the next 20,000 years has in store.
Putting nuclear power on the Moon is a possible enabler for a future Moonbase. Considering the length of time it has taken since the last footsteps on the Moon, a Moonbase is long overdue. That said, going to a faraway place where there’s an abundance of solar energy potential it’s an interesting development that nuclear power is given a priority.
My view is that exploration beyond Earth is a matter for the whole of humanity. Going to the Moon should be an international endeavour. There’s good reason to cooperate when it comes to exploration. For a start space exploration is incredibly hard to do. Rockets explode with an unsettling degree of frequency.
Modern humans have gone from tens of thousands on one continent to what may top ten billion on Earth. It’s no wonder space, the final frontier, beckons. Trouble is we have evolved as specialist on this planet. Not well adapted to the space environment. If our wandering species is to venture into the void, we need to be mighty determined. This will be hard. The hardest effort ever made.
It would be absurd for individual nations to establish separate camps on the Moon. The space race is a concocted nonsense. More flag waving PR than serious sense. Why do I say this?
One: Demand on resources, to build, develop and maintain, a space presence is high. Sharing costs has benefits when planning for the long-term. Continuing costs can be volatile.
Two: In the event of the almost inevitable failures and setbacks, better to have partners to create different ways and means to recover or mount rescues in the worst-case scenarios.
Three: Partners can specialise. Not everyone has to do everything all the time. Afterall, that’s how our modern society came about in the first place.
Four: Cooperative planning means more gets done at the same time. Duplication and fragmentation of efforts don’t serve the great goal of exploration.
Five: Earth’s people are interconnected and interdependent. Even small Moon based colonies will inevitably be the same. Reliant on connections, locally as much as to a distant home.
As a spin off, making exportation an international endeavour can bring us together on this divided planet too.
John Vincent 