When I was a kid in the 1950s, my dad was active in the East Bay Astronomical Society. Every month the society held a meeting at Chabot Observatory and I went along. The meeting part was totally boring to a twelve year old but afterwards I got to look through the big telescope. It was housed in a equally huge round room with a rotating dome for a roof. It was dark inside and really a little awe inspiring. The telescope was a long tube mounted atop a tall mount. It was pointed through a slit in the dome at the dark sky. I had to climb stairs to a platform, high up the the dome, to look through the eyepiece. What I saw usually was the moon. Through the telescope, the moon’s image was huge, bright, and really wonderful. I gazed in wonder and pondered what it might be like to go to the moon.
I was not unique in that notion. In 1969, people did land on the moon. We have not been back since, but soon we plan to return. When we return, the goal is to establish a permanent settlement on the moon. Many organizations have planned moon bases. Ideas and plans have come and gone for at least sixty years or more. Members of the Science Circle have their own planning ideas. Below Dr. Philip Youngblood explains.
The idea for the Science Circle’s Moon Base Project began in the wake of a two-day celebration of NASA’S International Observe the Moon Night in the fall of 2022. The Science Circle was coming up on a celebration of its own, our 15th anniversary, and we were looking for a long-term project where we could put our strengths as an international, multi-disciplinary, collaborative, group of scientists, educators, and science enthusiasts to use. Inspired by the excitement surrounding the Artemis 1 lunar mission set for December 2022, we came up with the idea of researching, designing, and building a virtual Moon Base in Second Life. It seemed like a perfect project for us since there were no ‘right answers’ yet with regards to the many challenges that a real Moon Base might present. With the Board’s approval, we started meeting regularly to decide on the spectrum of expertise needed, which initially included Science & Education, the foundations of our organization, Construction & Scripting, required for design and implementation, Psychology & Ethics, which we agreed was important for any human endeavor, and Writing & Outreach, to imagine, describe, share, and possibly inspire others with what we were undertaking.
The Moon Base Project was presented to the membership in March 2023 by representatives from each of these areas. The project was enthusiastically received, and we recruited members from around the world to begin a weekly discussion group that has met without fail every Monday at 10-11am SLT since then. Our active Moon Base group membership has varied over time, with some original members finding that they could no longer meet with such regularity and new members with other expertise or interests joining our group. Over the last year and a half, we have collectively agreed on several key features of the base. Noting that NASA/ESA contest winners have mostly focused on designs for early generation bases, we decided that ours would reflect what might be possible many decades from now. With research pointing to the many hazards of surface habitation, we agreed that our base would be built largely underground, ideally inside a lava tube.
I think we would all agree that we learn something every week from our spirited and imaginative discussions and that we have not shied away from tackling tough subjects such as medical and psychological issues, personal hygiene, resource management and recycling, ethics and sustainability, respect for the individual, community, and global cultures, commercialization, government and security, and a host of other realistic topics. True to our mission, we are now in our third major revision of a full-scale mockup of our Moon Base design. We will be sharing project concepts at an upcoming virtual worlds conference and aim to have a tour of the sim-sized facilities ready for the next Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference in 2025.
References
- Chabot Observatory was established in Oakland, California in 1883. The telescope I looked through in the 1950s is still in operation (See photo on right). It is a 20″ refractor telescope (28 ft focal length), commissioned in 1914 from Warner & Swasey, with optics by John Brashear. It is the largest refractor in the western United States regularly open to the public.
- NASA lunar outpost concepts, Wikipedia. Image: Proposed lunar base from 1993. Image from NASA, public domain.
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SUMMARY. Spacefaring nations are seriously thinking and planning for human travel beyond Earth after being focused on operations in Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo Program in 1972. There is now a serious East-West competition – essentially Space Race 2.0 – just like back in the 1960s, except one effort is an international effort led by NASA and the other is led by China, as compare with the two Cold War adversaries trying to prove who had the better system.
Thinking Beyond Earth.
Human space exploration has been confined to Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo Program. The emphasis now is on the Earth-Moon system, envisioning the Moon as a ‘gateway’ to learning about how to live beyond Earth. One of the important components of this idea is to build a space station around the Moon called ‘Gateway’ — this article talks about that vision, its components, and when construction is scheduled.
Reference: https://www.nasa.gov/reference/gateway-about/
Space Race 2.0.
The Artemis Program. NASA was tasked with another go-it-alone national program called Constellation that ran from 2005-2009 and had three goals: to complete the International Space Station, to return to the Moon by 2020, and to develop a crewed mission to Mars. In light of the massive costs of such a program, it was shut down. Instead, a new vision of an international effort to get back to the Moon was introduced in 2012 called the Artemis Program. The partners in that program were the same that made the International Space Station so successful – NASA, JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada), plus a host of new nations that signed what became known as the Artemis Accords [43 signatories so far], whose principles include going to space for peaceful purposes, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, the registration of space objects for deconfliction of activities, release of scientific data, protecting the heritage of past missions and their objects and properly disposing of orbital craft and debris. One mission has been launched so far, the successful crewed Artemis I mission that orbited the Moon in December 2022, the first time that humans have left Earth’s orbit since 1972.
References: https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-accords/ and https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/
The Chinese Program. China began its own national program in 2007, best known as the Chang’e Program. It has been very successful, with six robotic missions so far, the latest in May 2024, which landed near the lunar south pole on the far side of the Moon with a lander and rover duo that investigated the topography, composition, and subsurface structure of the area where they and the Artemis missions intend to have crewed landings and a Moon base.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Program