Fly Me To The Moon

I didn't realize it'd been a week since I last blogged. Man. It's just been one of those weeks, with a deluge of bread-and-butter paying work (an essentially mindless copy editing job, which I enjoy once in a while) and more speculative maybe-it'll-pay-someday work that I hope to tell you about later. "Too busy" is a poor excuse but it's the only one I've got.

Meanwhile, here's a new video from NASA intended to get people talking about returning to the Moon:


You probably heard something about this a few months back: NASA is making plans to establish a permanent manned (peopled?) lunar base, probably at the Moon's south pole, somewhen around 2020. There's a nice summary of the plan and links to other resources here.

What impresses me most about this video is its coolness. NASA ought to be about inspiring new generations of up-and-coming taxpayers to explore the final frontier, yet all too often their public face is as dry and uninspiring as an actuarial convention (no offense to actuaries).** C'mon, people! These are real scientists, engineers, pilots and explorers seeing and doing things that no one has ever seen or done before! Making it exciting should be the easy part. This little film might be criticized for looking too much like a video game or movie trailer, but its the first sign of life I've seen out of NASA in a long time so I like it.

My personal position on building a Moon base: Hell yes, where do I volunteer? Although I hit the tail end of the Baby Boom, I consider myself a Space Age kid more than a Boomer. But I also grew up, and I think if NASA and the United States commit to returning to the Moon we need to have an honest, grown-up discussion about why we're doing it. And the fact is, there is almost no scientific justification for sending people to live on the Moon, and even less economic justification. Anything humans could study or mine from the lunar surface could be accomplished cheaper and safer in near-Earth orbit or by robots. We built a space station on the promises of the scientific breakthroughs and amazing commercial opportunities it would deliver, but it hasn't yielded a single paper in the scientific literature or an industrial process or product anyone wants to buy. We won't fall for the same argument again. As far as I'm concerned, the only real reason for returning to the Moon is to live there: colonization. Expand our one-planet species to two.

Is that reason enough? It is for me: I think humanity's growth into the galaxy is inevitable and I'd like to live to see it. In fact, give me a fast Internet uplink and I could do about 98% of my job on the Moon as well as I do it here (though I'm sure the 1.3-second time delay due to the pesky limit imposed by the speed of light would be frustrating--almost like being back on dial-up). The ultimate telecommute.

Is it reason enough for everyone else? I dunno ... but I'm pretty sure that's where the debate should be: not about advancing science or exploiting new resources, arguments the pro-returners would lose on their merits. The question is, are we ready to grow up, move out of the spacious and comfortable family home, and set ourselves up in a grungy little studio apartment across town? I say we are, but I think I'm in a small minority.
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**Speaking of interesting lines of work, a couple of weeks ago my wife and I stayed at a hotel hosting the International Canned Fruit Conference. The lobby and elevators were full of business-suited conferees wearing badges from nations around the world, all of them evidently deadly serious about their canned fruit. I could only wonder what recent amazing advances have been made in the science of fruit canning to justify the time and expense of gathering people from Peru, Greece and Russia to learn about them. You'd think that'd be something you could handle with a brief newsletter, plus maybe a phone call for the really big breakthroughs. But apparently not. Who knew?