Fifty years after Apollo 11 put man on the moon, is it time to go back?
This episode of the excellent documentary series explores options on the satellite with one-sixth our gravity -- hey, I'd weigh only 25 pounds there -- that's "just a few days away, waiting for us to explore."
The moon has mineral wealth, including iron and titanium, but it's a dry place covered in jagged dust that "gets everywhere." It would cost too much to ship water 226,000 miles from Earth.
Luckily, research points to the existence of enormous quantities of unimaginably frigid lunar ice at the moon's poles. The hydrogen and oxygen of water can be separated in a way that produces flame, releasing water and huge amounts of energy.
Thus, not only could water be harvested for moon-colony use, but it could "open up the entire solar system to exploration," we're told.
Future space activity could involve private companies, perhaps including Astrobotic of Pittsburgh (my hometown), and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which in 2018 took its first fare-paying tourist into space. Then, in 2022, Japanese billionaire Yosaku Maezawa spent 12 days at the International Space Station.
One day we may see the lights of a colony when we look up into the sky at night. Still, all kinds of questions cloak future activity in this place Neil Armstrong said had "a stark beauty all its own" -- not the least of which is, "Who owns the moon?"
This episode of the excellent documentary series explores options on the satellite with one-sixth our gravity -- hey, I'd weigh only 25 pounds there -- that's "just a few days away, waiting for us to explore."
The moon has mineral wealth, including iron and titanium, but it's a dry place covered in jagged dust that "gets everywhere." It would cost too much to ship water 226,000 miles from Earth.
Luckily, research points to the existence of enormous quantities of unimaginably frigid lunar ice at the moon's poles. The hydrogen and oxygen of water can be separated in a way that produces flame, releasing water and huge amounts of energy.
Thus, not only could water be harvested for moon-colony use, but it could "open up the entire solar system to exploration," we're told.
Future space activity could involve private companies, perhaps including Astrobotic of Pittsburgh (my hometown), and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which in 2018 took its first fare-paying tourist into space. Then, in 2022, Japanese billionaire Yosaku Maezawa spent 12 days at the International Space Station.
One day we may see the lights of a colony when we look up into the sky at night. Still, all kinds of questions cloak future activity in this place Neil Armstrong said had "a stark beauty all its own" -- not the least of which is, "Who owns the moon?"
