stickman

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2017/...onization.html



Better to put money and efforts towards getting people to Mars and back faster or easier than trying to colonize the moon.

187sks

There's a lot of good science to be done on a lunar base. I want to see us start to colonize Mars, that's a better long term goal, but developing life support techniques closer to home makes a lot of sense. Most people involved in planning theoretical missions have thought living primarily underground on the moon or Mars makes a lot of sense.



In my opinion we should have a robust lunar outpost similar to our antarctic outposts. There's not a lot of point in truly colonizing the moon, but a decent sized science outpost makes good sense.

Stocker

A lunar outpost is a huge waste if you're going farther out. The gravity well requires so much energy to overcome. Then if you are going farther, it is a gigantic waste of energy to f*cking STOP at the moon and then start off again. Mars makes better sense than the moon as a remote outpost for just those reasons. The only arguments for doing habitat research on the moon are shot down when I consider all the same research could be done under water, here, and rescue wouldn't be literally impossible in those conditions. I think we should leave the moon alone for those and a few other good reasons.

187sks

The gravity well is a problem, but the moon offers things that Mars does not. A research facility on a large stable body with no atmosphere alone is worth the effort. You can test many things on Earth, but critical tests should still be done in space before committing to their use on a half decade Mars mission with no hope of rescue or aborting the mission. Some of these things could be less expensively performed on an asteroid which would also have a lot of value. A moon base probably shouldn't be publicly funded, but I still think it has a lot of value. The cost of this will be cheaper than a typical low Earth orbit space station utilizing reusable rockets.





A Lagrange point station is planned and will be required to support deeper exploration of the solar system. Nobody is launching anything from the moon to the outer solar system.