Reply #82: There are some serious differences with the moon that Space Stations [View All]

[politicat]

can't provide.

Fractional gravity, for one. It's hard to work in the ISS or live in the ISS because micro gravity is so hard on bodies. But 1/6th gravity is enough to work with. ISS is what happened when we failed to learn from the Russians - they had Mir up there for ever and pretty much said, "this is a research station." The US doesn't know what to do with ISS because as far as I can tell, we read Russian produced scientific papers. (But that's another rant.)

Reasons to go to permanent habitation on the moon: Here on earth, a clean-room is an incredibly expensive thing to maintain and build, and there's always some contamination. On the moon... it's easy. There are no contaminants like condensation or dust mites. Airless environments make it easy to maintain. So chip and other cleanroom production could be done for a fraction of the cost in the moon. Plus, there's enough silicon in the moon that it's not a problem to make the things, and the energy that is so expensive down here is practically free there - solar power on the surface.

There's the eggs in one basket concept - we've pretty much screwed this planet up, and we need some "off-site backup."

There'st he fact that we can't get to Mars without having a place at the top of the gravity well - and that's Luna. We can't use ISS to launch a real mission or colony to Mars because we have to have something we can use to bould the heavy lift capacity that is outside of the gravity well and not in microgravity. Again, we can use lunar materials to build the crafts and to supply the crafts to go to Mars much easier than we can build the crafts on earth or at the ISS.

That's off the top of my head at 4 am.