MAKING SERIOUS READY

There have been and are all sorts of preparations, past and present, related to a second visit to our Moon. What is not clear is whether this next visit will be just that or will be the first step in the founding of a permanent Moon Base. The Constellation program, though teetering on the verge of cancellation is still being worked on and the Lunar Reconnaissance Observer (LRO) is still doing an effective job of mapping the Moon. It is finding candidate landing sites in the polar regions near the detected frozen water sources.

The Obama Plan essentially cancels the original planned Moon mission envisioned under the Constellation program. At this writing, Congress is still debating whether to accept that cancellation or to support an alternative project that uses most of Constellation's R&D efforts.  Since we advocate establishing a permanent Moon Base we are going with the concept of a modified Constellation plan.

In order to put this into action there are many preliminaries that need to be established in advance of actually landing on the Moon and starting to construct the base station. In this regard we will be presenting comments and information that pertains to each of the steps in the process. We will do this separately with individual blogs entries with an overall summary at the end of each entry. Here is the initial list of these entries:

(1) A Global Space Congress
(2) Technology Considerations for a Permanent Station
(3) Initial Goals and Planned Achievement
(4) Problems and Constraints
(5) Initiating the Plan
(6) Operations
(7) The Future: A Way To Mars.

Mars advocates, please do not despair.  We are Mars advocates too, we just feel that the best and surest way to get to Mars is from our Moon.  We also believe that what we learn in establishing a Moon Base will be invaluable for our plans for exploring Mars, and other planetary bodies in our solar system.

Notes: (1) It should be noted that the above list may be modified with either deletions and additions as we move along in this discourse.  We hope you will understand this and continue to follow us. (2) It is not possible to "terraform" our Moon, so the Moon Base will be a self-sustaining shelter environment as opposed to a transformation of parts of the Moon into an Earthlike setting.

CREDITS: The image above of LRO is courtesy of NASA art.