Playing Lunar Catch Up

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Or is that “catsup”?

NASA found significant and meaningful amounts of water on the moon in the “bombing” of the South Pole a couple months back.

Navy: South Polar ice marked in blue

OK, the Huffington Post guy kind of got it:

Most Valuable Real Estate in the Solar System

Huffington Post (blog)

Today’s announcement by NASA of significant water on the south pole of the Moon is scientifically critical, economically astounding and extremely important …

Revealing water in significant quantities on the Moon could truly be a turning point in space exploration. Who will set up the first water mining plants? Given low-cost availability of water, hydrogen and oxygen, what type of off-Earth economies and exploration will this enable? The question is not too dissimilar to those questions asked when oil was discovered buried deep under the Earth or under the oceans. We eventually designed the technology to mine and extract this precious resource. It’s what we do as humans and entrepreneurs.

The south pole of the Moon has another very important attribute in addition to water, namely the existence of small mountain peaks that are constantly in sunlight, 28 days out of the Lunar cycle and referred to as the “peaks of eternal light.” These peaks which are in the plane of the ecliptic (the plane that the Earth rotates around the sun) will allow for constant illumination of solar panels and heating of the spacecraft. The reason this is important is because the temperature on the Moon plummets from +100 degrees Centigrade to -150 degrees Centigrade as the Moon rotates into and out of direct sunlight…

Groovy. Glad to see that SOMEBODY finally caught up with me. Bill Nye (the science guy, and not the founder of the Laramie Daily Boomerang and nationally known humorist of the XIXth Cent.) sure as hell didn’t on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show Friday.

not the science guy

Here’s what I wrote on this blog on December 29, 2005:

… The new space race is on. Just remember: a base at the south pole of the moon* will be the “Rock of Gibraltar” of the solar system for several centuries to come. Whoever gets a base there first will have a huge strategic advantage over the other nations of Sol-3.

(* The moon is a navel orange: the navel is always in darkness, with frozen water, seemingly, both making a permanent base of any sort a MUCH easier proposition. Trust me, metal fatigue issues given the moon’s temperature differential between “night” and “day” are an engineering nightmare. As regards the South Lunar Pole: this astonishing finding was made by the Navy’s Clementine mapping satellite in spring 1994, nearly 25 years after the moon landing. Think about it: the SINGLE most prominent feature on the moon wasn’t known for three decades after we started littering its surface with spacecraft. For more information, see: http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Clementine/ and, you can find the Clementine image of the “navel” at the South Lunar Pole at: http://www.solarviews.com/browse/moon/clmsouth.jpg and, see its “mother’ page at http://www.solarviews.com/cap/moon/clmsouth.htm )

If we get there first, I’m sure we can give it a snazzy name, like, say, Reagan Base, or, maybe Space Base Eagle Freedom. I dunno.

Courage.

Posted by: harto / 12/29/2005 02:21:00 AM

The moon is a navel orange (US Naval photo)

You might want to read the entire 2005 entry (scroll down past Mark Williams of KFBK, who I wrote about last week  “MSNBC Gets Astroturfed Again « November 4, 2009″ and on November 25,  and 26, 2008, “Moving America Bass-ackwards” and “Thanking Sarah Palin“). The astronomical blog post is still out ahead of the conceptual thinking and policy, seemingly.

That’s what I get for having been trained by science fiction writers, I guess.

In the next week or so, I’ll tell you about even MORE thrilling things about the future! Meantime, I salute NASA and the Huffington Post for catching up.

Or is that “ketchup”?

Courage.

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