this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Has there ever even been a reason to have a space station of some sort on our moon? There's really not a lot there and its expensive as fuck to keep humans alive on it. Only real reason i can think of would be ease of cooling and power generation for computing without damaging our own environment, and that is a very recent "need".
At a very minimum you could use the research bases at Antarctica as an example and give the same objections and same reasons for having a Moon base with similar number of people. Exploitation of resources makes even the worst places suddenly desirable, so that's the next question - does the Moon have resources for us, now or for future need? I think it could, and it's a great place to launch raw material from vs. Earth. Would it ever be a large settlement though, I doubt it.
I've always been a proponent of Gerard O'Neill's vision (The High Frontier). Why spend so much effort to escape from a gravity well to then go back to any other gravity well with a different and hostile environment (like Mars). Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to everywhere else, you just need enough delta-v and time. Space settlements would be a larger investment than we've ever done before, but once started they would multiply and return so much more.
Caveat, this is my past self talking. I now think the window of doing such things has closed on us, ironically when we need it the most. Such as removing eggs out of one basket that's dying, moving industry out of the biosphere it's choking, giving a new goal for humanity that all could participate and create their own worlds. It was a nice vision though, we could have done a lot.
You’re underestimating the difficulty.
Getting to space is indescribably hard.
Maintaining a manned base in an ocean trench or an open lava pit or under sea ice would be cheaper.
The only rationale is science (which is very important), but Van Braun couldn’t really envision today's computerized drones and comms networks. As an example, the opposite side of the moon would be an excellent spot for certain types of space telescopes.
There are some speculative sci fi industries, like helium-3 mining, asteroid mining, space solar, or solar shades to reduce global warming, but nothing that’s even in the universe of cost effective now.
I don't think that would work either. Without an atmosphere, any bodies of water or really anything at all, you'd be stuck with impractically slow radiative cooling.
Yep, there's a fuckload of minerals on the moon, and in our solar system. Enough metals to probably crash a handful of industries on Earth. The moon would be a useful gateway to many of the outer planets since it's gravity is weaker, and there's no atmosphere, in addition to the raw materials.
For mining, refueling* and power generation*, the moon makes a ton of sense.
*Some of these require technologies we don't yet have, but may soon.
Not even remotely economical, if we account for the transport costs.
And what do we want to do there? It has the same problem as the moon.