Posted by
EWRoss on Friday, June 19, 2009 8:00:00 AM
NASAlaunched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and a companion spacecraft today aboard an Atlas 5 rocket. This return to the moon with the first US unmanned spacecraft in over five years is part of an international effort to eventually place human beings on the Moon permanently. Right now space-based telescopes, the LRO, India's lunar orbiter, and several ground-base observatories will try learn more about the Moon’s composition. Most important it will look for signs of water ice--essential to sustaining human life on the Moon for protracted periods. It’s just too expensive to transport that much water there from earth.
With all our problems here, I know it’s tough for most people to get excited about permanently stationing people on the Moon. On the whole, we’ve generally become bored with men and women in space, until there’s an accident. It’s all too routine, and we don’t like to think about what it costs. The Star Trek and Star Wars fans among us still like to think about our decedents someday traveling to the stars, but we know that will never happen in any of our lifetimes.
Increasingly, however, we’ve very much become aware that human extinction is just a large asteroid away. They only way human life will survive after earth becomes uninhabitable, when that inevitably happens, is if we get off this planet and begin the long slow migration to others. A permanent base on the Moon is the first step toward doing that. As for me, I’d just as soon spend billions on that than on the hundreds of wasteful so called stimulus projects we’re spending money on now.