Great use of an internet meme. I feel much the same way.
Didn’t we land a small nuke plant on the moon, wouldn’t it make sense to set up a base there?
set up us the bomb?
I don’t recall any of the Apollo Lunar Modules being powered by nuclear reactors.
Perhaps you know something I don’t.
And, yes, in my opinion we should have a research facility on Luna much as we do in Antarctica.
I could have sworn that we dropped one of the small reactors on the moon in preparation to start up a scientific study base.
After hitting up google, I see that as far back as 2008 they were discussing a suitcase reactor cranking 40 gw to power a scientific settlement on the moon.
Personally, I would almost rather they pump the cash into establishing a lunar colony to start with. It would be a hella lot easier to do an emergency run to the Moon with supplies than to Mars. If you lose your algae food facility on the moon, as long as you have a shuttle equivalent you could probably get them some repair and renovate supplies within a month, as long as you maintain a stockpile of MREs that would last long enough for a resupply run, you are good. Waiting out a resupply run to Mars would be a bit too long. We could also probably have a regular earth-moon run a lot more inexpensively than an earth-mars run.
Five of the Apollo missions (12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) used Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators to power the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Packages. One Apollo RTG got dropped into the Pacific Ocean after the Apollo 13 mission.
Thanks. I see I was wrong.
Ignorance fought once again!
No. Any science or surveying that needs to be done can be done by robots cheaper & safer. The US does not currently have the means to put people into orbit much less on the moon and we are 5 to 10 years away from having it as I understand.
In this era of trillion dollar deficits and a 16 trillion debt, who would support a multi billion dollar program to put a hand full of people on the moon just to man a science station? If the US Congress can’t seem to agree on just 61 million to fix the Capitol dome, they will never agree to a man moon base.
Not too much ignorance though, since I see from the link that we’re talking on the order of 100W. That’ll power some low-energy bulbs, or a tiny heater (it wouldn’t heat a room in your house), get a 1kg model aircraft to fly slowly (on Earth at any rate), or boil a kettle if you’re really patient. It won’t power a lunar colony unless you’re thinking in terms of ant farms.
Well, at least we have a fail-safe if the ants get out of control (the kettle of doom being the surest way to deal with ants).
Agreed. As much as the romantic in me would love to see humans walking around on the moon or Mars, the fact is that robots can do space exploration better, more cheaply, and more safely. I mean, we’re still getting data from Voyager II.
Because, you fool, we’ve got to beat the commies to it! USA! USA!
In all serious I would throw out a guess that India will be the next country to put a man on the moon.
There’s not even a Starbuck’s on the moon, why would we go there?