NASA administrator says US should have ‘village’ on Moon in a decade

If the USA’s space strategy succeeds, it will run a “village” on the moon in a decade, NASA administrator Sean Duffy told the International Aeronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney today. Duffy appeared in a session featuring the heads of space agencies from the USA, China, Japan, India, Europe, and Canada. Readers will likely …

[Pascal Monett]

"leaps and bounds"

You will only be able to start leaping and bounding after 2029, when the current orange curmudgeon is forced to take a pause in returning the US to the stone age.

If NASA still exists and the shitgibbon-in-chief hasn't dismantled it on grounds that it's full of democrat-terrorists.

In the meantime, China will be pushing ahead, ESA will probably be delighted to hire all the NASA specialists that will be fired by the orange tsunami of ignorance, and even India might end up with a bigger budget than NASA.

So yeah, there will likely be a Moon base in the next quarter century. It just won't be flying the US flag.

[Phil Ni'Sophical]

Re: "leaps and bounds"

Neah, it'll have the US flag alright, and also be the site of the first off world Amazon distribution hub, and AWS data centre.

Who else is looking forward to a future Ryder cup, coming to you live from Trump Mare Imbrium?

[SnailFerrous]

Re: "leaps and bounds"

Alan Shepard demonstrated the practicality of lunar golf on the Apollo 14 mission. No shortage of crater bunkers, or regolith traps.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: "leaps and bounds"

"Who else is looking forward to a future Ryder cup, coming to you live from Trump Mare Imbrium?"

...and Trump will still cheat to win!!

[SnailFerrous]

Job opening

Every village should have a village idiot. We shall know NASA is serious in planning a moon village when they start recruiting candidate astronauts for the position.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Job opening

Every (lunar) village should have a village idiot.

I would have thought most of the US would an acceptable candidate - the Maga fraternity are possibly overqualified.

I don't think astronaut training is required - just strap the successful lunar idiot to the power reactor or any other material being delivered with a cargo rated launch system.

The unplanned disassembly of idiots is less of a preventable hazard than a desirable feature.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Job opening

A good moment to try natural selection. If you launch enough of them (it's not like there's a shortage) you may eventually find a few that survive the process.

Trust me, I know these things.

:)

[Ken G]

Re: Job opening

He's headed to Mars.

[Like a badger]

No appreciation of history

“We have not been in the business of taking people’s land,” Duffy said.

Not recently, no, but there's some indigenous peoples who might hold different views mate, and not just on the North American continent.

[SnailFerrous]

Re: No appreciation of history

The Orange One certainly wants to be in that business. Ask the people of Greenland.

[mevets]

Maybe a deportation camp?

They have recently been in the business of taking people *from* the land; so maybe that is the plan.

[dmesg]

Re: No appreciation of history

... not to mention people whose homes have been flattened by US weaponry, while the Dotard dreams of building beach resorts on the rubble.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Re: No appreciation of history

Americans are allowed to steal. It's called American exceptionalism.

[ForthIsNotDead]

They've been spouting the same bullshit for the last 20 years. China will beat America to colonising the moon.

[VoiceOfTruth]

I wish China all the best. The USA is not our friend.

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither are you, Vald.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's much easier for Xi install and run "re-education" camps on the Moon and force people to stay there...

[Flocke Kroes]

Duffy is copying Roscosmos

Just like Roscosmos, he has no budget. The solution is to make big promises for several years in the future and repeat them every year or two with later target completion dates. The strategy worked just fine for Dmitri Rogozin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Duffy is copying Roscosmos

.. and Musk with his FSD and robotaxis.

[trevorde]

Voting for new mayor of lunar village open now

Candidates:

[ ] Donald J Trump

[ ] Elon Musk

[ ] Vladimir Putin

You may vote for more than one

[HausWolf]

More empty words from MAGAville

Remember, he's not a qualified scientist, he's not even a qualified bureaucrat.

He was a reality TV host who did some time at Fox news that can suck a mean one.

He has no idea what he is talking about.

[ThatOne]

Re: More empty words from MAGAville

You don't need to be a scientist to emit headline-worthy statements. Any dumb-as-bricks TV celebrity can do that.

Apparently he also forgot to mention why the government would spend all those billions when they're cutting everything they can cut. Oh sorry, I see, they expect the private sector to do it. Obviously. The private sector isn't tied to profit and stockholder satisfaction, they're the only ones able to start very-long-term projects with no visible profit expectations... *rolls eyes*

As others said, just hot air to cover the obvious lack of plans or ambitions. When all the other space agencies proudly list their projects, it wouldn't do to admit we're actually trying to scuttle our own agency because we don't like it. So he had to say something big, something beautiful... *eyes still rolling*

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: More empty words from MAGAville

He can't see the time he can run a reality show from the Moon - that's why he need a village there.

[Irongut]

sustained human life on the moon. Not just an outpost, but a village

And by the 1980s NASA will have space stations for tourism and an underground moon base regularly served by the Space Shuttle.

Oh wait, Mr Reality TV is not reading my kids books from the 1970s?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are we going to call the inhabitants?

I mean, 'Village people' is already taken..

:)

[SnailFerrous]

Re: What are we going to call the inhabitants?

As is Lunatics

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen this show

Big dramatic announcement, then a few years later a budget cut cancels the project

Meanwhile party donors companies do well from the pork barrel

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've seen this show

> Big dramatic announcement, then a few years later a budget cut cancels the project

This was just an announcement, there is (AFAIK) no project or even just a feasibility study to go with it (at least not yet), so there will be nothing to cancel.* Announcements are a dime a dozen and don't commit you to anything.

_{* The reactor-on-the-moon project, the only real part, is just about land grab, and due to the lack of suitable transport very unlikely to succeed anyway, at least in the foreseeable future.}

[DS999]

This is at least practical

The idea of a Mars colony is fantasy. On the Moon if something goes wrong they can't fix, so long as it didn't go catastrophically wrong help is only a few days away. On Mars help might be as many as two years away depending on orbits, and even a small problem that gets steadily worse over time would result in the next visit being burial/retrieval detail.

But I highly doubt 10 years for a permanent presence on the Moon, and I think it would be safe to bet against even if we executed a successful Moon landing next week. Even when we someday establish that permanent presence it will be much more like the space station than McMurdo as far as personnel levels so hardly worthy of the label "village".

I don't think anyone reading this will live to see people "emigrate" off world with the intention of never returning to Earth (unless you believe they would waste resources on nursing home/hospice care for the aged)

I would love to see the Sci Fi future I've read about or seen in movies since I was a kid, but reality is a bitch.

[MachDiamond]

Re: This is at least practical

"On the Moon if something goes wrong they can't fix, so long as it didn't go catastrophically wrong help is only a few days away. "

The mission currently in place would have the ride home in a week long lunar orbit. If the landing system requires over 20 refueling flights to put down one lander, that's weeks before emergency supplies or personnel can be sent.

Talk of nuclear power is guessing about something way off in the future. So far there's only some talks about preliminary designs that would still need to be adapted, prototyped, tested and approved. That's not going to happen in a month or 12. Solar panels are rather simple. A lander that unfolds an array like a flower opening up could be designed and built in a short amount of time. Every battery on every craft can be specified so it can be used for storage of solar power so as time goes by, a station would have more capability. It would have made things easier on Apollo 13 if the CO2 scrubber cartridges were the same on the capsule and lander.

The US has put people on the moon. If they stick with what is known to have worked as a mission design, boots could be on the ground in a few years. What's being "planned" now is massively complicated and the focus has been on getting there, not back nor establishing any sort of village. The south pole as a target is also highly aggressive with lots of risks. Maybe there's water resources or maybe there's only some frost. There could be lots of water, but locked up in regolith that will take lots of processing to extract it.

[DS999]

Re: This is at least practical

I keep trying to tell people here that putting a nuclear reactor on the Moon is not about whether it is needed or is the best solution for providing power. It has little or nothing to do with that. It is about "claiming" an area of the Moon via a 50+ year old treaty that allows countries placing a nuclear reactor on the Moon to maintain an exclusion zone surrounding it where other countries are not permitted. It was intended as a safety measure, and at the time it was assumed the Moon was a dead rock that's fairly similar in composition everywhere thus there would be no "premium real estate" anyone would want to claim.

Since then, with the strong likelihood of water ice in permanently shadowed craters on the south pole, and the possibility of constant or at the very least certainly more than 2 weeks per month of sun in some south pole crater rim locations, it turns out the Moon does have Park Avenue addresses after all!

[MachDiamond]

Re: This is at least practical

" It is about "claiming" an area of the Moon via a 50+ year old treaty that allows countries placing a nuclear reactor on the Moon to maintain an exclusion zone surrounding it where other countries are not permitted."

It seems like it would be better to not funnel money down that rat hole and just get on with building some sort of (semi)permanent base which should also come with some territorial waters around it.

The south pole water hypothesis still needs verification. Maybe it's not Park Avenue, but St James Pl. or maybe Baltic Ave. I'll bet there is water there, but in what form I can't say. If it's really hard to get at and process into H2O exclusive of contaminants, the value drops a lot. Whose to say if there isn't pockets of cometary ice underground that can be located and better for extraction? We need to climb the tree and look in the nest to count eggs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is at least practical

> The US has put people on the moon. If they stick with what is known to have worked as a mission design, boots could be on the ground in a few years.

Wishful thinking. We don't have the rockets they had back then, and we can't even build some more, the engineers who know how to build them are either deceased or extremely old. Besides, small detail, we don't have the money either... The USA of the Apollo program was very different from the current one, in all aspects.

Even the Apollo project (just land on the moon) is, I'm sad to say, something we're quite unlikely to be able to repeat in today's sociopolitical climate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is at least practical

" If they stick with what is known to have worked as a mission design, boots could be on the ground in a few years."

This person has no idea. I mean: *No idea*.

There's no such thing as blueprints for the Saturn V. Not only that, the people who built it and could explain how it actually worked, have died long time ago.

Most probably the materials they used don't exist either, as many of them were custom made for Apollo program and no-one knows what they exactly were and even less documentation is how they were made in the first place.

In theory everything is simple, just copy whatever there is. Unfortunately, in reality, you need to know how it's made in order to copy it: It's a bit more complicated than brick.

[John Brown (no body)]

NA^SA??

"He pointed out that other US government agencies have the job of considering terrestrial stability and earthly resilience, and that NASA must focus on exploration,"

So, they'll be dropping that first A for Air from the name soon and become NSA? I think that initialism has already been taken.