[mahranch]

> Had we established the first Moon base in 1988 as NASA had on its roadmap in 1970 we would know all about this

You say that offhandedly, as if they decided not to move forward with a Moon base due to bureaucracy or because some upper management people decided to go in a different direction.

A permanent moon base in the 70s and 80s was largely impossible as far as the technology is concerned. Hell, we're approaching 2020 and we still have several major hurdles before we could put a permanent base on a body or planet that is not earth. Everything from radiation to supplies are still problems that need solved. Expecting them to solve them in the late 70s or early 80s is almost laughable.

I know HN and reddit likes to think it was congress who is responsible for the shift in NASAs goals (after all, they control the purse strings so they get to dictate/approve budgets & goals), but they did so precisely because NASA told them it was impossible to establish a permanent moon base at that point in time. On top of the insane cost, what more was there to be gained that justified the immense cost? If they wanted to go to the moon and study rocks, that's what the Apollo program was for. There was only so much we could learn with the technology we had at the time. People forget, the rest of the solar system awaited exploration too, but only so much money to go around.

"But we can use the moon as a base to launch further missions out into the solar system and beyond!" It's a nice pipe dream, but getting the materials there and/or manufacturing facilities to create everything needed is cost prohibitive. Also, the logistics of doing something like that today is insane, let alone 30 years ago.

[osullivj]

If the US had established a colony on the moon, would that colony have eventually declared independence?

[ChuckMcM]

I hear you, and my comment was more wistful than accusatory, because to my grade school self, after NASA had landed on the Moon I believed them when they said they would establish a base there 20 years later. It aligned nicely with my plan to be an astronaut in good standing by then so I could be the base's first commander (such are the dreams of a young man enthralled with science).

When I was in college, I got a chance to intern with Jerry Pournelle who was on the White House science advisory council and we talked about moon bases at one point. Jerry asserted (and I believe him) that NASA had a program "ready to go" to put a permanent installation on the moon. The budget challenges however were large.

I also got to meet Gerard O'Neill through Jerry who was pushing for colonizing space and had lead NASA to develop plans for how a Moon base would support the development of space habitats.

This let me understand that while the technical challenges were hard, they were engineering and budget challenges, no new science or equipment or materials had to be developed. The same materials that survived for years in orbit would survive on the Moon, the same resupply requirements that there were for a space station there would be for the Moon etc.

President Regan was open to the idea but the only way to fund big space initiatives was to make it sound like a war. That has historically been the only motivation that gets Congress to appropriate the funds. And in the late 70s, early 80's it was going to take a lot of funds.

Really smart people tried to make the argument that the economic benefits of adding 'space' to a country's economic operating zone would be immense, and create growth that could be taxed to fund the rest of the expansion fell on skeptical ears. Even O'Neil's pitch that space based solar power satellites would give the US a built in economic advantage; 'Cheap' energy would lower the development cost of all goods. Wasn't enough to get people to commit to the groundwork for this. When I last talked with Jerry about this, he suggested that a cost effective single stage to orbit capability, built to support Regan's SDI initiative, would enable space colonization as well (that was in 1990 or 1991).

Here we are, nearly 30 years after 1990, and SpaceX is on the cusp of making access to space an order of magnitude cheaper than it was in the 90's. This presentation [1] from 2007 could have been the SpaceX pitch deck!

Now I need to go dig around and see if I can find NASA's plans they did in the 80's.

[1] http://www.dglr.de/fileadmin/inhalte/dglr/fb/r1/r1_2/06-Raum...