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NASA's Plans To Build A Human Settlement on The Moon (discovermagazine.com)
Nine private spaceflight companies are bidding on contracts to deliver robotic NASA payloads to the moon -- and Thursday NASA said they'd like them to start flying "this calendar year."
Discover magazine reports NASA envisions this "as the first step toward returning to the moon, this time for good." The first tasks will be to practice launching and landing on the moon, as well as answering questions about its surface... They will test habitation for future crewed missions. They'll prove that they can collect materials from the lunar surface and return them to space or Earth. And they'll establish communication networks between robots on the moon's surface, way stations in lunar orbit, and mission control on Earth.
But NASA also wants to deploy demo technology that can mine the moon's resources "to pave the way for human settlement," Space.com reports: The main lunar resource to be exploited, at least initially, is water. The lunar surface has lots of this stuff, locked up as ice on the permanently shadowed floors of polar craters. This water will aid lunar settlement and further exploration, and not just by slaking astronauts' thirst, NASA officials say. Water can also be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel.
The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is just part of NASA's broad moon-exploration plan, which prioritizes an open architecture that encourages cooperation with many commercial and international partners. (Indeed, NASA wants to be the commercial landers' first, but not only, customer.) One of the most critical pieces of this plan is a small space station, called the Gateway, which NASA aims to start building in lunar orbit in 2022. Gateway will be a hub for many kinds of lunar exploration, including sorties to the surface by landers both crewed and uncrewed.
If everything goes according to plan, NASA astronauts will take their first such sortie in 2028 -- 56 years after Apollo 17 crewmembers left the last boot prints on the lunar surface
Discover magazine reports NASA envisions this "as the first step toward returning to the moon, this time for good." The first tasks will be to practice launching and landing on the moon, as well as answering questions about its surface... They will test habitation for future crewed missions. They'll prove that they can collect materials from the lunar surface and return them to space or Earth. And they'll establish communication networks between robots on the moon's surface, way stations in lunar orbit, and mission control on Earth.
But NASA also wants to deploy demo technology that can mine the moon's resources "to pave the way for human settlement," Space.com reports: The main lunar resource to be exploited, at least initially, is water. The lunar surface has lots of this stuff, locked up as ice on the permanently shadowed floors of polar craters. This water will aid lunar settlement and further exploration, and not just by slaking astronauts' thirst, NASA officials say. Water can also be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel.
The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is just part of NASA's broad moon-exploration plan, which prioritizes an open architecture that encourages cooperation with many commercial and international partners. (Indeed, NASA wants to be the commercial landers' first, but not only, customer.) One of the most critical pieces of this plan is a small space station, called the Gateway, which NASA aims to start building in lunar orbit in 2022. Gateway will be a hub for many kinds of lunar exploration, including sorties to the surface by landers both crewed and uncrewed.
If everything goes according to plan, NASA astronauts will take their first such sortie in 2028 -- 56 years after Apollo 17 crewmembers left the last boot prints on the lunar surface
I would love to see this put in motion, but with the political climate in the US, not going to happen. The fights over NASA funding has been happening since 1970 and I doubt NASA will ever get decent funding.
My guess is China or possibly India will have a better chance of accomplishing that than the US
Sure, let the national space agencies build settlements on the Moon. There is no commercial viability in those places. Commercial organizations will go where the money is -- deep space asteroids and Mars.
The Moon will be very costly to maintain humans on. The "plentiful" water on the Moon is in very relative terms. It's likely to take days of work for a glass full enough to drink. And the extremely abrasive regolith and pitch-black-only shadows plus zero protection for radiation is all going to add risks and work.
Still, I do think some inflatable habitats on the Moon, once buried in regolith will have their uses, in terms of science and long term commercial uses.
On Mars, north and south of the equator hold hundreds of large, fresh water glaciers more than 2 km deep. The soil elsewhere holds about two liters of water per square meter of regolith. And the regolith is very soft and less abrasive than soil on Earth. Metals in Martian rock are all the same as Earth except about twice as much, in proportion. Martian Basal is near ore-grade for iron. Waving a magnet over the surface is all you need to do to collect very rich iron ore. And the atmosphere and gravity make it easy to launch this stuff into orbit on single-stage rockets.
Although the Moon is closer and therefore easier to send help from Earth, it's also far more likely that help will be needed. It won't take much to become self-sufficient on Mars.
However -- I would prioritize exploration of lunar lava tubes. It's reasonable to think that larger concentrations of water ice might exist in them. If that's the case then settlements in lava tubes on the Moon could be very profitable.
Elon Musk will have his Mars Colony up and running by then.