Chandrayaan-1 Flies! Welcome to Moon Miners' Manifesto India ...

the second native born generation turns out. Will they be
fertile Experiments with animals with much shorter life
cycles will give us debatable clues. There is but one way to
find out for sure. Do it! Take the plunge.
Official policy may be quite strict and allow no
exceptions. But then individuals will take matters into their
own hands. Confidence in this outcome will grow, if there are
for-profit commercial outposts on the Moon.
As long as we play the “outpost game,” and that is
what it is, of rotating crews with short tours of duty, as long
as we avoid allowing people to choose to live out their lives
on the Moon, raising families, as nature dictates, we will not
see the rise of a lunar civilization, nor real use of lunar
resources to help solve Earth’s stubborn energy and environmental
needs in sustainable fashion. Human choices must be
taken out of the hands of politicians and administrators afraid
of conservative opinion. Nations may build outposts, but only
people pursuing personal and economic goals can give us
settlement. If history is any guide, that is exactly what will
happen.
Antarctic outposts are a dead-end paradigms no real
use of local resources, no economic activity, no real society.
For the Moon, we see instead, a real human frontier in which
an initial small outpost will seed a self-supporting frontier of
hundreds of thousands of pioneers in a number of settlements.
Many of these Lunans will be native born, others fresh
recruits from Earth seeking the promise of starting over,
starting fresh, getting in on the bottom floor. Throughout
history, those doing well stayed put. Frontiers have always
been pioneered by the talented but “second best” seeking a
more open future.
The Moon will become a human world.
Chandrayaan-1 Impact Probe Successful!
November 14, 2008, the probe separated on schedule and
impacted the Moon near the South Pole 25 minutes later,.
The photo below was snapped moments before impact.
For more about this event and the historic placing of the
Indian flag on the Moon in the process, see:
http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/Nov14_2008.htm
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Space-Based Solar Power – “SBSP”
& Solar Power Satellites – “SPS”
A Decades old Idea Receiving Fresh Attention
By Peter Kokh
The idea of Peter Glazer in the 1960s to use the
abundant “full-strength” 24-hour sunshine in space to provide
Earth with virtually limitless clean energy was ahead of its
time. The Space Age had just begun. In the following decade
Gerard O’Neill, a physics professor at Princeton University in
New Jersey, USA, developed a scenario by which we would
mine the Moon for materials to build hundreds, if not
thousasnds, of these huge structures to create a power belt
orbiting Earth in Geosynchronous orbit. Gigantic “space
colonies” would house the workers needed.
In 1977 NASA put together an in depth 185 page
report. “Space Settlements: A Design Study” for the US
Congress on three options for Spaced Based Power, It was
not too long after the Apollo Program had been cancelled
along with the last three planned Moon missions: Apollo’s
18, 19, and 20. Congress made it abundantly clear that they
did not want to hear the word “Moon.”
These ideas were decades ahead of then current
technology. NASA dutifully dropped the idea and went on to
other things.
Three decades of development of more areas of
technology later, technologies than we had yet to dream
about back then, and, in the midst of the twin crises of
environmental degradation and dwindling energy reserves,
and it became clear to people in the US Air Force that it was
time to dust off these premature studies and designs and
reinvent them accordingly.
The US Defense Department's National Security
Space Office (NSSO) had led a study group to investigate
space-based solar power (SBSP) and has found SBSP to be
an especially promising way to reduce US dependence on
foreign-oil and as a way to reduce global warming. At a
National Press Club event, October 10, 2007, sponsored by
NSS (the National Space Society), the NSSO released its
findings. Buzz Aldrin was one of many notables on hand.
http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/library/nsso.htm
The National Space Society, in anticipation of the
announcement, had put together a Thirteen Member “Space
Solar Alliance for Future Energy” (SSAFE), of which, The
Moon Society was one, to promote these concepts among the
public, as well as to acquaint Congress with the scheme.