Men on the Moon

after hearing about the most recent and largest zombie-mode map on Call of Duty: Black Ops, i got to thinking that such a scenario (minus the zombies of course :D) would go pretty well in my plausible-implausible ATL. for those who dont know, the map in question is a moon base, presumably from the cold war era. there's advanced technology like artificial gravity generators, teleporters, a biodome (not like that stupid movie), and other things

anyway, getting to the point, for my ATL or any given ATL, what does everyone think is the earliest or most plausible time after armstrong sets foot on the moon that the US, USSR, or any other country (or a combination of them) could conceivably and plausibly establish a base on the moon, and when such a base would become feasible? there can be multiple scenarios here for a given country or group of countries, and assume that everything that they would realistically require to establish a moon base is available to them; in other words, nothing ASB
 
okay, so a space race would still be going on in the 70s. what about later? at what point do you think moon bases would become feasible?
 
Well, "space race still going" is the POD, since OTL it ground to a halt as a political "reality" once the USA was able to perceive itself as "winning" it by a simple moon landing. Plans made on the assumption that the "race" would still be seen as continuing, therefore NASA funding persisting, did involve developing Apollo tech into more and more sustained presence on the Moon; presumably the Russians would eventually have seen some need to match this with landings and long-term base plans of their own. But at this point OTL, American politicians were looking for excuses to back out of a commitment that had no obvious further payoff and the Russians were relieved to have less pressure on them too, so what one needs is a compelling political argument beyond "because this is a great adventure and we can do it!" Given that, the capability existed already and I suppose that eventually the Europeans and Japanese and so on would toss their hat into the ring too, either with their own program or by buying in to the American one. Or conceivably the Soviet one.

But to sustain it, there would have to be some obvious goal; if for instance orbital industry seemed to make sense to develop than a self-sustaining base on Luna might seem viable as a source of supply--if one anticipated a scale of orbital demand for resources justifying the huge investment in first making a Lunar colony self-supporting in essentials and then capable of scraping up and exporting key resources. The Moon has some good stuff on it such as titanium (and solar power to process it) but is lacking in hydrogen, so feeding Lunar workers would be a matter of shipping lots of water and biomatter all the way from Earth and then developing a very good recycling biocycle, and insofar as the orbital stuff and/or deep space missions needed organic materials, the squeeze is on to either find water, carbon, nitrogen on Luna (maybe the former at the poles, but they wouldn't know that early on--as late as the late '80s a JPL planetary scientist I spoke with was focusing on solar wind hydrogen bound to lunar surface rocks to be combined with oxygen sweated from moon rock:eek:! and I have no idea where one finds lunar nitrogen or carbon, I suppose bound into more rocks...) or even more ambitious schemes to go out and capture or mine in situ asteroids rich in the stuff...

And again, we seem to have managed to do without orbital factories and space-based solar power and all that just fine; we don't seem to have the interest or will to do massive-scale solar system exploration let alone development. Frankly if the asteroids do have the organic stuff we'd want for survival out there we can probably develop them for the inorganic stuff as well and the higher initial cost of first planting a base on one and then getting stuff back from it might well be offset by needing to ship less stuff out to get it going for human habitation. Of course asteroid base microgravity is so low it might as well be zero G, and should be for many purposes, but it isn't clear that lunar 1/6 G is significantly better from a health point of view whereas a base standing off a short distance from a low-mass asteroid could, with some considerable elaboration, involve a spinning structure providing higher G, perhaps right up to a full Terran G, whereas a moon base could hardly do so (unless we envision a habitat made of essentially railroad cars running around a track on the ground, requiring power to keep going.) Well, a Lunar base does allow for relatively easy shelter from radiation, by digging down under the surface (still harder to see how one could set up the high-G habitation under such a roof though). But then an asteroid base could also involve hauling out blocks of raw rock to surround the habitat too. So it boils down, in comparative economics, to the longer and higher-delta V passage to an asteroid rendezvous versus the "dryness" of Luna relative to some asteroids. The asteroid might turn out on the whole to be the smarter place to start!

Again, the real question is, how do we persuade leaders we need a big investment in manned extraterrestrial infrastructure? And given that decision, I don't see Luna being seen as the main attraction for developing extraterrestrial resources nor many other purposes.
 
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