To The Moon Alice

NASA has announced that it intends to go back to the moon. The time frame is much greater than when JFK announced it during his term. In less than 10 years, we had put a man on the moon and did it more than once. NASA is currently looking at going back to the moon by 2020 and actually setting up a permanent base four years later. Better yet, NASA is looking at making it a multi-national task by including other nations in the missions. How cool is that!

It is amazing the amount of science fiction that involves the moon. Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, and John Varley are all known for their moon based novels and societies. This announcement is really the first initiative towards establishing man on a non-Earth surface. From there the next step would be to set up a colony on Mars. I would think that a thriving group on the moon would be a great impetus to expand man’s domain to include the red planet. There we could go to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Martian series for how to handle things (just kidding). Turning Mars into a human base of operations would certainly guarantee man continued expansion to the stars.

Being a sci-fi buff, I remember watching the campy British adventure Space: 1999. The premise was that mankind was storing nuclear waste on the moon and a freak disaster caused the radioactive material to explode and shove the moon out of Earth orbit in into deep space. Martin Landeau and Barbara Bain were the two lead characters in the first season and they picked up a sexy shape changing alien Katherine Schell for the second season. It was silly and illogical in its premise but for the time period (1975), it was fun for a teenager. If that accident had actually occurred (yea right), NASA would be having to drastically change their plans and we would certainly not be looking at Mars as our second destination. It would probably be our first and not so soon.

Icool

Cobb