NASA To Deliver Space:1999 Scenario Only 25 Years Late (Veiled Subscription Pitch)
From the LA Times, via the Indy Star:
An international team of astronauts will live and work at a permanent moon base to be built at one of the resource-rich lunar poles within two decades, NASA announced Monday.
Earth's first off-world colonists will cruise the surface in a lunar lander that will function like a low-gravity pickup truck, possibly journeying to the dark side to build the most ambitious collection of observatories ever constructed, NASA said.
"We will build up to the point where we are staying 180 days, and then we will have a permanent presence," said Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems.
The permanent base could be operational by 2024, officials said.
More information on Space: 1999 than even Martin Landau and Barbara Bain combined could want here.
Recall Tim Cavanaugh's blast on how NASA fights the future with Gerry Cooney-like success.
Subscribers to Reason's award-winning print edition have likely already devoured Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward's excellent story, "Space Travel for Fun and Profit," about private-sector space entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Robert Bigelow who are pushing the envelope when it comes to space tourism (and readers have almost certainly read the compelling sidebar to the main story, "Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex in Space but Were Afraid to Ask"). And subscribers are also being delighted--as we live and breathe, my friend, as we live and breathe--by other fantastic stories such as "The Pinpoint Search: How super-accurate surveillance technology threatens our privacy"; "Is Liberalism Dead in Central Europe?"; and "The Myth of the 'Values Voters."
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