So it appears that someone has the idea that a space station at Lagrange point 2, on the far side of the Moon, would be a great idea. Oh yeah, sure, like having another big station, this time even further away, would in any way be different than the ISS. I mean yeah, it would make it easier to do research on the Moon. I mean, I've had tons of RC cars in my time, I'm sure NASA can knock together some stuff. But that doesn't mean it would be any easier to have people go to the surface. Of course, I guess that wouldn't be as necessary. And if anyone did need to go down there I guess it wouldn't be any more difficult than before. All we'd really need to do is build another LM. Hey, we brought the VW Bug back, why not the lem? So I mean, we'd have to build a station sure, and I guess a couple of satellites for communication, but those are cheap. If most of the exploration is robotic that would save on gas. Launching from orbit is easy. Er. Easier. Anyway. And any crewed mission to the surface wouldn't require nearly as much in the way of infrastructure, so that's not bad. And now that I think about it, the station itself wouldn't need to be as large as a surface base. Floating is awesome.
I guess I'll just let you read about it, rather than my wall of text about it.
'via Blog this'
Oh and also this!
Of course, that's the Moon. Awesome as this idea is, I think it'd be even awesomer if this happened at Mars. But it's not like that would happen anytime soon. I mean, you gotta develop the technology, and then you gotta test it out. And I don't think a dry run in Earth orbit is really going to be adequate for a multi-month mission to Mars. So having a way to test out the idea first, make sure we got the whole shebang running properly before we try it at Mars may be a good thing. But where could we appropriately test such a thing? I know, the Moon!
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