Starting Over Elsewhere: Why Build a Death Star When There's All That Real Estate?

They could even lease mineral rights...

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico – NASA is fleshing out details of launch vehicles, robotic and human exploration systems that can enable a sustained back to the Moon effort, including possible establishment of an Antarctic-like lunar outpost.

"The first step to Mars and beyond is getting back to the Moon," said Scott Horowitz, NASA Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at the Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF) held here this week.

Horowitz outlined aspects of the space agency’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), noting that a new study is underway on what future astronauts can carry out once replanted on the Moon.

NASA is on course to pick a single industrial developer in August of the Crew Exploration Vehicle—a spacecraft slightly larger than that used in the Apollo program to haul astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s to the early 1970s, Horowitz said.

Progress is being made too on designing a Crew Launch Vehicle, Horowitz reported, as well as a mega-cargo carrier that has the growth potential to toss over 300,000 pounds into low Earth orbit—more than the Saturn 5 booster utilized in the Apollo Moon program.

The two launchers are both borrowing heavily from solid rocket booster and external tank work honed within the space shuttle program. The shuttle is due to be retired in 2010. Also on tap for use in the two launchers is incorporating a Saturn 5-era J-2 upper stage engine—a motor capable of being started in flight and restarted anytime, Horowitz explained.

Horowitz said that conceptual looks at a four-person lunar lander have been done. Those initial studies of the vehicle show that it must be far more capable than the two-person Apollo lunar lander. For one, he said, a 21st century Moon lander must permit crews to put down anywhere on the lunar surface—and that means hauling lots of fuel in lots of tanks.

"The goal is four people at up to 7 days a shot," Horowitz said. An airlock on the lunar lander would permit ease of access to and from the lunar surface, he said...

NASA’s story for the Moon may well lead to a lunar outpost—infrastructure that can be utilized by international teams for scientific and exploration pursuits.

"In my mind, I kind of relate back to here on Earth…going to Antarctica," Horowitz told SPACE.com. Once crews have gone back to the Moon, they will learn to survive there in sortie mode. Finding locales on the Moon with usable resources—such as water ice—would be home base from which crews can then branch out to other parts of the Moon, he said.

"We do see an outpost of some sort," Horowitz said. "We just don’t know what it looks like yet."

Fortress Luna doubtless, a place to point your nukes back home.

Still, Dear Leader (or at least someone who could explain it to him) must have been impressed by the Titan fly-by. All those hydrocarbons without a rig. And no pollution standards to break, either.