Tonights 'Horizon' programme - heading back to the Moon?

Did anyone see this tonight? It is just over at this time, and I only caught about the last half hour of it. Some amazing stuff in it.

For instance, of the c. 800 pounds of Moon rock brought back to Earth from the Apollo mission, a pea-sized amount is valued in excess of $5million!

Also, of the 135 Moon Rock samples given to foreign heads of State by the Nixon/Ford Administration, only 35 can be accounted for today. The rest, it is presumed, are on the black market.

And a good substitue for hydrogen-based nuclear fusion power generators is helium-3, due to fewer neutrons given off (a safety concern of fusion reactions) - barley any exists on Earth - whereas about 100,000 tonnes is thought to readily exist on the Moon (as estimated by the returned Apollo samples).

Neat.

I just think they should leave the Moon alone, mankind is just not civilised enough, to take care of it. Mining the Moon for Helium 3, mining the Moon for anything is just a terrible idea.

We are hardly doing the right thing by our own Planet, and what about International Space Law ?

Out of interest, here is a small extract from an article I wrote some time ago about the piece of Moon given to the Irish Nation.

Irish Moon Rock by Deirdre Kelleghan

In Dublin city centre in the Natural History Museum lies a very special if somewhat small and unique treasure. In a glass case on the ground floor among 18 meteorites, rests a piece of lunar basalt returned from the moon in 1972. This piece of moon rock is contained within a lucite orb and comprises of a 1cm piece of lunar mare basalt. It is from the Taurus Littrow valley and was collected by the Apollo 17 mission of the seventh to the nineteenth of December 1972.

This particular piece of lunar material was presented to the People of Ireland in 1973 by President Nixon’s administration. As it was a gift to the Irish Nation, it was accepted by the then president of Ireland Erskine Childers. President Childers had the shortest ever reign as the head of the country as his life came to an untimely end after only one year in office. President Childers was the 4th president of Ireland and the only Irish President to die in office. Erskine Hamilton Childers was in office from 25 June 1973 - 17 November 1974 when he died of a heart attack.

The American President Richard Nixon had presented the moon rock as a goodwill gift to Ireland and to 134 other friendly nations in the world at the time.

After the death of President Childers, the moon jewel our gift from the efforts of the Apollo17 crew was put on display in the Natural History Museum in Merrion Square. The Apollo 17 landing site is in a spectacular valley called Taurus-Littrow on the southeastern edge of the Sea of Serenity (Mare Serenitatis). Sometime about 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago, a mountain-sized asteroid or comet hit the Moon and blasted out a basin nearly seven hundred kilometers in diameter.

Around the rim of Serenitatis, great blocks of rock were pushed out and up, forming a ring of mountains. In places, the blocks quickly fell again, and left radial valleys among the mountains. Taurus-Littrow is one such valley. In December 1972 Eugene A Cernan Mission Commander, Ronald E Evens Commander module pilot, and Harrison H Schmitt Lunar module pilot went to the moon and Cernan and Schmitt spent 75 hours on the lunar surface, in this spectacular valley."

I have referred to this tiny piece of the Taurus Littrow site as a jewel and although it is not a wearable bauble it is in fact very valuable and a conservative estimate of its worth is $ 7,000,000."

Deirdre Kelleghan

I'll believe it when I see it.

We can just about manage low earth orbit flight, and we can't do that with any degree of safety. Yet the powers that be seem to be convinced that in a few decades we can have colonies of miners living on the moon, regularly shipping back helium3.

One small step at a time. After all weren't we all meant to be enjoying short breaks in space hotels by now and living on Mars.

We're quite capable (technically) of building ships to get there and going a whole lot further. The problem is that space exploration is operated by governments, which have no critical motivation to do it. If it was being done by private businesses because a profit could be made somebody would be up there hacking lumps of ice out of Pluto by now.

Notice how nobody lives in Antarctica,except for researchers who leave when the work is done.

Nobody will ever CHOOSE to live on the Moon.(A million times more hostile than Antarctica.)

This is more political nonsense.

Peter.

It's not political, it's totally practical.

Nobody lives in Antarctica except for researchers because by international treaty nobody is allowed to exploit the natural resources there. The Southern Ocean used to teem with whaling ships plying their gruesome trade but since commercial whaling was banned you'll only see the odd research vessel or an occasional racing yacht. People only choose to live or be anywhere if they have access to the resources they need to make a living or they are working for a company that has such access.