The man who is leading the effort to build a base on the moon joined NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman during a presentation to Iowa State University students Tuesday in Ames.
Moon Base Project Manager Carlos García-Galan says they settled on building the base at the south pole of the moon because of the availability of light. “The Apollo program, for example, went to the mid-latitudes of the moon, where you have straight up 14 days of sunlight and 14 days of darkness. For a mission where you’re just going there, coming back, it’s probably fine, going at the time that there’s light,” he says.
He says the moon base will be permanent and they need more light to survive. “When you want to be there permanently, you want to look for areas where you have more of a mix of sunlight and shadows,” Garcia-Galan says. Garcia-Galan says the areas in the shadows have not seen the exploration of other areas of the moon and exploring them from the base could be important. “Can you imagine the amount of information that could give us? It could be a history book of the solar system, how the moon was formed, how the Earth and moon system were developed. That’s really our history,” he says.
Garcia-Galan says building the base there will not be easy and they will have to figure out how to do it to protect those who are going to live there. He says figuring out how to accomplish the mission is much like how NASA had to find a way use computers that were the size of a room in the Appollo program. “They had to figure out how to take that and put it in a box so they could put it in the spacecraft so they could get to the moon. And that led to things like microelectronics, which has changed our world. Imagine the amount of things we can develop by just having to do them so we can get there,” he says.
Garcia-Galan says they have already developed new moon rovers to help build the moon base and explore it. He says they will also be using drones and other devices they develop for the mission. He says they are not afraid to fail as they work on the first phase to get the base built.