Permanent ‘Moon Village’ is perhaps not now such a giant leap

It’s been almost 50 years since Nasa astronaut Neil Armstrong left the dusty imprints of his lunar boots on the surface of the moon.

Ever since, various notions of populating the moon — including an out-of-this-world Disneyland — were promoted but dismissed as the fantasies of the scientific lunatic fringe.

That may be about to change if Jan Woerner, the director general of the European Space Agency (ESA) has his way.

Living and working on the moon may sound like science fiction, but Mr Woerner, who was in Dublin yesterday to sign a partnership agreement between the Irish Research Council and the ESA, is determined to make this giant leap a reality.

It would take the form of an international network of research labs known as Diverse Lunar Surface Operations but which he prefers to call the Moon Village.

“My intention is to build up a permanent base station on the moon,” he says in an ESA broadcast.

“In the Moon Village we would like to combine the capabilities of different spacefaring nations, with the help of robots and astronauts. The participants can work in different fields — perhaps they will conduct pure science and perhaps there will even be business ventures like mining or tourism.”

Earlier this year, the ESA unveiled plans to construct a 3D-printed moon base and has now laid out a timetable that could see the project completed by 2030.

The Moon Village would be printed from regolith, a naturally-occurring material on the moon that would protect the base from harmful radiation.

The plan is to build the village as a pit-stop to Mars, replacing the International Space Station after its lifetime ends and in order to test technologies needed to make the trip to Red Planet.

The idea of the Moon Village says Mr Woerner, is “to bring together different interests of companies and countries, meaning for instance robotics and humans but also totally different interests like mining, tourism, but also especially science”.

The agency has a budget in excess of €4bn a year and a staff of 2,000 across its member countries, including Ireland. More than 50 Irish companies are involved in ESA programmes.

“There is a lot of interest in building a community on the moon for mining and science,” Mr Woerner said yesterday, speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.

“If, for instance, you go to a little bit to the far side of the moon then you are in the shadow of the moon, meaning that all the radiation coming from the earth — our telecommunication etc — is shadowed. Therefore, you can have very a nice look into the universe.

“There are a lot of practical operations, even for tourism and some companies are interested in building a hotel on the moon.”

Mr Woerner sees the prospect of lunar operations as far more feasible than building colonies on Mars.

“It is exactly 350,000kms from Earth. To go to the moon and back takes about seven days, so you could do it on summer holiday. It takes three days to get to the moon but to go to Mars takes about two years.”