The Simpsons
BROS!
Guess what’s gonna happen in 14 years?
Can you guess?
Can you???
We’re gonna have a base on the moon!
That’s fucking right, a base on the moon, where people will live and work and play and drink moon beer and moon fuck and moon masturbate and smoke moon drugs and basically do anything they do on Earth, except moon based. Moon shred, that’s for certain.
The European Space Agency, which yea, isn’t technically us, but Europe will probably own us by then, or we’ll own them, or we’ll all consider ourselves part of one great big happy humanity (HA!), so let’s be happy, is gonna build a god damn moon base. For reals. And soon!
The goal is by 2030 to have a lunar village on the moon, one which we can use to blast off into other parts of the galaxy.
The moon base will be entirely 3-D printed on the moon, using the moon (which, whoa), and will house real astronauts.
The decision was announced at the ESA’s International Symposium on the Moon last month. And the head of the ESA, Jan Woerner, is all about it.
He said he wanted to see a lunar base becoming the replacement to the International Space Station, which is currently orbiting the Earth.
He described a vision to establish a ‘village’ on the moon with multiple countries from around the world that could serve as a base for scientific, space tourism and even mining activities on the moon.
He said: ‘There is the regolith – an ideal material for making concrete. We could mould structures, such as an astronomical observatory, on the far side.’
The moon base will be built entirely by Earth robots, before we send Earth people, to become moon people. When it’s done, it will make it easy AF to go to Mars.
MIT researchers released a paper last month arguing just that: collecting the heavy liquid fuel from the moon on the way to Mars could reduce the mass of the vehicle by 68%, which reduces the bottom line considerably. A NexGen report suggests this could equate to savings of around $10 billion per year.
Sure this sounds like a total pipe dream, but people at the ESA are seriously optimistic.
Laurent Pambaguian, from Esa’s materials technology section, outlined technology his team have been testing to print construction blocks out of the lunar regolith.
He added that 3D printers can produce between 6.5ft and 11ft (2 metres and 3.5 metres) of material an hour, meaning an entire structure could be produced in a week.
So get moon pumped, mooner fuckers. The only question left is how much to charge for a gram of moon marijuana.
See you bitches up there in 2030.
Space.
It’s fucking ours.
[Via Science Alert]