Stop the Presses!

Back in January I saw an article in Al Jazeera about Russian plans to mine the moon (link). Russia is planning to have a permanent base on the moon within 10 years, with mining starting five years after that. I wondered how I could have missed such an explosive story (and to be honest, I was a little doubtful of its credibility) so did a google search and found that only one other online newspaper had the story (Pravda), although a couple of science sites had picked it up.

Now a couple of months later it's still not big news. Lots of blogs and science sites have it, but other than Yahoo news and the Washington Times (not my first choice for reliability), North American newspapers haven't picked it up. None of the New York Times, Washington Post or Globe & Mail have covered it.

The space elevator has had slightly better press than moon mining, but the idea has been around for a long time and NASA has really pushed it. One of their web pages is headlined Audacious and Outrageous and someone has even created a wikipedia page. Even so, few people seem to have heard that we may have cheap and easy access to outer space within our lifetimes, without a space shuttle.

I was talking to a science type I know about the mass closure of university chemistry departments in England, and he suggested that if they renamed chemistry "nanotechnology" the discipline would probably be growing, not shrinking.

But surely we can't be saying that moon mining and space elevators sound boring. This is thrilling stuff. Perhaps the deaths of shuttle crews has curbed the public's appetite for news of outer space?

Public understanding matters. If moon mining and space elevators were part of our public discourse, it would be much more likely that commercial opportunities would be identified that would help push these initiatives along. NASA estimates that an initial space elevator would cost about $5 billion. That doesn't sound like much for technology that will provide a platform to launch satellites and space ships that is cheaper, safer, and less harmful to our environment than existing technology.

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