🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct31.111812.1@cs0.lamar.edu> carlis_jc@cs0.lamar.edu writes:
>   ... I was wondering why the respective space 
>programs have chosen to abandon the Moon? ...

This decision is basically irrational and political.  It can't be justified
on rational grounds unless you assume that the next big program, whatever
it is, will be another one-shot-and-that's-all effort... in which case it
makes sense to go somewhere we haven't already been.  Any rational plan for
an ongoing space program will include resuming lunar exploration, which
barely got started in the Apollo era.

>... Also I see no reason why many of the techniques that have been
>sugested for attempted teraforming couldn't be tested on a smaller scale
>on the Moon. 

Unfortunately, there is a fundamental reason, actually a couple of them:
no atmosphere, and no source of volatiles to create one.  Mars does have
an existing atmosphere, thin though it is, and definitely has some --
perhaps a lot of -- frozen volatiles that could thicken it.  The Moon
definitely has neither, not in terraforming-relevant quantities anyway.
-- 
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry