Phases to establish a Permanent lunar base on the moon.

In just two days we have gone from the epic NASA announcement, where the program to build what should be the first human settlement on the Moon was presented to the very harsh reality, on May 26, a NASA press conference took place, where the progress and the program for the future lunar base were presented, which is the essential part of the Artemis program, in order to establish a sustained human presence at the south pole of the Moon and create the foundations of what would be the future lunar economy.

It will be the base camp of what will gradually transform into an authentic industrial city in this century. It will be the epicenter of lunar economic activities from mining to the manufacturing of spacecraft to lunar tourism, but there will also be arks to store data and genetic material in case a disaster occurs on Earth that ends up destroying all that material, whether biological or cultural information. There will also be large-scale scientific projects, such as a radio telescope on the far side of the moon, perhaps to be able to capture extremely weak messages sent thousands of years ago by other civilizations in the cosmos.

At the head of this lunar base is the Spanish engineer Carlos García Galán, born in Málaga in 1974 and raised largely in Torre del Mar, Málaga, although the Artemis program is an international program where in addition to the United States, which is the one that leads it, there is also Europe, Canada, Australia and other nations. García Galán did not reach this position of director of the lunar base because he represented neither the European Space Agency nor Spain, his position is not representative, much less political, it is a strictly technical position. and in addition to those with the greatest responsibility in current space exploration, he is one of the highest level technicians in the world.

García Galán emigrated to the United States at the age of 18 to train, becoming one of the best engineers on the planet, in fact, to reach the level where he is at NASA, he had to become an American citizen, he currently has dual American and Spanish nationality, he is the director of the lunar base because NASA considers him the best in the world and it needs the best in the world because the challenges that García Galán has to overcome are enormous, he will have to do what no one has done to date, lead the design and establishment of the first human base in the surface of another world very different from ours, at the south pole of our beloved natural satellite.

Your work is already underway. will supervise the strategic initiative valued at nearly 20,000 million dollars. At this point, you may ask me, why install the lunar base near the south pole? Wouldn't it be better to choose the Ecuador where there should be more pleasant temperatures? I admit that the temperature thing sounds good, but I guarantee that there are much more important things. To begin with, the Moon does not have an atmosphere; peculiar, you have on the one hand, areas of perpetual darkness and also areas of almost permanent light, it seems contradictory, at the bottom of some craters there is eternal shadow with temperatures ranging from -173ºC to -23º Celsius, it is colder than on Pluto and this shadow creates a cold trap that preserves water ice, a water ice that is believed to come mainly from the impact of comets and asteroids rich in water over millions of years, it is possible that part of that ice is several thousand years old. of millions of years.

That's at the bottom of the craters, but on the tops of the mountains and on the edges of some craters, the sun illuminates 90% of the year, which provides a large amount of solar energy. By the way, the year on the Moon lasts exactly the same as on Earth. A year is defined as the time it takes for a celestial body to make a complete revolution around its star and the Moon and the Earth go on that journey together.

NASA in its press conference presented a three-phase plan to create that lunar base. The first phase would go from the current moment, the year 2026 to 2029, it will be the phase of robots, the main objective will be to test technologies, reduce risks and prepare the ground, rovers, drones and scientific instruments will be sent. The intention is to collect as much information as possible and gain experience for future manned missions.

Second phase from 2029 to 2032, but before, in the previous phase we would already see astronauts on the lunar surface, the Artemis 4 mission, which is scheduled for 2028, but in my opinion they will end up delaying it to 2029 or 2030, I hope I am wrong, but at the moment things are not looking good. In this second phase 2030-2035, an initial habitable base will be created; the first habitable modules will arrive around 2032.

Solar and nuclear energy systems, rocket fuel storage and habitats will also be built and intermittent human presence will begin with stays of several months, of course, there will be intensive use of manned robes and telerobotics. What is this telerobotics? There are many illustrations currently about astronauts moving around the moon in their vehicles, collecting samples, doing operations and that is not going to be the case, they will go outside the base occasionally.

Most of the work outside the base will be done by robots managed by humans, the astronauts inside the base will be avatar robots, they will not use artificial intelligence in these robots, because artificial intelligence has its limits, to do repetitive tasks, it will be fine, but to explore or collect samples or perform complicated operations, the human mind is still more agile, therefore, operating a robot in an avatar form will be much more useful and practical than simply the robot working with artificial intelligence.

Third phase from 2032 onwards. The continuous human presence begins, there will be crews at the beginning of between four and eight astronauts and it will gradually increase with more modules, more habitat, the lunar economy will be developed, mining, fuel production, in situ manufacturing, that is, manufacturing, for example, of solar panels or entire spaceships, also space tourism, arks to store data and biological samples, funeral services to carry ashes of people who want to be buried on the Moon, for example, who would not be the first, there have already been some case previously.

All this will mean the expansion of the base, according to NASA calculations, by several square kilometers, it will be the construction of an authentic lunar city. At that press conference, NASA announced that it already has contracts to provide services with Blue Origin, which is the company of Jeep Bezos, Astrobotic, Intutive Machines, Astrolab, Lunar OP and Fireflight.

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