It requires a real head of bone to believe that no water ice exists on the Moon in the face of direct evidence for 5-10 wt.% water vapor AND water ice particles in the ejecta of the LCROSS impact plume.

Someone else replied, “A robotic lunar polar lander with a rover might be needed to get more reliable data.”

Absolutely correct and if you read our proposed lunar architecture, you will see that we begin with a lander/rover mission to BOTH poles as the first steps in a return to the Moon.

Your “advocates of all kind” are trying to figure out something cheaper, easier, whatever, and I don’t think that is going to happen.

People living for extended periods in less than Earth gravity is not a good idea. They will debilitate and suffer permanent bone loss and other effects. The space colony movement came into existence because Mars does not make a good second home for humankind.

Someone replied, “Moon has water? ice? 100% proof? You might want to check the data showing ppm ranges as the only hard physical evidence.” Someone else replied, “A robotic lunar polar lander with a rover might be needed to get more reliable data.”

Recent discussion by others about the Moon besides Dennis and Paul is some progress but a Mars mission is ***always*** attached to lunar mission concepts. I think right then it will bankrupt any lunar planning. My 2 cents.

OK, I was talking in a kind of shorthand, and should have been more clear. So, my position is yes, we have plenty of data, a “control group” if you will, for our experiment in the form of 1.0 G, normal life on Earth.

We also have plenty of evidence that microgravity, like on the ISS, is harmful to us, even with exercise. In my opinion this evidence is enough: prolonged microgravity is bad.

So 1.0 G good, 0 G bad, based on substantial long term experience. My point was that we need that same “substantial long term experience” with 0.17 G (Moon) and 0.38 G (Mars), and we don’t have it. Fifty-plus years, and we have, really, nothing.

I do know about the Gemini experiment. It was a good thing, a first among so many remarkable Gemini program firsts, and I hope tether technology has a long and fruitful future. But the test wasn’t nearly long enough and with enough people to answer the gravity question.

Advocates of all kinds of rotating habitats want to find out a minimum amount of gravity for good health, affecting the required size and spin rate, also taking Coriolis Effect into account. I’m in favor of this, but like many, I don’t want to give up on planetary surfaces just yet. I have great hopes for the Moon.

I appreciate your speculations for the Moon, two months down, one month up, and so on. I speculate too, but my hopes and speculations are not the same as evidence.

If I were emperor, my method of finding this out would be to just put a crew on the Moon for a year. After all, Scott Kelly and others have stayed a year in orbit in microgravity, so the Moon couldn’t be worse than that, perhaps much better.

The Moon is thus the enabler for the underwater exploration of alien oceans with submarines.
So not just geology.

No idea how large a Moon base would be after ten years or so because that would depend on just how many new habitats are constructed per month. Each habitat might be more like a greenhouse than anything else with plants everywhere to provide food and supplement life support. No lava tubes in the vicinity of the ice mean water trucks could be used if distant tubes were found and utilized and as I have commented in the past these water carriers could be used as radiation shielded surface exploration vehicles.

There is the old PACER concept also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER

Sure we do, it is called 1G. Earth gravity is the “prescription” and the Gemini 11 mission in 1966 shows the most practical technique to effect artificial gravity: the tether.

Gemini also showed how long it takes to start debilitating in microgravity: 11 days.

If you want a data point use that and apply that 16 % Earth gravity to 11 days and call it 20 days till debilitation begins on the Moon after descending from a 1G- LLO space station.

Are astronauts going to have to go back up to LLO after 20 days on the Moon? Probably not. A wild guess would be 2 months “down” and then at least 1 month “up” but depending on what kind of rotation they use it might be equal time spent in LLO and on the surface.

With 2 months up and 2 months down an astronaut would take 6 trips a year and over a 4 year tour 12 trips down and 12 trips up. All just speculation though.

The reason is to begin humans expanding into the solar system. Not Mars. Space colonies built with lunar materials. This logical progression begins with a permanent cislunar presence off-world and continues with exploiting lunar resources to build a space solar power infrastructure. The space solar power revenues, essentially powering the entire planet, is then used to finance construction of Bernal spheres. All of this was studied in the 1970’s and now seems to have been forgotten in favor of retirement condos on Mars.

Since you are willing to allow for great advances in robotics to make more elaborate missions cheaper (“I guess there is a difference here is estimating the cost and capabilities of robotics. I agree with you for the near term, robotics can be expensive. But given the accelerating pace of robotic technology ….”) you should allow for some advances elsewhere.

As only one example, development of a cryogenic PLSS would allow reduction in cost, complexity and weight and is an increasingly well understood technology.