With Indian, Chinese, and Japanese spacecraft now orbiting the moon and the US and Japan planning to build lunar bases, it’s only a matter of time before disputes arise over who has a right to build on and mine the moon and where. The UN’s so-called Moon Treaty declares that the moon is part of mankind’s common heritage, and would ban ownership of any extraterrestrial party, but the treaty has never passed and has not been ratified by any nation with a space program.

According to Virgiliu Pop, that’s all for the best, since the UN has the wrong idea. Pop is a Romanian space lawyer who has written extensively on the topic of lunar property. His latest book Who Owns the Moon? Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resources, Pop explores the possibility of creating a legal framework for property and natural resources law on the moon. At the heart of this exploration is the notion that energetic individuals, rather than international coalitions, will need to claim property in order to advance the cause of extraterrestrial colonization:

"Homesteading is likely to transform the lunar desert in the same manner as it transformed the 19th Century United States," he said. "Space is indeed a new frontier calling for individualism rather than collectivism, and its challenges need to be addressed with a legal regime favorable to property rights."

He also challenges the notion that homesteading will favor citizens of wealthy nations, whose public and private enterprises have the resources and technology to travel into space:

"A refutation of the Common Heritage principle does not mean, however, that the developing world will, or should, be left behind in the space era," he said. "China, India and Brazil are living proofs that a developing country can, through its own effort, join the spacefaring club. Instead of freeloading on the efforts of the older spacefarers, the have-nots should pool their meager financial resources into a common space agency or into regional ones, and proceed at exploiting the riches of outer space for themselves."

Pop’s ultimate concern is that, without the development of a legal framework for lunar property rights, the moon will remain largely undeveloped. But, with more and more private companies looking into space travel, it may be a necessary to establish rights for private systems simply to ensure that laws are in place before the first settlers stake their claims. If the international community can develop a cohesive and enforceable framework, it could help keep the lunar frontier from descending into the wild West.

[Space.com]

In 1969, it took just eight days to reach the moon but, as Aldrin notes, getting a manned spacecraft to Mars would take the better part of a year. After all that time and expense, a trip to Mars might not be worthwhile unless the astronauts were there long term:

"That's why you [should] send people there permanently," said Aldrin. "If we are not willing to do that, then I don't think we should just go once and have the expense of doing that and then stop."

He asked: "If we are going to put a few people down there and ensure their appropriate safety, would you then go through all that trouble and then bring them back immediately, after a year, a year and a half?"

Currently, NASA’s Constellation program plans for a manned mission to Mars in 2030. Under the current plan, the crew’s return vehicle would arrive ahead of the actual expedition ship. But NASA is also scheduled to break ground on the lunar outpost in 2019, and there could be a fully operational base on the moon by 2024. If the lunar outpost proves a success, it might make sense for humans to erect similar colonies on Mars, where oxygen and water are more readily available. Of course, the challenge would be finding colonists willing to sacrifice a terrestrial existence in the name of the Martian frontier:

"They need to go there more with the psychology of knowing that you are a pioneering settler and you don't look forward to go back home again after a couple a years," he said.

"At age 30, they are given an opportunity. If they accept, then we train them, at age 35, we send them. At age 65, who knows what advances have taken place. They can retire there, or maybe we can bring them back."

Mars pioneers should stay there permanently, says Buzz Aldrin [Physorg via Universe Today]

Don Davis, who painted this piece, has worked at NASA for years, and he's responsible for concept art on everything ranging from these space colonies, to the Voyager program. He's worked at the Ames Research Center, which is the mecca for speculative science fiction/faction at NASA, located in California. When he wasn't working on art like this, he was also collaborating with Carl Sagan, and contributed to Cosmos, for which he won an Emmy. You can check out more of Don's retro-futurist paintings at his website, where he also has an impressive number of Burning Man trip reports as well.

Part of what I like about the Virgle prank is that it's so well thought-out, including a detailed discussion of choosing the correct site for a Mars base, with protective lava tubes, sources of water and climate. And then it dips into total science fiction, predicting "a glistening blue bay" within a couple of generations of terraforming. And here's the funniest part:

Here's the Virgle Pioneer pitch: Things will get better. Eventually. Sure, the work will be hard, the broadband rates low, the commodes decidedly open source, and yes, your life might be extinguished in a fiery instant of catastrophic technological malfunction. But your enriched descendants will appreciate your sacrifice, which should render worthwhile your choice to spend the rest of your (perhaps radically foreshortened) life in deprivation and uncertainty.

They're called Homo hadalis. Get it? They're from Hades, "the planet within their planet," as Long calls it - where their refers to the military men who now find themselves confused by this brand new enemy that confronts them from below.

Soon enough, finding more and more of these literally hellish non-humans pouring up from the bowels of the Earth, killing thousands before disappearing again into unlit caverns, the militaries of every nation in the world plan a subterranean invasion. Armed with machine guns, hydroponic agriculture, UV lights, and lots of instant concrete, they head downward. They begin the descent.

Indeed, organized and state-funded, the militaries "approached the subplanet the way America approached manned landings on the moon forty years ago, as a mission requiring life support systems, modes of transportation and access, and logistics."

Vast caverns are mapped. Tunnels stretching clear across the Pacific seafloor are discovered - and, from there, cobwebs of subsidiary tunnels, weaving off into an abyss:

The abyss beneath the Pacific is basalt, which gets attacked every few hundred years by huge plumes of hydrogen-sulfide brine, or sulfuric acid, which snakes up from deeper layers. This acid brine eats through the basalt like worms through an apple. We now believe there may be as many as six million miles of naturally occurring cavities in the rock beneath the Pacific, at an average depth of 6,100 fathoms.

As one of Long's characters says:

"Where it goes, we're not quite sure... A profusion of tunnels shoots throughout the Asian plate systems, giving access to the basements of Australia, the Indonesian archipelago, China, and so on. You name it, there are doorways to the surface everywhere."

Soon the Army Corps of Engineers gets involved. "They were tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots - three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves."

It takes days at a time to get anywhere; people move between underground base camps and vast instant cities further on, full of klieg lights, ringed with landmines, thriving behind walls of sandbags and fortified machine gun nests. There are outbreaks of "tropical cave disease" and claustrophobia - and there is something else down there, that enemy twin of the human race.

Everywhere the descending soldiers find "evidence of primitive occupation at the deeper levels," down amidst overwhelming pressures beneath continents and beneath the sea.

Of course, surface-dwellers want to explore; they want to see where the tunnels lead, to go out to the edges of the Earth by going into the Earth. "Into Hell?" some characters innocently ask. No, not Hell: into "an upper lithospheric environment," we read. "An abyssal region riddled with holes."

Suddenly, man no longer looked out to the stars. Astronomers fell from grace. It became a time to look inward.

There is a rich vein of subterranean adventure in science fiction, from Jules Verne, of course, to Neil Marshall's recent horror film The Descent and the unwatchably bad The Core - or even the Bible, where we read about the harrowing of Hell, which the Catholic Encyclopedia describes as a "triumphant descent" into the planetary abyss.

I'm tempted to quote Nietzsche. After all, with all this talk of entering into unexplored realms of pressure and darkness, looking into a void that perhaps looks into us in turn, the obvious final question is: Are we prepared for what we'll find?

As Jules Verne himself wrote: "Look down well! You must take a lesson in abysses."

An engineer hitches a ride on the lunar rail, hoping to visit his family on Earth. But the rail malfunctions and falls 1,000 KPH short of the 8,500 KPH speed needed to escape lunar gravity. He winds up in a decaying lunar orbit, and only a risky spacewalk (or a jump, really) can save him. NASA scientists are helping with this digital short, which director Jeroen Lapré hopes to show in schools as "a teaching tool in the colonisation of space." Given that Lapré works at ILM and is using ILM resources on his own time, you can expect the final special effects to look way better. The acting and costumes won't ever improve, alas. But maybe Maestrom II can inspire more cool DIY films that use real science.