NASA administrator Doug Cooke says, "We now know the south pole has peaks as high as Mt. McKinley and crater floors four times deeper than the Grand Canyon." So your Moon condos could have beautiful mountain top views, or lie snuggled at the base of a sweeping canyon. Plus, there are more advantages, according to NASA:

The location has many advantages; for one thing, there is evidence of water frozen in deep dark south polar craters. Water can be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to burn as rocket fuel—or astronauts could simply drink it. Planners are also looking for "peaks of eternal light." Tall polar mountains where the sun never sets might be a good place for a solar power station.

New Radar Maps of the Moon [NASA]

Size, for one thing. We're used to the petite but powerful microwave ovens that nestle on our kitchen counters, but early models were behemoths that varied in size "from a unit smaller than a home refrigerator to one somewhat larger," according to the New York Times in 1946. Pictured is one of the more compact models from 1947; a demonstration model from 1949 was five feet high, two feet wide, and two feet deep.

Price was another problem. In 1949, the magnetron tube alone cost $500 to manufacture (roughly $4400 today), thus the first generation of microwave ovens were marketed for restaurant and industrial use. A Radarange for the home was introduced in 1955 but at $1,875 for a tabletop model and $2,975 for a wall console ($14,500 and $23,000, respectively, in today's currency), it was prohibitively expensive for all but the most well-heeled consumers.

There were other drawbacks, too. The Times noted in 1946 that baked goods were crustless and roasts "gray rather than brown." But it was fast, fast, fast! Microwaves cooked steak dinners in 35 seconds, hot dogs in buns in 15 seconds, and baked gingerbread from batter in 26 seconds. A 1962 Raytheon ad imagined what this meant to the harried housewife:

Four unexpected guests for dinner? Mother better set the extra places at table first or the food will be ready before she is. Popping four large potatoes in to bake will give her just two minutes before they are steaming, fluffy, ready to serve. And the juicy, tender, mouth-watering sirloin steak with which she wants to impress her guests will be done to a turn in nothing flat. Twenty seconds to be exact!

Even so, sales didn't take off until the mid-1970s, when technological advances led to lower prices and more compact ovens—and the American public learned that the microwave was best suited for reheating leftovers and frozen foods than cooking gourmet meals.