“Lunar orbit would be filled with many more satellites, including a lunar GPS network and a human space station capable of housing human astronauts that serves as a rest stop before they land on the moon’s surface. While there are no plans for a lunar city, there are proposals for a permanent outpost on the south pole of the moon, where crews might one day spend six-month rotations (China and Russia have announced plans for a lunar outpost, too). If NASA has its way, the lunar surface might eventually include a series of nuclear power plants, a resource extraction operation, and even something akin to moon internet. Given these plans, the US government estimates that the level of human activity in cislunar space over the next decade could exceed everything that’s happened there between 1957 and today, combined.”
-Quote from a November 22 Vox article, “The White House’s Plan to Colonize the Moon, Briefly Explained.” The article comments on the recently released report by the White House’s National Science & Technology Council, National Cislunar Science & Technology Strategy. By the way, the term “Cislunar space” in the report refers to “…the three-dimensional volume of space beyond Earth’s geosynchronous orbit that is mainly under the gravitational influence of the Earth and/or the Moon. Cislunar space includes the Earth-Moon Lagrange point regions…, trajectories utilizing those regions, and the Lunar surface.”
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