— Ch. 1 · Military Moonbase Proposals —
NASA lunar outpost concepts.
~4 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
The United States Air Force unveiled the Lunex Project in 1958. This plan envisioned a twenty-one-person underground base on the lunar surface by 1968. The total cost for this military operation reached seven point five billion dollars. Heinz-Hermann Koelle led the Army's Project Horizon study in 1959. He proposed that two soldier-astronauts would land on the Moon in 1965. Subsequent launches of Saturn rockets would transport cargo to the outpost. By 1966, these missions could deliver two hundred forty-five tons of supplies. The Ballistic Missile Agency organized a task force on the 8th of June 1959 to assess feasibility. These early plans predated the Apollo Program and focused on establishing a fort rather than scientific research.
Shuttle Era Feasibility Studies
A team at the Johnson Space Center began a feasibility study in 1984. They utilized the Space Shuttle infrastructure to build a permanent eighteen-crew moon base between 2005 and 2015. The shuttle transported an empty twenty-one-thousand-kilogram lunar lander to a space station. A one-hundred-ton propellant module waited there for rendezvous. The first objective was creating a small semipermanently crewed camp during 2005 or 2006. NASA planned to launch a lunar orbiting space station from 2008 to 2009. This orbital facility supported the creation of a permanently crewed moonbase by 2009 or 2010. An advanced base with five habitation modules emerged in 2013 or 2014. Three power units derived ninety percent from lunar materials formed part of this complex structure. The ultimate goal aimed for a self-sustaining moonbase by 2017 or 2018.International Resource Exploration Concepts