The explicit reason is: Why would we pay another $200 billion to just do Apollo again? People were bored of Apollo before it even finished its original set of missions.
To add another data point: the Chinese lunar program also plans to land humans on the moon and later establish a manned research outpost on the surface. But there don't seem to be any plans for an orbital stations, despite China having very successful space stations in LEO
It was cool to get bragging rights by being the first to land and come back - in the ultimate show of “soft power” against the Soviet Union. But a permanent moon base? We can’t even fund the ISS.
And here I'm sitting in my basement not working on space projects and realizing money spent on space is money I don't have for something else I want (even it is is only $.10 that is still money that adds up).
Being able to prove that people can live in an environment like the moon long term and develop materials that can make their stay there sustainable by reducing consumables and developing replacement parts from lunar material is a great stepping stone.
Being able to demonstrate the doubling of usable pressurized space by building and burying modules that can be stocked with equipment brought from Earth would be a remarkable accomplishment.
We couldn’t even handle a closed source experiment on earth (see biosphere 2), why would one on another celestial body fare any better?
These kinds of things can be put into cycler orbits around the Moon or Mars[0] which would allow relatively comfortable and cost effective journeys to these locations. As the scale of these kinds of craft expand they could eventually become destinations themselves akin to massive cruise ships in the sky where some people live out their entire lives.
Biosphere 2 was obviously a flawed experiment but it seems that Mir, the ISS, and Tiangong have shown that long term habitation in micro-G is possible, it seems like the extension of that is to try long term habitation of a body with gravity and material to experiment with.
So let's say we spend a little more money ($150 million would be approx $335 million today, so maybe $0.5 - 1 billion). That's a lot of money but still a LOT less than establishing a moon base. And by doing it on Earth we can solve for more closed-loop system problems here without also coping at the exact same time with an environment actively trying to kill the participants and a multi-month lead time for any resupplies/"oops"es.
Then we can take those lessons learned and apply them to the much harsher environment of the moon. In other words, it's a lot cheaper and faster to learn some lessons here on Earth first before having to tackle all that plus things like keeping yourself alive.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/07/nx-s1-5442529/biosphere-2-ear...
Because (1) the project would be designed seriously and (2) you don't need a completely closed loop. Just one that's mostly closed.
Ok so maybe a multibillionaire. Perhaps Elon musk? Yikes. Or Bezos? Maybe.
The EU is kinda busy increasing their defense spend, preparing to engage in Ukraine so I don’t see them super excited to do this.
China or India perhaps?
Also, why shouldn’t it be completely closed loop? If you’re designing to address the myriad of scenarios that can unfold in space, I’d say you’d want that experience under your belt. Its already easy mode doing this exercise on earth you might as well give yourself a little challenge to capture lessons learned.
NASA.
> why shouldn’t it be completely closed loop?
Because it doesn’t need to be. Engineering an ecological carbon cycle is hard. Putting in long-lived CO2 scrubbers is not.
And then, once you've got it working well here on Earth, then you have a go at doing it on the moon.
This idea that the best place to get started on working out how to do these sorts of things is on the moon makes about as much sense as suggesting that the Space Shuttle program should have had astronauts rushing to work out the kinks of EVA missions in space instead of doing everything they could to test and practice procedures in swimming pools in an effort to learn as much as possible before you blow half a billion dollars on trying it out in orbit.
Agree. A moon base lets us test this out with real-world constraints as opposed to simulants.
We don’t know how to build ecological closed loops. But every failure mode of Biosphere 2’s was almost trivially solvable with expendable components. (The CO2 cascade being the simplest among them.)
> idea that the best place to get started on working out how to do these sorts of things is on the moon
It’s not. It’s the best next step. We’re doing a lot of pre-colonisation lab work already. And we will need to do more before establishing a moon base. The moon base is the interim goal—you don’t put astronauts in swimming pools without a plan for a Shuttle. And Biosphere 2 is a terrible swimming pool for anything we’d do on the Moon or Mars.
All these dreams of star-trek like interstellar travel (or even interplanetary travel beyond taking a selfie and going home) require major advances in the physics tech tree. Might come, might not.
A moon colonization program provides both.
"Moon base that produces positive economic benefit" is about 10 steps up a very expensive tech tree and we don't even know what the rungs are.
I also don't think this is very imaginative. If you want to colonize the moon, why send a man in a can? How about genetically engineering a human-ish that's better adapted to that kind of environment? That's the kind of technology advancement that makes manned interplanetary missions reachable.
The exact opposite of that has been the meta in most 4X games I've played.
You always rush specific techs because you understand the ROI for the specific empire you're going for. That involves specialization.
Apollo allowed America to demonstrate its ability to land a rocket with pinpoint accuracy on the Moon, implying it would be easier to land an ICBM on the Soviets.
The USSR got a large PR boost through launching Sputnik and then a person. It convinced many people communism was a superior ideology for advancing science and technology. Turning it into a "Space Race" allowed the USA to reframe the discussion for the world in a way that let America catch up.
Though the rather limited space on the ISS and its imminent decommissioning complicate that a bit. I think the current plan is to launch satellites for commercial production
We have plenty of earthbound motivation to solve the "energy too cheap to meter" problem. We're nowhere near that. Adding one more big energy consumer (moving cargo to/from orbit) does not make a material difference.
Starship is supposed (Musk hype warning!) to be 1/10th to 1/100th the cost.
We haven't done skyhooks or launch loops or launch cannons, which are large upfront projects but once built are semi-permanent economic gamechangers.
I always felt like that was a backwards justification for going to space (we want to go to space, how do we sell it), rather than a real need to that would push people to go to space.
Given current American politics, I'm honestly divided on whether we should colonise the Moon. That someone will do it seems pretty obvious.
One interesting (admittedly small in scope, but huge in impact) thought experiment is the following- let's say that the doomsayers are correct. The Earth has been destroyed and inhabitable, leaving just our extra-planetary outposts. How do we supply the necessary high-tech manufacturing capability to survive?
Have we spun up all of the supply chain to reproduce the state-of-the-art technology required just required to sustain life on that celestial body? As an example, even with all our experience on Earth, we have exactly one physical location on our entire planet that can crank out the most advanced chips used in our modern technology we take for granted. That build-out took massive investment of deca-billions of dollars plus a massive, deep supply chain to build, even with all the advantages we have here on Earth (things like, oh, breathable air, access to vast carbon energy storage, access to millions of humans and existing factories... just as a start...)
Are we expected to replicate all of that on our next celestial body? If not, how do we expect to replace failing parts and continue progress?
What about even more basic concerns about things like... literal population growth? We understand ... a little... about how very healthy adult human bodies react to prolonged periods in zero-g (hint: not well, where "prolonged" == 437 contiguous days [0]). What about pregnant women? Babies? Spaceflight crews are required to exercise two hours every day to counteract muscle and bone atrophy [1]. How is that expected of say... an infant?
Don't get me wrong, I find spacefaring fascinating. I idolize the Apollo era. But we haven't even scratched the surface of how we can sustain any sort of population off this planet. We need to find ways to get along here, because ... this is all we've got, folks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_longest_spacefligh... [1] https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/07/16/muscle-an...
If we find some faster-than-light travel mechanism and a star group that includes a planet like our own, then perhaps there's a way out of here.
On the other hand, why not try to achieve something like ... getting along better here? We could find ways to create more clean energy here on Earth, clean up existing messes, better harness the 3/4 of the globe covered by water, etc.
Plus we have a lot of societal issues to try to address. How would living on another planet solve distinctly human problems like war, conflict, need to pollute the natural environment of a new planet, etc? Why not look at how we can improve our own self-governance? After all, if we do escape this rock, it's not like we're magically going to become more altruistic, compassionate, etc. We'll still suffer from the same problems we do here, just with even more stressors like "my body boils over if I dare step outside unprotected". Sounds super depressing to me.
Snark aside: the goal is Mars because it might be possible to colonize the planet and to have a place that acts as a reserve for humanity should shit really hit the fan (i.e. WW3).
The moon isn't suitable as much for that purpose due to a complete lack of any atmosphere and because it's too close to Earth.
The problem with using a space station as a waypoint on the way to and from the surface of a remote body is that it make the mission more expensive. For example, the Lunar Gateway increases the delta-v requirement by 15-20% (can't remember exact number) compared to a more direct mission. Which then, all else being equal, increases the total mission cost by much more than 15-20% because the rocket equation always wins. And that's just the actual visit, we're not even considering the cost of putting the station there in the first place.
So I keep going back to, why a space station? If we're going to spend all that extra money on turning hydrogen and oxygen into hot water, why put it toward a space station out in the middle of nowhere instead of, say, more time or more equipment on the surface of the body?
Also, IIRC, none of Elon's proposed mission architectures for going to Mars involve an orbital station. And, while SpaceX did get the Artemis lander contract, they weren't involved in the decision to have a Lunar Gateway.
Read the book A City On Mars recently which had a lot of interesting concerns not widely discussed in the pro space colonization community : https://www.acityonmars.com/. Highly recommended.
I felt they had some very good points, though, and I don't see any progress on the major blockers to any sort of large scale extra-planetary colonization. I hadn't considered the issues with procreation discussed in the book, for example--that's kind of a huge issue if we want to have any sort of self-sustaining population outside of this earth!
I hear this somewhat often, and I find it a bit disingenuous since it's not like we're trying that hard to colonize Antarctica, we're mostly preserving it as well as we can, no? And the existing Antarctic bases aren't total hellholes or anything, AFAIK the larger ones are relatively normal spaces with power and normal food and heated water.
I do agree with the overall point though for sure.
The Reds want to preserve the environment and the Greens want to completely change it...
The reality was that Von Braun looked at dozens of mission architectures before discovering one that was much more feasible than any of the others and made it possible to realize Kennedy’s dream.
The moon is not far away in terms of miles but in terms of energy and momentum it is very far away if your goal is to fly there and fly back. Right now the best idea we have for a moon lander is to hope that SpaceX gets Starship to orbit and masters orbital refueling it’s not like they can fly 100 tons there and back, but rather they can land about what Apollo did with a much bigger spacecraft that’s really tall and tippy, needs an elevator, can get the ascent rockets smashed on rocks, etc. if they had a set of those chopsticks on the Moon or Mars they could land it easily but on generic inner solar system bodies covered with boulders, craters and stuff good luck. Plan B is basically the same from Blue Origin.
If you could refuel there the math changes, maybe you can, there might be usable ice at the poles but nobody has seen it, unless we have a Drexler machine we’re going to have to launch a huge number of missions with a marginally effective system until we have a system in place that can reliably deliver fuel.
So it’s tough, any honest analysis of space colonization makes you come to the conclusion that Drexler did, rocketry has very little to do with it, being able to pack a self-sufficient industrial civilization into the smallest package has everything to do with it.