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falkor

Member

From: Surrey

Registered: 2004-08-21

Posts: 112

Hovering moon base may be on NASA's horizon

Just a day after US President Barack Obama was re-elected, rumours began to fly that he will back NASA plans to build a hovering moon base. This lunar outpost would be parked in orbit, about 60,000 kilometres from the moon's far side, in a gravitational haven called a Lagrange point.

There, the combined gravity of Earth and the moon would tug on a spacecraft with exactly the force needed for it to hover near the moon without spending fuel. Putting a spaceport at the Earth-moon Lagrange point 2 (EML-2) might assist human missions to an asteroid or to Mars – both on the list of NASA goals Obama announced in 2010.

Buzz about NASA's vision for an EML-2 outpost has been swirling since September, when the Orlando Sentinel newspaper obtained documents detailing how such a craft could be built using parts left over from the International Space Station.

NASA has probably already cleared plans for the craft with the Obama administration, space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University in Washington DC told Space.com on 7 November, and has been waiting until after the election to announce them.

what do you think? sounds great!!  READ MORE