On to the Moon

Founding a colony on the moon will be enormously difficult, and it looks worse the more it is studied. These facts do not discourage General Electric Co.'s Missile and Space Vehicle Department from a firm belief that now is none too soon to start planning. This week it issued a massive report on how, and how soon, the lunar colony can be established and what it will cost.

G.E. believes that no major breakthroughs are required, only modest improvements in the space art. Nor, it insists, need the project wait for new big boosters; the eight-engine Saturn (1,500,000 lbs. of thrust), which has been ground-tested already, should be good enough. Two hundred Saturns will be needed, together with massive upper stages and a host of other fancy equipment, to soft-land ten colonists and 500,000 lbs. of equipment on the moon.

Like Noah s Ark. One Saturn cluster with its upper stages and lunar landing retrorockets is expected to soft-land 2,370 lbs. of cargo--or two men and their life support--on the moon. The G.E. plan is to set a radio beacon on a suitable lunar plain selected in advance by instrumented exploring rockets. Cargo ships will home in on the beacon and land their loads within half a mile of it. When all essential articles have arrived safely, the colonists will follow two by two, like the animals entering Noah's ark. Their first job will be to assemble the litter of cargo and empty vehicles into connected habitations that can be filled with air from earth.

As soon as the colony is reasonably snug, the ten colonists (or those who survive) will start a project that will doubtless be close to their hearts: getting back to earth. In the clutter of equipment on their dusty lunar plain, they will find enough rocket engines, heat shields, navigation instruments and other parts to assemble five return vehicles, each of which can blast two men off the moon, return them to the earth and land them on its surface in, hopefully, good condition.

Chapel & Garden. About many of the details of the moon colony the G.E. prognosticators are necessarily vague, but the cost of the whole show they have estimated closely. The Saturn launch site, apparently on a tropical island, will cost $342,694,000, including $1,520,000 for a chapel and $40,000 for moving a native village. The Saturns will cost $4.9 billion. Grand total for establishing the ten-man colony: $7.9 billion (in today's dollars). The whole job can be accomplished, says G.E., in 1968, and the colony can be kept on a permanent basis, perhaps with translucent domes and cheery gardens, for only $920,600,000 per year.

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