Japan aims to build Moon base by 2030

Found on Nature on Thursday, 03 August 2006
Browse Astronomy

Japan's space agency has provoked surprise among other space experts by re-affirming its ambition to build a habitable base on the Moon within decades. At a lunar exploration symposium in Tokyo this week, head of the country's lunar and planetary exploration programme Junichiro Kawaguchi announced a deadline of 2020 for sending astronauts to the Moon, and 2030 for constructing the base.

The dates and details presented by Kawaguchi build upon the country's 20-year vision for space exploration, released in the spring of 2005, which began to consider far-flung ideas such as a Moon base.

A unilateral move by any country to colonize the Moon doesn't make sense, comments Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. "I don't think you'll see separate countries each with bases on the Moon - there's not that much to do there," he says.

Or it will go like in America: people from all over the world moved to the promised land of the free, and finally there was a war for independence, which resulted in the USA.