Back to my Grand Tour images; slowly working my way out from the center of the solar system. Been thinking a bit about the current space program lately. It's a bit depressing that in ten years we might, if we're lucky, be where we were forty years ago. And despite all the technological change that's occurred since 1969, rockets are pretty much the same as they were then. Hell, the Soyuz booster is just an incremental improvement over the same rocket that launched Sputnik and Gagarin... You'd think there ought to be a better and cheaper way to reach space, but there really isn't. Maybe an airbreather first stage or a fully reusable two stage to orbit shuttle might work with funding, but though banks and automakers get hundreds of billions, we can't find a couple of billion a year extra for NASA (which of course would really be a little stimulus package for Boeing and LockMart). And any case, though I have my doubts about the Ares I, we need a heavy lift vehicle to go to the moon and beyond, and an Ares V or some derivate of that design or a shuttle-derived cargo launcher is the best bet for that. But it's a big dumb booster. Enough about that. Let's move on to the middle of the twenty-second century and not worry about how we got there... ---- The moon has been the goal of space travelers since before the first rocket reached orbit. Today it is often just a first step or a sidestep to some further destination. But over a million people live on or below its rocky surface. Most travelers visit the major settlements: Tranquility for its history and gaming, Copernicus for its government offices, Farside for its scientific showcases. But most Lunar residents are focused on what makes the moon a viable home: industry, not tourism, government, or science. Hundreds of small settlements, like Herbertville in a lonely crater in Lacus Temporis, eke out a living by mining and industry. The moon has its pockets and concentrations of minerals, extruded in ancient lava fields or deposited by asteroid bombardments. Its regolith is peppered with Helium 3 from the solar wind. On the moon, nobody cares about the wastes of industrial development. Vast areas of the surface have been stripped away. Deep pit mines and the resultant slag pock the surface, and giant fusion plants, heat radiating off into space, provide the heavy industry that the earth's ecosystem can no longer support. Half-buried settlements of a few hundred or thousand people produce goods for markets on Earth and the colonies: refined metals, non-organic superconductors, red oxygen power cells, even metallic oxygen fuels. Launched by translunar shuttles or hauled by magrail to the accelerators at Tranquility or Mare Smythii, these goods provide the lifeblood of the Moon. Something to remember next time you're playing robopoker in a Tranquility casino. --Grand Tour 2150: A Guide to the Solar System, Euphoria Press