Science fiction is replete with armed, human-occupied bases on the Moon1, ever ready to protect national interests or unleash nuclear hell onto the waiting Earth2. Yet, no such bases exist. How can this be?
As all technical problems can be solved with sufficient will, no doubt the explanation is simply because the people who control the funds have not been presented with sufficiently persuasive arguments. Thus, five are outlined below.
The first, most personal but least important, argument is that a heavily armed base would greatly please aging SF fans like me. We were promised jetpacks, conveyor-belt-mounted cities, and atomic-powered cars travelling at hundreds of kilometres an hour, not to mention psionic powers beyond mortal ken. Is it so much to ask for one Moon base with enough thermonuclear weapons to peel the Earth like a ripe orange?
The second reason would be scientific research. In many cases, scientific research could be carried out remotely, the Moon being (just) close enough that teleoperation of robots is practical. There is one category of research that can only be conducted on the Moon and only by people actually living there, which is the study of the effect on humans of living on the Moon.
Strictly speaking, this is pure science, but you cannot have the nightmarish technological applications without first conducting the pure science on which the horrifying affronts to basic decency are based. Without the hard work of pure science pioneers like Bacon, Boyle, and Scheele, the world would have been denied mustard gas, and then where would we be?
A heavily armed lunar base could protect the nation’s vital lunar helium-3 mines3. It’s true, these mines do not exist, may be impossible to build with foreseeable technology, would service a commercial fusion power industry that does not exist with a fuel for which Earth has readily available alternatives, a fuel that fusion plants are unlikely to be able to use, on the basis of supposed benefits that do not stand up to close attention. Nevertheless, do you want some rival nation to monopolize the Moon’s miniscule, useless resources of helium?
An infraplanetary ballistic missile (IfPBM?) base on the Moon offers many advantages. For example, such a base would not, as terrestrial bases are, be subject to annihilation on short notice… well, not unless Those Other Guys build their own base on the Moon. Whereas bases on the Earth are subject to continual scrutiny from orbit, making a sneak attack impossible, a lunar base only has to worry about a launch being detected if the other side happens to point telescopes in the direction of the Moon or if, being aware of the base, put satellites in orbit around the Moon. While it’s true that space authorities like to keep track of every bolt-sized-or-bigger object out to geosynchronous orbit, why would they bother keeping telescopes aimed at the very small, very specific patch of sky from which atomic doom might at any moment descend?
Such an IfPBM provides further benefits. Experience with the ISS suggests the base would be phenomenally expensive to build. Furthermore, maintaining the missiles would be far more costly than maintaining terrestrial missile bases4. Neither of those may sound like benefits to you, but they certainly would be to the lucky contractor who wins the bid to construct and maintain the base.
Finally, even if someone could prove that a lunar military base would be expensive and largely pointless, the very fact that it was expensive and pointless would make the project worthwhile as proof of national prowess. Throwing money away on a lunar boondoggle would signal to other nations that the nation can afford to waste hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars without significantly impacting its defensive or offensive capabilities5.
Of course, these are simply the first five arguments that came to mind for a lunar military base. No doubt there are more, each one more persuasive than the previous. Delight us all by detailing them in the comments below.
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