The orbiting space station was also empty, just Heywood Floyd and a few snoopy Russians and lots of deserted concourse. Again, a lot of reserve capacity there. The same can be said for the liner that transports Floyd to the moon, seats for a hundred passengers (and no doubt sleeping and lounge facilities) and he’s the only passenger.

And of course, the elaborate drydock facility, no doubt excavated at great expense and effort, when a pressurized vehicle or an extending airtight boarding tunnel could probably have unloaded the passengers and their luggage just as easily and effectively.

I bring this up to remind us how our fictional representations of space travel reflect our emotional hopes and prejudices, not the financial and engineering realities of maintaining an operating base, one with a real scientific mission, on another world.

And yeah, I’m a space groupie, too. I want to go there, and I want to do things when I get there, even if it means I spend most of my time in free fall in a cramped spacecraft between planetfalls. But I don’t want to live in an underground tunnel for the rest of my life Looking at video of an unchanging landscape (no doubt littered with construction debris and empty containers and busted equipment). Meanwhile I would probably be working my ass off to try and earn my fare home.

As for Elon Musk, he’s an ass. There may be a role for entrepreneurs in space exploration, but not trendy hip ones.

I suspect Musk may have picked that figure because to an American it’s the average price of a home, and he wanted to evoke the image of liquidating your Earthly homestead, piling your possessions into his version of a Conestoga wagon, and schleppng it all out to the new frontier. Again humoring Musk’s logic, being able to do that for real as close the Moon would, I really believe, unleash a stampede of people whose net worth neatly fits into Musk’s scenario.

Maybe Musk is blowing smoke. I keep throwing in caveats there are two lower stories to my house of cards.

Not sure how a comparison to the shuttle in 2001 (or any spacecraft) is relevant. The lava tube provides an enormous volume for free. Why be cramped?

I overlooked one practical obstacle, the length of the tube. That’s an enormous distance over which to maintain pressure. You’d want to install pressure doors every kilometer or so, and that’s a big engineering job in its own right. I’d build a tunnel/airlock on the floor, then collapse the roof on top of it. But that’s around 30 airlocks in the cited lava tube. No small job. I envision stepwise development as each new section is sealed off and pressurized.

I’m a space groupie at heart, I guess, if you carefully define the term. I certainly don’t knee-jerk endorse any damn thing to do with space flight. Nor do I worship NASA (though I remain respectful of its accomplishments). I get misty-eyed a bit over the faithful Soyuz capsule. No hero worship for Elon Musk, whose plans are most likely to lead to a gated community on Mars for the 0.01%…they don’t deserve terraforming, and I’ve come to see it as a bad idea anyway–space habitats, hollow asteroids, and lava tubes make more sense. The SR-71 still makes my heart soar. Images from all those trusty robots never ceases to amaze and delight me.

So sure, I’m a space groupie, of a certain kind, and always will be.

Remember 2001? How much wasted space there was on the shuttle, the space station, the moonbase? The film was technically correct, but the space program of the future wasn’t very realistic otherwise. Will we really need a great elevator to lower arriving spacecraft deep into the regolith?

You’ve come a long way, Robert, but you’re still a space groupie at heart. You dream of terraforming Mars but look at what happened to Earth.

Remember Andy Rooney’s comment on the Veranzano Narrows bridge?

“Man has made a sewer of the river, and spanned it with a poem.”

My thinking behind it all was that lava tubes eliminate the biggest and most expensive engineering hurdle to establishing habitats in a vacuum. And with that out of the way, you have the means and resources to construct a really livable space. You absolutely would not have to settle for “a lot of bad food, smelly, overcrowded quarters, constant safety drills…like living in a WW1-era submarine” (dude, were you high when you wrote that? I think you went tripping on words and tripped over them.)

You say you’d do a short tour of duty and retire to Earth. I see a place I could retire to. Different universes for different folk.

The moon is a blasted piece of rock and slag, unless you’re a scientist studying it, there is really nothing there. Business opportunity? That’s a Heinlein fantasy, even if you found something of value it would cost too much to haul it back. And sure, the moon is a vast place, with the surface area of Africa, but you just can’t go out and stroll around and see the sights without a REALLY good reason. Just going out the airlock to check the progress of your experiment or to pick up a few moon rocks would probably require an hour to prep your suit–not to mention the environment is deadly. Every EVA would be strictly controlled and require a support staff and considerable technical assets. Not exactly an environment conducive to freedom, entrepreneurism and low-g sports.

Life there would be a lot of bad food, smelly, overcrowded quarters, constant safety drills and an occasional terrifying emergency. It would be like living in a WWI-era submarine. And once you started getting old, they’d ship you back home (or shove you naked out the airlock, after first harvesting all the titanium in your dental work). They can only afford healthy, young productive people there. Too resource-expensive for tourists, retirees and kids.

On the plus side, your fellow colonists would probably be pretty neat people, highly intelligent, highly motivated, real A-type personalities. Lots of young, fit, over-educated horny people! But the support staff, the pipefitters and programmers, electricians and hydroponics specialists, dental hygienists and A/C techs would probably be a surly lot always forming unions and threatening strikes. They would not get along with the lofty scientific and administrative staff. So that probably means a big security goon squad to maintain order and enforce the endless safety and conservation regulations.

Yeah, people flocked to colonies on Earth a few hundred years ago, but that was no picnic either. Slaves, sharecroppers, indentured servants, military deserters, the no-pot-to-piss-in poor, freebooters, soldiers-of-fortune, religious fanatics, pirates, convicts, refugees, second sons, ax murderers and sex perverts…they weren’t all fucking pious Pilgrims looking for their freedom in a new world, mostly they were desperate people out of options and those eager to victimize them. It all makes for romantic reading and patriotic nostalgia, but for most of them it was the pits.

Hey, I read science fiction when I was a kid, I probably would have jumped at the chance to sign up if I were young and stupid. You know, living under the shadow of Saturn’s rings, mining the Belt, the ice moons of Neptune, the Sands of Mars. Yeah, I’ll do my graduate work on the moon, or my Peace Corps tour, but I want a return ticket and a one year contract, guaranfuckingteed. I’m a grown-up now. I know better.

And they have skylights! People pay good money here on Earth to cut skylights in the roof.

But seriously, there’s one thing about the idea that I find particularly compelling: Elon Musk is hallucinating when talks about sending millions of people to Mars at $200,000 each (household?). Not in this millennium.

But the Moon is one hell of a lot closer, and with ready-made habitat structures available, a SpaceX heavy-lifter might well be able to send settlers to the Moon at a reasonable cost. And to people who live in areas with hyper-inflated real-estate, a million bucks for a condo on the Moon sounds like a dream home in one-sixth G.

A home on the Moon might sound pretty dreary if you picture a can buried under the regolith, the way NASA PAO illustrators picture it. But a space the size of one of those lava tubes (with a skylight!) could be made really habitable. A light and airy space for two weeks, then a night sky for two weeks with the illumination on the floor tracking the normal diurnal cycle. That seems to me well within the range of comfortable adaptation for humans. No rougher than living in Scandinavia. With 1/6 the gravity, but colder outside.

Sign me up, man!