New ESA boss calls for permanent moon base

Johann-Dietrich Wörner, the future director of the European Space Agency, ESA, is keen to create a permanent moon base. He expects the base to be an important base for further manned missions.

Wörner is currently the boss of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt and was recently elected to succeed Jean-Jacques Dordain, the current director of ESA. At a recent conference, Wörner indicated that one of his priorities is to create a lunar colony. He sees a moon base as a good successor to the current space station ISS.

“It seems appropriate to propose a permanent lunar station as the successor to the ISS,” he told Space.com. According to the future minister, the station is an important base for further research in space. In addition, he believes the moon base could help humanity learn to use resources at the mission site, not transport them separately.

Wörner, who will succeed Dordain at the end of June, seems to want to make a moon colony a priority. During the conference he called Mars, where NASA does research with Curiosity, among other things, a ‘beautiful destination’, but a base on the moon also offers advantages. This makes it possible to do better research into the cosmos from there, because the Earth’s atmosphere does not have to be taken into account.

NASA also wants to establish a moon base in the foreseeable future. The organization also sees that location as an interesting place, NASA boss Charles Bolden clarified at the same conference where Wörner was. “While Mars is the ultimate destination for humanity, we must not forget that there are plenty of other places in the solar system. And those are places where people must and will go.”