Rod Pyle (29:23)
Yeah, well, you know, sortie missions is what we did with Apollo, right? We, we, we the nation had the commitment to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely by the end of the decade. That was achieved with Apollo 11. But then there were, you know, some hardware developed and there was an exciting momentum there to do a little more on the Moon, especially lunar rover came on the line. So we went all the way to Apollo 17. And it was never the goal for Apollo to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. That wasn't what was at stake in the competition in the Cold War. And so what was done was sortie missions. You land here and then next time you go to another interesting place, like next time you go to some other place where you went didn't matter to the geopolitics of it, but it mattered a lot to the scientists. And so by landing in different places, you were sort of doing the science buffet of sampling what the geology of the moon has to offer. But it's really not an efficient strategy, even if you're a scientist, but especially if you're considering other things like geopolitics of being on the Moon. The, the sort of our strategic presence, our long term ability to explore the place, just a logistics chain of going back to the moon each time you really want to get into a mode where you are setting up an infrastructure as fast as possible. And so the analogy of course are the Antarctic or Arctic bases. You set up a base, but the base in itself is not enough. A base would just anchor you to one point. It's a base plus a mobility system. So ways to travel from your base to sites of exploration, sites of mining, eventually on the moon, sites of possibly tourism. So the idea of a base is really very important because it creates an infrastructure, a shelter, safe haven for you at the surface of the moon where your operations are. I mean, some people propose a base in lunar orbit, but that doesn't really help with building infrastructure to increase safety in your surface operations. And, and then once you have a base, everything is possible. So, you know, with McMurdo in Antarctica, we can, we, we can roam the continent, the entire continent, with different mobility systems. C130 airplanes for long range, helicopters for short range or twin otters, snowmobiles for, you know, on the ground surface. Short roaming, short range roaming. And what I think should be decoupled is the idea that we do want a base on the moon, but we don't want it in the south polar region, because the south polar region is being focused on, because we're looking for water ice there mainly. That's sort of the main draw for being there. And we don't know where we want to set up chanter yet, or if at all, ever. And even if we found a place to extract water that was economically viable to extract, well, what you would want to set up there is a mine, not an exploration base from where you would roam around to explore other places. The terrain is just too difficult, the lighting too crazy and risky. And so those are two different things. And you know, you can look at the Arctic or extreme environments on Earth, you set up a town, but then you have different minds, you serve by, by roaming from there. So I mean, I'm pushing for Clavius because I love the place at this point, now that we've studied it quite a bit. And, and the other beauty, of course, is that from clavis you have a very nice gentle sloped corridor down which you could drive. And within a few days you're at the south pole of the moon, which is not true for a whole bunch of other high latitude sites on the near side or the far side. The lunar polar regions are very, very hard to sort of break into. They are surrounded by a fortress of very steep crater walls that are contiguous. And all of a sudden there's a break. If you're at the south pole of the moon and you drive northwest, you can break out of the polar regions on the near side of the Earth of the Melan, and reach the first big basin and that's Clavis Crater. So I call it the Northwest Passage.
