Few people enjoy the fact human ambition towards space has withered these past few years. With the exception of the Rosetta mission and the
Mars One project, money at the moment seems to be flowing mainly towards the home-planet and the sick economy.
On the other hand, excessive space ambition is also unhealthy. In this article we’ll show you 10 examples of grandiose space ideas which almost came close but didn’t really come true. The huge colonization craft, launched from Earth in the 60’s in the upcoming mini-series
Ascension and the Nazi base on the moon from
Iron Sky are not among them but could measure against those that did make the list by grade of unrealizable.
We start the ranking with the not-all-that-impossible ideas and gradually make our way to the manifestations of absolute insanity.
![An example for an exterior of a Moon base, had Hitler survived a few decades longer.]()
scifi.bg
An example for an exterior of a Moon base, had Hitler survived a few decades longer.
Having mentioned the Nazi moon base, we can’t but start the review with NASA’s actual plans to build one as part of the Apollo program. It was this exact program by way of which NASA sent people to the moon (even though some still don’t believe it), put the American flag there and brought back some stone-souvenirs for research. But this was not enough for the most ambitious!
During the preparation of the budget for the agency in 1968, the supervisors expressed their weariness of short-term missions, which place a man on the Moon for some 3 meager days; they had something long-term in mind.
The plan was to send a lot of other Apollo missions to the same spot on the moon and the idea was for them to leave materials and infrastructure so in order to eventually build a permanent moon base, which was supposed to be ready by the 1980s. Sadly, the energy crisis from the 70’s and the realization that there’s not much profitability in this otherwise costly idea got in the way of us having a moon base.
Nevertheless, fiction is very open to the idea of a human colony on our permanent satellite and hopefully considering the amounts of
Helium-3 and the potential ability to use the Moon as a spaceport may, someday, inspire the creation of one.
