Moon Diving
By Victor Hernandez
I told the guys at the office it wasn’t a good idea.
I really did.
But did they listen? No. They never listen. Ever since we got here they have never listened to what I have to say. Not once.
We shouldn’t even be here in the first place anyway. The point of setting up a station on the Moon was to train astronauts for interplanetary missions within the Solar System. Since the Moon has only 0.16 times the gravity of Earth, that makes sense if you want to send people to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, where the gravity is 0.14 Earth’s. But all of the fucking space missions today are to Mars, where gravity is 0.37 times Earth’s gravity. There isn’t anything scheduled for Ganymede for like 30 years. And why? Because rich people want to brag about how they went on a trip to Mars and drank real Martian water. But guess what? Ganymede has more water than Earth. Even the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It makes no sense to waste money on Mars if you have Ganymede except as an in-between port.
And yet, here we are anyway. NASA likes to brag about their Mars missions too. That’s how they get money from Congress. But money from Congress isn’t enough, so NASA partnered with a few corporations to fund the Mars missions. With just one catch: the corporations wanted NASA to build a station on the Moon first. So they built this shitty training station for 20 astronauts so they can live here for six months and then claim they’re ready for Mars.
