Now that we're out of the spaceport, let's start with the first place any good tourist
sees on visiting the Moon in 2021: Moon City. Clearly the
budget for naming colonies was cut pretty severely in the planning
stages. This
probably explains those other great lunar settlements, Moon Town,
Moon Village, Moon Hamlet, Moon Suburb, Moon Another Suburb, and
Moon Two Houses A Service Station And One Of Those Tourist Traps
With A Deer Park And A Tethered Coyote With A Bad Case Of The Mange.
It's man's foothold on the Final Frontier and a remarkable feat of
engineering with...
But perhaps it would
be best to let Captain Bill Kemp to give us the bob-a-knob tour.
Solar power, ice mines, hydroponics; it could all
be right out of NASA's projections for its (abortive)
settlements of the 1970s. Oddly, they're still hoping to find
ice at the Moon's South Pole, though much closer to the surface than
a mile down.
Meanwhile, the bit about the monument is pretty
clever. Since the film was still in production when Neil
Armstrong touched down, it wasn't hard to shoot a few seconds of a
hastily put together monument and have James Olsen record a line
about it to create a topical clip that could be dropped in without a
seam. It did, however, come back to haunt the filmmakers.
If you look at the image of Moon City at the top of the page, you'll
see the Earth hanging low in the sky. That means the Moon City
is somewhere close to the North or South Pole, say in the vicinity
of Mare Frigoris.
This is a bit unfortunate, because the Apollo 11 landing site is
considerably to the south in the
Mare
Tranquillitatis just 0.8 degrees north of the equator.
Trust NASA to pick a spot with rotten camera
angles.
