Space exploration is something our species needs to master in order to make it in this big, deadly universe in which we live. The illustrious Stephen Hawking, as well as many other scientists, have remarked time and again that humanity needs to spread out into space if we want to survive past the lifetime of our star.

At present, we’re only making baby steps toward such a challenge. We have already figured out how to land people on the moon and return them safely. We  have a permanent orbiting space station to boot. NASA had planned to build a base on the moon as a kind of jumping-off point to help astronauts get to Mars, since it is more cost-effective to build a rocket in space and launch it from the moon than to launch from the Earth directly to Mars.

However, a recent presidential space panel had been tossing around ideas directly challenging the moon base plan.  Building a structurally sound edifice is especially hard and costly, but building one on the moon is pretty much out of the question if you are not going all in on the gamble.

Science news headlines in the past week have been buzzing with news that water has been found on the surface of the moon and that it fluctuates during the lunar day. Early in the lunar morning, a kind of “moon dew” accretes and is easily seen by our satellites in orbit. As the sun rises, it evaporates away. This discovery has been getting a great deal of press because it could provide a means of allowing astronauts to mine said water (about a liter’s worth of water per cubic meter of moon rock, or a quart per cubic yard) for a moon base.
Instead of pouring tons and tons of money into a shaky and potentially unsound moon-to-Mars mission right now, we should first try hunting for alien life in our own solar system. Two moons in particular (Europa in orbit around Jupiter and Enceladus around Saturn) may prove to be far more exciting places than Mars in terms of hunting for alien life, as they both boast more subsurface water than all the oceans on our planet combined. If NASA green lights one kind of avenue of space exploration for the next half-century, the world will watch in awe as we set someone down on a rusty red surface. In the other, we have the chance to hunt for things like alien sea life. If we are to be a cosmic civilization at some point, then it would probably pay off to meet our neighbors before landing in their backyard unannounced, over-budgeted and ultimately forgotten.

      Scott Burger is a Western senior
majoring in physics

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