Web Links for Lunar Settlement

Public-Interest Space Organizations

The membership of most of these groups is open to any interested person. They offer useful opportunities for meeting pro-space people & carrying out activities. Usefully, activities officially adopted by many of these organizations may be covered under tax-exempt non-profit status, US 501(c)3 or the like.

• The National Space Society is one of the leading organizations of the space movement. While its lack of a consistent, coherent approach to space issues is disappointing, it has three strong marks in its favour : a focus on space settlement, a strong network of local chapters (including several outside the United States), & its annual International Space Development Conference.
• The Planetary Society is larger than NSS, but has less of a focus on human activity in space, being interested in pure exploration rather than development. It has, however, a laudable policy of direct action, which has led it to conduct such activities as funding searches for near-Earth objects, & even launching a solar-sail space probe.
• The Moon Society is smaller than either of the two leading space enthusiast organizations, but (with its affiliated organizations, including several NSS chapters) quite active & strongly directed toward lunar settlement & development. It is the successor of the defunct Artemis Society.
• The OpenLuna Foundation is a new organization committed to pursuing human lunar activities as part of the so-called new-space movement, using social technology with an open-source approach. As such, it is closely aligned with the Project.

Government Space Agencies

• The Web presence of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is something of a metaphor for the agency itself — the vast amount of information presented could be enormously useful, but is rendered almost inaccessible by the complexity of its arrangement. The best advice is to use an external search engine.

Educational and Informational Resources

• The NASA Technical Reports Server has a vast catalogue of records, & a smaller but still huge collection of of full-text downloads, of publications by NASA personnel or prepared under NASA supervision & funding. These range from conference pre-prints to massive multi-volume reports, with especially useful coverage in the Contractor Report (CR), Research Publication (RP), Technical Note (TN), & Technical Translation (TT) series. As the collections of the predecessor National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics are also included, some materials go back to the 1920s. One drawback is that most older material is presented as monochrome scans, so illustrations other than line drawings suffer badly.
• Under "About Space", the National Space Society web site presents a large library of useful documents, including a number of entire books for reading on-line or download, as well as several themed pages with brief summaries of & links to the most relevant or accessible materials.
• The Lunar and Planetary Institute of the Universities Space Research Association is something of a clearing house for planetary science research. Among the information available from its Web site is a large collection of lunar maps.
• The Moon Society has made available for download materials including extracts from its (somewhat eccentric, but valuable) publication Moon Miners' Manifesto, presentations on relevant topics, & a variety of printable items such as bookmarks& calendars.
• Among the many interesting things published by John Walker (probably best known as one of the developers of AutoCAD) are the useful Moontool, Home Planet, & Earth & Moon Viewer