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On 15 October 2003 Chinese Lt. Col. Yang Liwei survived 14 Earth orbits in his Shenzhou-5 space capsule. Said taikonaut (from taikong, Chinese for "space") was paraded through the streets to massive cheering crowds and no doubt interesting perquisites. Evil empire Peoples Republic of China then proclaimed plans for a permanent moon base within ten years (to be followed by overpopulation and massive illegal immigration). President Bush the Lesser and his boys went ballistic.
The US will beat the Chinese back to the moon! We will haul more Chinese than the PRC could ever hope to send (though not as pilots). And an educator, a Lesbian, an AIDS victim, an illegal Mexican with a California driver's license, a dying child whose last wish it is to walk on the moon, Christopher Reeves with some fetal stem cells, a Congresscritter, Al Sharpton wearing a ball gag... and Rupert Murdock if he pays his own way. However, there was a problem with the racially non-profiled Muslim astronauts and the potty. First, some facts.
A moon base is not a lunatic waste of money like International Space Station Freedom FUBAR Space Hole One Alpha. Burrowing down will protect lunar locals from temperature (two feet insulates against 120°C days and -170°C nights) and radiation (dig deep!) that fries ISS FUBAR ass-tronaughts. 100% of extended orbit folks get radiation cataracts. Solar storms belch magnetic bubbles that can cancel patches of magnetosphere, giving Alabama auroral displays and ass-tronaughts a few hundred Officially harmless chest x-rays. Daily. The moon has no shielding magnetosphere at all. Dig deep!
Lunar real estate is covered with 1-3 feet of unconsolidated pulverized regolith in hard vacuum. Apollo 12 returned lots of dust with 40-70 microns average diameter (-325 to -200 mesh), all the way down to submicron particles. Think of wheat flour or water droplets in fog. The stuff gets into everything mechanical (wryly called "particulate osmosis") ruining seals (as in airlocks and spacesuits) and abrading anything in moving contact.
Official moon dust simulant fills Merriam Crater (35°20'N, 111°17'W) here on Earth. Go for black (chromaticity diagram coordinates (0.3222791,0.3331298)) slightly porphyritic glass-rich basaltic airfall ash whose major crystalline phases are plagioclase, pyroxene, and olivine. Minor minerals include ilmenite and chromite. NASA will sell you a bag of this dirt plus a nice certificate for an obscenely large price.
NASA squandered less than $100 million pursuing intricacies of doing Number Two in space. Spacesuits still have diapers, as Texas catheters disempower girls and solids are not tractable either way. Apollo missions had plastic bags with internal finger projections. Frat boys demonstrated he-man etiquette. ISS FUBAR has two spiked interdigitated counter-rotating cylinders recessed beneath the seat. A high frequency whine indicates an induced breeze will direct your micro-gee effluvia to materials handling and archiving. If you are a manly man and it is warm, do not snuggle in lest you snag your marriage tackle.
None of this sat well with designated politically correct Muslim astronauts culled from savage hinterlands of Iran, Afghanistan, and Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Fevered cries of "hate language!" and "religious persecution!" rang out. Muslims use their left hands to enforce perianal hygiene, then ablutions from two jugs of water (or not - desert, er, dry land ecology culture and situational ethics). No other astronaut would tolerate left-handed NASA compliments. There wasn't room for it to hit the fan, but they raised a stink anyway.
Crown Heights is also a cornucopian spigot of Chabad Lubavitcher Jews. As the Church of Rome desperately needs the devil to make its god tolerable so Muslims and Jews invariably settle eyeball to eyeball, each sublimating his own loathsome 14th century existence with cries of outrage at the other's. At least the obverse side of the coin was toilet trained in Europe. NASA thought they had it iced until its engineers realized that everything relating to food would have to be doubled, and doubled again for Passover, plus some good china (in pairs) in case space aliens visited for dinner. The mass penalty was intolerable.
The Mormon wanted his wives, the Christian Scientist would not submit to infamously enthusiastic NASA rectal spelunking, Zoroastrians wanted their flagons of sacred oil. Baha'is, Baptists, Buddhists, Calvinists, Confucians, Druids, Episcopalians, Hindus, Jehovah's Witnesses, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Rastafarians, Shintoists, Seventh Day Adventists, Taoists, Unitarians, Wicca... were out!
NASA was left with the United Church of Canada, that pretty much summed to nothing. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants resurrected the kosher thingie. What to do, what to do...
The United States is returning to the moon! It is going to be Marines at the helm all the way. REMFs will travel in steerage, to be accidentally depressurized along the way. Every time. Has anybody any idea what we will use for a rocket? NASA doesn't.
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