Just a day after US President Barack Obama was re-elected, rumours began to fly that he will back NASA plans to build a hovering moon base. This lunar outpost would be parked in orbit, about 60,000 kilometres from the moon's far side, in a gravitational haven called a Lagrange point.
There, the combined gravity of Earth and the moon would tug on a spacecraft with exactly the force needed for it to hover near the moon without spending fuel. Putting a spaceport at the Earth-moon Lagrange point 2 (EML-2) might assist human missions to an asteroid or to Mars – both on the list of NASA goals Obama announced in 2010.
Buzz about NASA's vision for an EML-2 outpost has been swirling since September, when the Orlando Sentinel newspaper obtained documents detailing how such a craft could be built using parts left over from the International Space Station.
To read more, click here.