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An advocate of moon colonies for 20 years, Levitt is no mere dreamer. To help prove his point, he has actually built a working model of a solar still. Using four 20-in. mirrors, he focuses sunlight on powdered pitchstone in a glass laboratory tube until its water of crystallization steams off. The steam is then channeled to an adjacent model still, where it is converted to drops of water.
Lunar Vacations
NASA Administrator Thomas Paine is so confident of continued progress in space flight and the establishment of lunar bases that he foresees vacations on the moon within two decades that will cost the affluent thrill seeker as little as $5,000—round trip. "There is no question," Paine says,, "that we can reduce the cost of travel to the moon to the cost of traveling through the air today. The spacecraft we use will be descendants of today's Boeing 707s and Douglas DC-8s, married to today's hydrogen-oxygen rockets."
For the price, the vacationer will enjoy some exhilarating experiences in the weak lunar gravity. On a diving board, for example, he will be able to spring six times as high as on earth. When the splash occurs, it will be a veritable gey ser, also six times as high as on earth. Even more remarkable, a visitor to a domed lunar resort will be able to don a pair of wings and flap off like Icarus into the artificial atmosphere, using only muscle power to fly.
Though such notions about the uses of the moon may sound visionary, they are tame alongside some of the really futuristic ideas. A Russian has suggested covering the entire side of the moon that is visible to earth with a reflectant coating to make it a huge thermal power plant. Zwicky theorizes that man may one day actually be able to shrink the moon through nuclear fusion; a smaller, denser moon would have greater gravitational pull, perhaps enough to hold a habitable atmosphere. Levitt speculates that in the distant future the moon may serve as a launching platform for a 1,000,000-ton spaceship (Apollo 11's weight at liftoff: 3,200 tons), an intergalactic Noah's ark that could carry a complete civilization to nearby stars.
Ridiculous? No more so than the visions of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells seemed less than a century ago. Given the remarkable feats already achieved by technology, it would be unwise to bet against almost any possibility.