Creating near-term lunar settlements: lessons from space history 

March 16, 2026, was the 100^th anniversary of Robert Goddard’s first flight of a liquid fueled rocket. It reached an altitude of 41 feet. 31 years later, in 1957, Sputnik began a lonely beep as the first satellite in orbit. In 1969, 12 years after Sputnik and 43 years after Goddard’s first flight, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. It’s been 57 years since the first Apollo landing and we don’t yet have a group of folks living and working on the moon or Mars (although people have lived for more than a year in the International Space Station in low Earth orbit). Frankly, we’re not even close to living on the moon. Something has gone remarkably wrong. Something needs to change dramatically if living and working on the moon is going to become real.