§ 2.6 Other Web Resources on Lunar Materials and Utilization

When I edited this page in 2021, it was another of those OMG days ... links to other information sources which have died ... This page was supposed to be some good links general information sources which didn't fit in elsewhere in the lunar section but which were particularly noteworthy for their broadbased information. So here is a shortlist of some longstanding links which have persevered with quality:

• The Lunar Enterprise Daily, an electronic newsletter from Space Age Publishing, has been putting out news reliably back into the 1980s, when it was a nice paper newsletter in the postal mail. Over time, they've compiled a Lunar Enterprise Directory of organizations and individuals. Led by Steve Durst, who deserves a lot of respect for his perseverance and reliability, through both bad times and good times for lunar projects funding. That kind of service comes with a significant cost for an individual. For more information, see www.LunarEnterpriseDaily.com and www.spaceagepub.com

• The Space Studies Institute website has alternated between basic and often not changing much for long periods of time, and updated times. It is one of the pioneering and most long established private entities supporting research and development into lunar resources utilization, though funding and levels of activity have been issues at times. There are many research reports on elements of lunar materials utilization which would be useful for a private sector initiative. SSI belongs at the top of any list of established and quality organizations to contact for a private sector venture, having a breadth of active research members in industry and government, and has led much of the research in this field as a private organization since the 1970s.

  Here's a longtime reliable entity: Red Whittaker and the Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute:

• A current proposal within NASA, Icebreaker One, to fund a surface lander mission to the lunar pole to verify ice at the pole, as a follow-up mission to Clementine and the Lunar Prospector. This link actually belongs elsewhere, but Red Whittaker is a remarkably committed individual.

Others I have deleted in this update. I don't plan to post more here for awhile, as I'm focused on updating my databases and republishing information in another format.

Below are examples of sites and pages gone bad, despite the trivial cost of keeping a website online at a government web address, or a forwarding page if it has just moved, and a domain name if it has its own. (Abandoned domain names are often taken by squatters based on still existing links to them and traffic, and then they run advertisements on unrelated stuff.) I've removed the clickable links, though left some underlined (nasa, esa, edu, other). It's just testimony to the carelessness to spend just a tiny amount of money to keep something alive. When the government money dries up, people who have put in a lot of time and effort and been paid a lot still simply drop things carelessly.

• The International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG) was founded in 1995 at a meeting in Europe, and seemingly developed mainly in European settings. It was supported with government money, and was heavily established for international cooperation between governments. The ILEWG home page was sponsored by the Mission from Planet Earth Study Office at NASA Headquarters, Washington DC, and was maintained by researchers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, then contracting with USRA (Universities Space Research Association) for web curatorial support, but European activity was been rising. Strengths included the Lunar Explorers Register, the sponsored ICEUM conferences (Int'l Conference on Exploration and Utilization of the Moon) and LUNEX (the Lunar Explorer's Society) (this domain name was apparently abandoned and taken over by somebody who just posts unrelated link ads, so I've removed the link).

  As I asked before, "If the government money stops flowing, would it continue?"

More dead stuff:

• The Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) ran an excellent website which included lunar base and space resources related materials, among a bunch of other planetary stuff. Of particular interest within this site was the excellent lunar base documents prepared by NASA and contractor employees at the NASA Johnson Space Center, several issues of the Beyond LEO Newsletter, and the Lunar Explorer's Digest reviews of books on the moon.
• The NASA National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) made available on the internet data from NASA (e.g., Apollo samples, Lunar Prospector, others), U.S. Defense Department (Clementine) and Soviet missions to the Moon. Their Moon pages started at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planets/moonpage.html
• For images and good pictures of the Apollo missions, you could go to the NASA Johnson Space Center Public Affairs Office's Apollo Pages

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