The U.S. is exploring a railroad for the moon. It has a good reason.
The first U.S. transcontinental railroad, completed with a spike hammered into the track in 1869, transformed the nation. Perhaps the same will happen on the moon.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA — an ambitious federal innovations division — has begun collaborating with over a dozen companies on potential future lunar technologies, including a moon railroad. It's called the 10-Year Lunar Architecture Capability Study, or LunA-10, and its mission is to find technologies that will catalyze a self-perpetuating lunar economy. It's a salient time; already the new space race is on.
It's an endeavor that seeks to avoid a go-at-it-alone approach, wherein diverse nations and industries struggle to communicate, travel, and do business on the moon. The NASA Apollo missions from over 50 years ago were an extraordinary exploration and engineering marvel, but those billions in spending never established growth or a lasting presence on the moon.
"One of the critiques about Apollo is we put in all this effort, and then it ended," Michael Nayak, a program manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, told Mashable.
