Acta Astronautica 63 (2008) 1337 – 1342 www.elsevier.com/locate/actaastro Strategic, technological and ethical aspects of establishing colonies on Moon and Mars G. Madhavan Nair a , ∗ , K.R. Sridhara Murthi b , M.Y.S. Prasad c a Indian Space Research Organization, Bangalore, India b ANTRIX Corporation, Bangalore, India c Space Applications Centre, Indian Space Research Organization, Ahmedabad, India Received 5 December 2007; received in revised form 19 March 2008; accepted 6 May 2008 Available online 21 July 2008 Abstract With the vast experience gained by Aerospace Community in the last five decades, the natural future course of action will be to expand Space Exploration. Our understanding of Moon is relatively better with a number of unmanned satellite missions carried out by the leading Space Agencies and manned missions to Moon by USA. Also a number of unmanned satellite missions and surface rover missions were carried out to Mars by those Space agencies generating many new details about Mars. While the future exploration efforts by global community will also be centered obviously on Moon and Mars, it is noteworthy that already NASA had declared its plans for establishing a Surface Base on Moon and developing the technical infrastructure required. Surface Bases on Moon and Mars give rise to a number of strategic, technical and ethical issues both in the process of development, and in the process of establishing the bases. The strategic issues related to Moon and Mars Surface Bases will be centered around development of enabling technologies, cost of the missions, and international cooperation. The obvious path for tackling both the technological development and cost issues will be through innovative and new means of international cooperation. International cooperation can take many forms like—all capable players joining a leader, or sharing of tasks at system level, or all players having their independent programmes with agreed common interfaces of the items being taken to and left on the surface of Moon/Mars. Each model has its own unique features. Among the technical issues, the first one is that of the Mission Objectives—why Surface Bases have to be developed and what will be the activity of crew on Surface Bases? Surface Bases have to meet mainly the issues on long term survivability of humans on the Mars/Moon with their specific atmosphere, gravity and surface characteristics. Moon offers excellent advantages for astronomy while posing difficulties with respect to solar power utilization and extreme temperature variations. Hence the technical challenges depend on a number of factors starting from mission requirements. Obviously the most important technical challenge to be addressed will be in the areas of crew safety, crew survivability, adequate provision to overcome contingencies, and in-situ resource utilization. Towards this, new innovations will be developed in areas such as specialized space suits, rovers, power and communication systems, and ascent and descent modules. The biggest ethical issue is whether humankind from Earth is targeting ‘habitation’ or ‘colonization’ of Moon/Mars. The next question will be whether the in-situ resource exploitation will be only for carrying out further missions to other planets from Moon/Mars or for utilization on Earth. The third ethical issue will be the long term impact of pollution on Moon/Mars due to technologies employed for power generation and other logistics on Surfaces. The paper elaborates the views of the authors on the strategic, technical and ethical aspects of establishing Surface Bases and colonies on Moon and Mars. The underlying assumptions and gray areas under each aspect will be explained with the resulting long-term implications. © 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd. ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: chairman@isro.gov.in (G. Madhavan Nair), krs@antrix.gov.in (K.R. Sridhara Murthi), mys@sac.isro.gov.in (M.Y.S. Prasad). 0094-5765/$ - see front matter © 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2008.05.012