By Mooncampus Editor

Imagine a remote campus on the Moon!

The Moon Campus project is working towards such an endeavor. The operative term is remote.

Students these days pay big money to attend prestigious universities with excellent physical campuses. Student expect and pay for the brick and mortar. However, ever since Covid, many students don’t physically want to be in class. They rather participate via Zoom or via other remote means. It’s kind of like in the old days, when the cool kids sat as far away from the instructor as possible. Now, with modern technology, students can sit thousands of miles from their instructor. How cool is that?!?

It gets better. Wouldn’t it be even more hip to attend class from a hundred thousand miles away? Well, technologically, it will soon be possible, by placing communications and educational equipment on the Moon. Telescopes, rovers, lab equipment—it can all be there. And it can all be operated from facilities on Earth. Students can become tele-astronauts. It’s safer and a lot less expensive than being there. Also, you will be able to do things you can’t do in a bulky spacesuit.

The Moon is the “sweet spot” for a remote campus. It’s just barely close enough for humans on Earth to control equipment in real time. There will be a lag of at least a second or so, but that won’t be so bad for most operations. Alas, to to the limits of the speed of light (and radio waves), this arrangement won’t be available for Earth students to tele-attend a campus on Mars*, but the Moon would already be pretty good, and about as cool as one can get.

 

* The author proposed locating humans in the interior of the moons of Mars to teleoperate equipment on the surface of Mars. It would arguably be less expensive than landing astronauts on the Martian surface, and it would make it easier for the human to eventually return to Earth should they so choose. (Proposed at the Next Generation Exploration Conference, NASA Ames Research Center, August 16, 2006.)