It's Time to Build a Base Camp on the Moon

​While the European Space Agency doesn't have the experience launching humans into space that NASA and the Soviet-turned-Russian space programs do, its whole existence has been based on international collaboration—and in a newly released video, that notion is at the center of the space agency's plans to send people back to the Moon.

The ESA wasn't really around for the first big era of Moon exploration. By the time it was formed—through the merging of two other European space agencies—the last Apollo mission had already been home for three years. But an eig​ht-minute video released this week by the space agency outlines the ESA's plans to play an essential role when people go back to the Moon. And, a sign of these cash-strapped times on the continent and elsewhere, the video outlines why that's a goal worth pursuing.

All the surface exploration has happened on the side that faces the Earth, according to the video, near the lunar equator. The samples of lunar surface seem to be more the exception than the rule, from "an unusual region with a complex chemistry of potassium, phosphor and rare Earth elements such as thorium."

The ESA wants to see what's going on down on the lunar south pole, where the Sun never sets on the peaks, and never touches the bottom of the craters. The environments are ideal, respectively, for solar panels and hunting for water that we're already building robots to excavate. The dark side of the moon, facing away from the Earth, is also ideal for listening to the 13-billion-year-old radio hum of the universe, which we lose in the noise here on Earth.

Unlike the space race, the ESA's video is big on the idea of collaboration. It pays homage to American and Russian forebears, and tips a hat to China's unmanned Chang'e 3, which landed on the moon in 2013. The ESA's vision of the Moon is someday being like an Antarctica orbiting around the Earth, a place where all nations come together in the name of science.

That's an appealing notion, but the ESA also mentions the potential of untapped resources that might be hiding in the Moon, which could be worth extracting. To take a lesson from the terrestrial North Pole—where US Geological Survey report estimates that 22 percent of the Earth's untapped but recoverable resources may be—it's all fun and games until there's something to be gained, and then all of ​a sudden Russia, Canada, and Denmark can't get along any more. Sure, Russia can be hard to get along with, but Canada and Denmark are about as deferential as you can get.

With that in mind, just getting to the Moon seems like the easy part.