I personally like the idea of a colony on the Moon. In my mind I even have the killer app for such a colony: an astronomical telescope. There are 5 things going

I personally like the idea of a colony on the Moon. In my mind I even have the killer app for such a colony: an astronomical telescope. There are 5 things going for such an telescope: 1. no atmosphere (so no need to deal with atmospheric turbulences in post-processing) 2. no radio chatter 3. no seismic activity 4. 14 days out of 28 the darkest night one can have inside a solar system 5. a little bit of gravity. The last one is something that can't be said about space-based telescopes like Hubble and James Webb. Having a bit of gravity means you can have people working over there. It means you can perform maintenance and upgrades. With Hubble and especially James Webb, what you send in space is what you'll ever get. So you better send something good. Once in space, there are no iterations, except software upgrades. Nothing like "move fast and break things". This necessary perfection at iteration number 1 makes the price of a space-based telescope skyrocket. JWST is projected to cost a cool $10 BN [1]. At that price, I'm sure we can build a whole Moon base and a telescope much bigger than JWST. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cost_and_schedule_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos...