9 Reasons We Should Go Back To The Moon
4. To Create A Lunar Pit Stop
As well as being a good practice run for lengthier future missions, a moon base would make an excellent pit stop on the way to anywhere else in the solar system.
Proportionally speaking, the moon is barely out of the clouds, but it does have one big advantage over Earth: Its size.
Hauling a dirty great spaceship off-world is a tough business. The earth's gravity makes our escape velocity (that's how fast you need to be travelling to leave the planet) somewhere in the region of 11.2 kilometers per second. This takes a lot of fuel and, annoyingly, the more fuel you have on board, the more you need as the ship gets heavier.
On the other hand, the moon's lower mass and resultant lower gravity, brings the escape velocity down to 2.38 km/sec.
Fuel either stored on a moon base in advance, or derived from the material in the moon's surface itself, would make it an ideal pit stop as we would only need to launch our rockets from Earth with enough fuel to get them to the lunar surface, knowing that we can refuel there and use far less on the second launch.
We could also store supplies for longer missions up there in advance, taking a huge amount of pressure off size and weight restrictions for our craft.