Well, if no one else is going to post, let's talk about what's needed to go to the moon for a while.
To begin a colony, we'll have to cart everything there from earth. Air, food, water, walls, floor, roof, power plant and recyling sytem.
The Saturn V was stretched to it's limit to send two men to the surface of the moon and get them back again (yes, I'm quite perfectly aware that Mike Collins stayed in orbit with the CM, thank you).
We're not limited by the payload capacity of the SV, though, or with the limitations of every flight being a manned flight. This both saves a lot of money and increases the amount of cargo that can be delivered. Man-rated systems also require higher safety factors, life support, and redunancy, all of which cost weight.
So let's launch the house, the food, the pond, the family car, and the septic system and the airconditioner before we start our vacation to the moon.
The living structures would be shipped as disassembled pre-fab units ready for assembly on site. There would be at least two units, with completely independent environmental control and power. If one house fails, they can't call the plumber to come fix it.
Six men can rest and sleep in a six-by-nine foot bunk room, with three bunks on each side. Works on submarines, can work on the moon. Air matresses, of course. Foam mattresses have weight and volume problems in shipping.
Most things, especially the walls, would be made of carbon fiber composite laminate boards with aluminum honeycomb core. Depending on the exact materials used, a 1 inch thick board has a mass of about half a pound per square foot. Thus the walls of a 6 x 9 x 8 foot tall room would have a surface area of 348 sq ft and an earthweight of 120 lbs.
Of course, that doesn't include the stiffeners and support structure this box would need, so multimpy that number by four. The bedroom has an earth weight of 500 lbs.
Say the galley/panty is the same, and the sanitary facilities are in a similar modularized room. Add also a recreation room, because the lesson of Skylab should always be remembered. If we're going there to stay, the crew will want Sundays off.
Add in a work-room laboratory that's twice the area of the other rooms. This would have a weight of about 900 lbs, without the supporting structure. Assume that too has mass uncertainty factor of 4.0. 3600 lbs for the lab.
Did I mention that they have to ship an solar electric bulldozer up, too? A vital bit of construction, we need that to dump lunar soil on top of our house. If the weight of the dirt on top equals the force of the air pressure underneath, we don't have to make the structure like a pressure vessel holding internal pressure. The sides of the structure will still require bracing, though. Also, the soil will act as a very necessary radiation shield.
So, we got four 500 lb rooms, and a 4000 lb laboratory. Times two. Plust a bulldozer I'll say weighs a ton.
So, so far we're talking 12,000 pounds plus the dozer, so that's 14,000 lbs.
The Wikipedia says
The module was designed to carry two crew in a 6.65 m³ space. The total module was 6.4 m high and 4.3 m across, resting on four legs. It consisted of two stages—the descent stage module and the ascent stage. The total mass of the module was 15,264 kg with the majority of that (10,334 kg) in the descent stage.
The LM descent stage could land, safely 5,000 kg of payload, or 11,000 lbs. Clearly we could launch the structure for a moon colony on one Saturn V and give it a soft landing. Again, because this is an unmanned delivery (and we have better analysis tools), the LM we actuall use would have a higher payload ratio. So I haven't even started to dig into the 5800 kg mass of the Command/Service Module the Saturn Five launched with each LM.
So, yeah, we could launch a pre-fab outpost with existing technology. We could have done it in 1973.
The real question isn't one of ability, it's one of why.
The moon gives us something a space station can't. Real estate. Want to build a rail gun to shoot packages around the solar system? Anchor it on the moon and ignore that pesky Newton and his Law of Action and Reaction.
There's STUFF up there. Free stuff, just laying around that didn't cost anything to ship from earth. Well, yeah, it looks a lot like dirt and rocks, but hey, it's free! Aluminum ore on earth looks suspiciously like mud, too.
Okay, we got dirt on earh. What else does the moon have to offer? Nothing. Huge quanities of nothing at all. The moon has a vacuum that can't be achieved in earthly laboratories without a lot of hard expensive work. So how much better would microchips be if they could be made in a completely dust and oxygen free environment? High quality microchips will probably become a cornerstone of lunar industry.
Plenty of silicon up there, too.
So, the colony's buildable (I have talked costs, though), and there's stuff to exploit. Instead of wasting billions of dollars on "bridges to nowhere" or socialized medicine or bribes to Yasser Arafat, the US could do itself a big favor by exploiting the moon.
One hurdle, though. The stupid space treaty.
I'll get back to that later.
