Friday, July 16, 2004 | 8:58 a.m.
If a settlement were built on the moon in the not-so-distant future, it would in many ways resemble Las Vegas.
So say the proponents of space settlement who are holding their fifth annual Return to the Moon conference in Las Vegas starting today. Organizers expect more than 100 people to attend.
The conference, scheduled for Friday through Sunday at the Westin Casuarina Hotel, brings together would-be space explorers for a progress report on their efforts to colonize the moon, using existing technology, within 20 years.
"In a lot of ways it's (Las Vegas is) similar to what you're going to find on the moon when you build there," Return to the Moon Project Director Manny Pimenta said Tuesday.
"You'd have to bring all the resources there," he said. "That's basically the case for Las Vegas, except for oxygen. You have to bring in water, you have to bring in power to live comfortably.
"It's a good analogy for the surface of the moon," he said. The symbolism was one reason the conference chose to locate in Las Vegas.
Return to the Moon is a project of the Space Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that is part of the increasingly visible alternative space movement.
One of the founders of the Space Frontier Foundation, Rick Tumlinson, said he often invokes Las Vegas in his speeches about space.
"People say, 'Oh, well, nobody's going to want to live on the moon,' " Tumlinson said on Tuesday. "I point out, who would have thunk it, that there in the barren desert of Nevada you would have a major city? That's human creativity. That's the human ability to adapt."
He's not the only one to see parallels between the Southwest desert and extraterrestrial habitats. The Mars Society, a Colorado-based group, has since 2002 operated a module in southeastern Utah that simulates the conditions of the Red Planet.
This weekend's conference comes at a crucial moment for the alternative space movement, Tumlinson said. For years the movement harshly criticized NASA, the federal space agency, as having the wrong priorities and too much bureaucracy.
Then, in January, President Bush gave a speech announcing a new direction for NASA that was to include partnering with the private sector. Tumlinson and his allies celebrated the plan, called the Vision for Space Exploration, as long-awaited vindication of their doctrine, even though Bush has not mentioned the plan since the initial speech.
"It's almost ours to lose now," Tumlinson said. "For a long time, we've been the biggest critics of NASA. Now that they're starting to come our way, we can't blow it."
Some space enthusiasts believe space should be conquered; some believe it should be observed and photographed but not disturbed, Tumlinson said. But the foundation believes in "taking our tools and imagination and using the resources of space to expand our culture outwards," he said.
Las Vegas is home to one prominent member of the wealthy, space-obsessed crowd: Robert Bigelow, the owner of Budget Suites of America, who is reported to be spending as much as $500 million on his plan to build inflatable, modular, habitable pods to host space vacationers.
Bigelow was not available for comment, but Pimenta said many expect Bigelow to make a major announcement about his progress at this weekend's conference.
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