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Space

Lunar colony to run on moon dust and robots

By Celeste Biever

19 January 2005

SIMULATED moon dust has been used to make a key component of a working solar cell, giving an unexpected boost to President George W. Bush’s project of setting up a colony on the moon.

Bush’s plan, announced a year ago, envisages a permanent lunar base from which people can go out and explore the moon, and then go on to Mars. “We will need a power source,” says David Williams, a planetary and lunar scientist at NASA’s National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Bringing stuff up from Earth is really expensive.”

Four years ago, Alex Freundlich and his…

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