Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798
In its operational phase, you will have air traffic from the runway and helipad already making the location fairly obvious once it become common place to ship out custom parts, bring in samples, etc. Once that happens, some surface structures would just start to make sense. It seems likely that eventually you will have a semi-permanent settlement on the surface at or very near Prime Base. The only real question is when.
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And my point is that those are all Project assets, people for whom risking their lives is part of the job description and whose loss is an unfortunate cost of doing business. You do not necessarily need a "safe zone" to have those assets exposed and in use, but you DO need one to have your civilians out. How long does it take to secure things adequately to take that risk? I would be surprised if there was a "good" situation where you really felt you could secure the area and assemble housing and overcome the other problems in less than a year or two. And security concerns are likely to drive that back a couple of years more. At the point where you are so free to operate openly, it probably makes more sense to move major operations out of Nevada anyway!
Heck, if I were designing Prime and Second Base, I would design Prime to be in charge for the first 2-5 years and design Second to take over once open operations were possible. Prime Base needs to be tremendously secret and secure to get to and through the first stages of the Project, getting through after that has very different design considerations!