At Space.com we can read some details related to the pressure that the European Space Agency is making in order to have a permanent inhabited outpost on the Moon.
The goal is to establish a foundation for science, business, mining and even tourism, according to Johann-Dietrich Wrner, director general of the European Space Agency during the recently held 32 Space Symposium. That base will be inhabited by people from ESA member states and other nations around the world, and will have as one of the goals to define an intermediate point for the future arrival on Mars.
To make this possible, it is important to keep in mind that they want to bring together people with different capacities so that they can build a community, different actors from the public and private sectors. There is a fairly comprehensive project dealing with that topic, and indeed ESA brochures can already be found based on the conclusions of a conference called the International Moon Symposium 2020-2030: A New Era of Human and Robotic Exploration, which is held in December at ESA's Space Research and Technology Center in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
Already in 2013, in the same publication, they showed an infographic with details on how a moon base should be, hopefully with this new proposal the project will get off the paper.
