What are you doing June 10-13, 2007? If you are planning on going to Sudbury, Ontario consider yourself lucky. Norcat is hosting the Planetary & Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium on those dates. Hopefully they can put together a symposium better than a website. (Why did you hide the link to the homepage, people?) Well, Norcat does claim that Canada has become the world leader in mining and space robotics - they never mention web design.

The purpose of the symposium is to promote a relationship between the mining industries and space agencies.

MSNBC published a neat article outlining what is being done to design habitats for the moon colony. NASA's Constellation Program Office seems to be coordinating the effort.

The main thrust of the lunar habitat projects are inflatable dwellings. The reason for this is that the planned payload of the Orion ships are only 13,000 pounds. Space Station modules, which are apparently the only other option for lunar habitats, weigh up to 30,000 pounds.

Beyond talks with Lockheed and Boeing, NASA is talking with several other private contractors to help design and possibly build these inflatable habitats. One company is Bigelow Aerospace, who has already launched one of their inflatable habitat designs into orbit, and has a second test launch planned for April, 2007. The second company is ILC Dover. They have built a prototype for a NASA funded test in Antarctica.