Sorry, NASA: Discover Blogger Almost Destroyed Your Moon Colony

I spent some fifteen minutes on the moon yesterday. It wasn't pretty. A meteor strike knocked out my base's life support; I crashed a robot into a NASA supply shed; and, while I fiddled around with a welding torch, a gas line exploded. Moonbase Alpha, the first of two commercial-quality online games that NASA has just developed, taught me a lot: how a solar panel-powered life-support system might work, what "regolith processing" really means, and the weird gait I'd have if I tried to sprint on the lunar surface. Perhaps it also taught me that I'm not cut out to be an astronaut, but maybe I'll try multiplayer mode before making that decision. The game, released yesterday on Valve's Steam video game network, imagines the year 2020 when we have the meager start of a lunar base near Shackleton crater, not far from the Moon's south pole. A meteor strike ...