"You are here to help humanity become a spacefaring species."

So said the opening line of a brochure for a workshop that took place in August 2014. It was a meeting of some of the greatest scientists and professionals in the space business and beyond, including gene editing maverick George Church and Peter Diamandis from the XPrize Foundation. The workshop's goal: to explore and develop low-cost options for building a human settlement on the moon.

"You are here to make this moonshot a reality," said the brochure.

NASA

One giant expense for mankind

The history-making Apollo missions would have cost $150 billion by today's standards. With new ways of thinking, it might be possible to set up a lunar station for $10 billion.

NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay helped organize the meeting, and then he edited a special issue in the journal New Space to publish the papers that came out of the workshop. Those papers just came online this morning, and Popular Science had exclusive pre-publication access. Together, the 9 papers help to build momentum for an idea that's growing throughout the planetary science and commercial space communities. The details differ between papers, they all say roughly the same thing: that we can set up a permanent, inhabited base on the moon, soon, and without breaking the bank.

Of course, this isn't the first time scientists have talked about returning to the moon.

"The reason all the previous plans for going back to the moon have failed is that they're just way too expensive," says McKay. "The space program is living in a delusion of unlimited budgets, which traces back to Apollo."

The Apollo program that put the first men on the moon would have cost $150 billion by today's standards. For reference, NASA's entire budget for the year of 2016 is $19.3 billion.

"The space program is living in a delusion of unlimited budgets, which traces back to Apollo."

The New Space papers, by contrast, conclude that we could set up a small lunar base for $10 billion or less, and we could do it by 2022.

"The big takeaway," says McKay, "is that new technologies, some of which have nothing to do with space--like self-driving cars and waste-recycling toilets--are going to be incredibly useful in space, and are driving down the cost of a moon base to the point where it might be easy to do."

Why go back to the moon?

Currently, NASA has no plans to send humans back to the moon--instead it's focusing on getting to Mars in the 2030s. But McKay and others think we can't possibly go hiking on Mars if we don't first learn to camp in our own backyard.