The European Space Agency (ESA) director called a human colony on the Moon 'more or less fact' in a Wednesday press conference in Paris due to the enormous amount of work being poured into a Moon village by numerous space agencies. Johann-Dietrich Wörner, who became the ESA director-general in 2015, foresees that a Moon base is inevitable after the International Space Station (ISS) is allowed to plummet from the sky and into the Pacific Ocean in 2024. While the ISS is only accessible to the five public space agencies that built it (ESA, NASA, and the space agencies of Canada, Russia, and Japan), Wörner foresees that a Moon village to be available to anyone. "It's not like the International Space Station, which is more or less restricted to the club [of public agencies]. The Moon village idea is an open idea, free and open access," he said in the Paris press conference. Some have proposed building the lunar colony underground, as large tunnels where lava once flowed decorate the