Let’s face it. The heavily cratered Moon already looks like a beat-up and blasted world.

So how about using the Nevada Test Site — established in 1951 to provide a venue for evaluating nuclear weapons explosions — as a nifty locale for shaking out NASA’s lunar outpost plans?

That’s the suggestion from Sheldon Freid of National Security Technologies (NSTec), Homeland Security Technologies, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Nevada Test Site spans 1,350 square miles - a secure site currently operated by NSTec for the U.S. Department of Energy. Three areas with a variety of elevation and geological traits were used for bomb testing, but the Yucca Flat region was the scene of the largest number of blasts.

The Yucca Flat area is some 5 miles wide and 20 miles long and roughly 460 subsidence craters resulted from testing in this area. For example, the Sedan crater there displaced approximately 12 million tons of earth - making it the largest of these craters at 1,280 feet across and 320 feet deep.

Freid notes that the profiles of Sedan and the other craters offer a wide variety of shapes and depths that are ideally suited for lunar analog testing of gear, astronaut duties and procedures.

Talk about a blastoff for the space agency’s return to the Moon schemes!