Tortilla Flat
What Tortilla Flat is
Tortilla Flat is an astronaut-named features — small craters near the Apollo landing sites, named for the crews — on The Moon, 2.2 km across, centred at 20.2° N, 30.6° E in the Macrobius quadrangle. It is the 1869th largest named feature on The Moon and the 18th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Astronaut-named feature, Apollo 17 site. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1973, under the theme it applies to every astronaut-named features on The Moon. Of the 81 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run American (68), Great Britain (7), United States (3), France (1).
What it would take to settle Tortilla Flat
The Moon scores 29.1 as a world. That number is the same for every square metre of it — but sunlight, water, radiation and the ground under your feet are not. This is the same question asked at 20.2° N, 30.6° E.
What this spot has going for it is earth link — near side — Earth stands 54° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water — outside the ice-bearing latitudes.
Computed from Tortilla Flat's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 84% of the model's weight had a basis here, and one axis was dropped as not applicable to The Moon (radiation geometry). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on The Moon and are already counted in the world's own index, not again here.
What this cannot see: elevation. Slope, local shadowing and the polar “peaks of eternal light” — ridge tops near the poles of a barely tilted world that catch sun almost continuously while a crater floor kilometres away never does — need a terrain model this does not have. Where a real mission targets a pole, that is usually why.
What is next to it
The largest astronaut-named features features on The Moon
All 81 astronaut-named features on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.