The Science, Health, and Technology Room
Do it. What is developed in order to build and sustain a moon base will certainly have untold numbers of civilian applications and could rival the return on investment that Apollo gave us- 26:1. Probably greatly exceed it.
The epic quest to build a permanent Moon base
The handful of astronauts who have set foot on the Moon spent as little as a day on the surface. How do you build a settlement that will last for years?
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If my 1980s-era Usborne Book of The Future was to be believed (and, frankly, it served as my bible when I was growing-up), at the beginning of the 21st Century – along with flatscreen TVs, electric cars and telephones that "have pictures as well as sound" – there would be astronauts living and working in a city on the Moon.
Occupying vast domes connected by pressurised underground passageways, "Moonies" would work at consoles surrounded by banks of computers or bounce across the surface in Moon jeeps on their way to the Moon mines.
Since the last astronaut left his final footstep in 1972, however, the only evidence that people once occupied the Moon consists of little more than a few flags, three rovers, a dozen cameras and 96 bags of human waste (you can read more facts on Apollo here). Whatever happened to the Moon base we were promised?
"One of the big goals of what we're doing today, is to make sure that this isn't flags and footprints and then it gets cancelled again," says Nasa's strategy and architecture lead for the exploration systems development mission directorate architecture development office Nujoud Merancy. In non-Nasa speak, that means Merancy is one of the key people responsible for planning the agency's return to the Moon.
"We want to lay the groundwork so that this can be an inevitable process that goes forward," she says, "and we don't spend 50 years not exploring beyond low Earth orbit again like we have for the last 50 years."
And, so far, that plan is working out. Nasa's first uncrewed Artemis mission returned to Earth in December 2022 after almost four weeks in space. Travelling far beyond the Moon, it proved the capabilities of the Orion capsule, its European Space Agency (Esa) Service Module and the giant SLS rocket that blasted it on its way. Artemis II is due to carry the first astronauts to lunar orbit in 2024 and, sometime in the middle of the decade during Artemis III, two astronauts will land near the lunar south pole. At least one of them will be a woman.
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But the longer you stay, the riskier it gets.
"You're dealing with three major challenges – radiation, temperature extremes and meteorite impacts," says Aidan Cowley, scientific advisor at Esa's European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany. On Earth, we are protected from the worst of these effects by a thick atmosphere and the magnetic bubble surrounding the planet, known as the magnetosphere.
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"If you really want to do it for the long term, we need to make the most of every resource that we bring or extract," says Rachel Klima from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, near Washington DC. Director of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium, Klima's group brings together space agencies, academics and industry to plot the future of lunar exploration.
"If you have waste heat, use the heat for something… if you have waste metal when you're trying to create oxygen, use the metal… if you have waste scrap metal, use the scrap metal," says Klima. "You don't want to trash things up!"
Over the past decade Cowley's team in Cologne has been taking that mantra to heart. They have become adept at turning one of the most abundant lunar resources, lunar dust or regolith, into bricks.
"I joke to people that I want to build a brick factory on the Moon," he says. "And initially everyone's like, 'That's crazy,' but then they start thinking through the problems and solving them."
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Originally Posted by Peter1469
