NASA Considers Mobile Lunar Base

colonist writes "During the Apollo missions, astronauts explored on foot or in rovers. The next astronauts on the moon may move the entire base instead. Marc Cohen, from NASA's Ames Research Center, proposes a lunar base on wheels or legs, such as the habot (robotic habitat) or the mobitat (mobile habitat). Cohen considers mobile bases superior to rovers: 'To avoid life-threatening or other compromising situations that might occur with only one rover traveling to a remote place, a second rover might travel with the first. But what if the second rover runs into a problem, too - the same or a different problem? Well, that means a third rover. So, why not make the entire base mobile, so that all the resources, reliability and redundancy of the lunar mission move with the excursion crew?' Of course, mobile bases are nothing new. Terran buildings have been lifting off for years."

Comments

Re:Inherent problem

[Slashamatic]

Forget cosmic, the main issue for the lunar camperwould be solar, i.e., during flares. This is already a major issue for mission planners and the ISS has a single protected area where astronauts can hide in when NASA sounds the alarm.

Of coure it would be possible to do something similar for NASA's lunar-camper. It would just add to the weight. A static underground shelter as you suggest would be much better.

In Soviet Russia, they did this in 1970

[Animats]

The USSR landed several rovers on the moon. Big rovers. The first, Lunokhod 1 worked for eleven months, exploring far more territory than the short-duration American manned missions. This vehicle was the size of an SUV, so it is clearly the first "mobile lunar base".

Pictures

[Somegeek]

Here are some links to NASA's concepts of what the mobile bases might look like:

MOBITAT

HABOT

Re:Does anyone else think NASA reads too much SCI-

[FleaPlus]

I would certainly tend to hope that people at NASA read large amounts of sci-fi. Many of the most useful concepts in spaceflight have come from science fiction, e.g. geosynchronous satellites.

In this particular case though, I'm not so sure. It just seems that you would take too much of a hit on cost and reliability to make up for any possible benefits. For one, a mobile base can't be built into the regolith for insulation, a feature one hopes a lunar base would have.

Obligatory pictures

[FleaPlus]

I haven't seen them linked to yet, so here's some info pages with pics of this:

"Habot" mobile lunary base
Mobitat (mobile lander?)

Does anybody know if scientists in Antartica use mobile habitats? If they do, then this would seem much more plausible.

Re:To the Moon, Alice

[Rei]

I used to be a major "moon-as-stopping-point" proponent myself. However, there are some serious advantages to a base on Mars in comparison.

* Higher gravity means less need for strength training to stop bone loss and other problems
* Partial natural radiation shielding
* Ample known water supplies (moon ice is currently only speculative, despite plenty of lunar-orbit studying)
* Cheap to get bulk raw materials to anywhere we care about. Even cheaper to get raw materials to Earth than it is from the moon, due to the orbital energy of the moon that needs to be overcome.
* Ample sunlight for farming; artificial light for farming is a pretty doomed concept, when you do the energy calculations.
* Partial-pressure domes
* Far more mineral rich in every respect except for Helium-3, which is currently pretty worthless.
* A perfect stopping point for a triangle trade with the incredibly mineral rich asteroid belt (Mars raw materials and people can get to the asteroid belt with very little energy; asteroid belt materials get sent to Earth; Earth sends small, high tech components that Mars can't build to Mars).
* Major terraforming prospects; estimated workforce needed to terraform Mars to 1atm=10,000 people; procodes enough pressure and CO2 for plants, which over about 100 years can produce enough O2 for humans to breathe.

Of course, the big downside: It's far. Still, I think the pros really outweigh the cons. A Moon base would be like an antarctic research station. A Mars base would be like a colony. Stopping at the moon just seems like a waste of time - it'll take so much in terms of resources to keep it going that it will severely sap from the Mars effort. Just think of food and nuclear fuel shipping costs alone... Mars will take more resources initially, but at least it becomes somewhat sustainable over time since large-scale partially-pressured agriculture is feasable, and there's enough good raw minerals in easily processable forms...

Re:To the Moon, Alice

[starcraftsicko]

You were good until this:

* Major terraforming prospects; estimated workforce needed to terraform Mars to 1atm=10,000 people; procodes enough pressure and CO2 for plants, which over about 100 years can produce enough O2 for humans to breathe

The much lower gravity on mars combined with the lack of useful magnetic field will make it virtually impossible to hold a surface pressure anywhere near 1 atm. The best you can reasonably hope for is a 1/2 atm surface pressure (in the deep valleys mind you) and a high fraction of oxygen to yeild a breathable atmosphere.

Keep in mind also that the atmosphere of mars is really all of the radiation shielding there is. With no magnetic field to speak of, the martian atmosphere is exposed to solar wind and all of the other hard radiation that the sun throws at it. That's one of the reasons they have such a hard time keeping probes and robotic explorers "alive" on the partian surface.