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Self-Sufficient Lunar Habitat Designed
An anonymous reader writes "Cosmos Magazine reports on a design for a lunar habitat that is 90 to 95 percent self-sufficient. The proposed habitat uses a closed-loop life support system that recycles and regenerates air, water, and food, reducing the need for costly supply trips. The north pole of the moon is chosen as a location because of its access to sunlight and useful resources. About 11 astronauts could live and work in the habitat for 2 to 3 years. The project would also help the environment on Earth with recycling and other sustainable practices." The designers say it could be 20 to 30 years before such a habitat could be up and running on the moon.
...I'll, for one, welcome our new moon-based overlords
!sig
we can use it to save some of our planet's plants by creating a space "eden" to save from extinction.
will it have boxy looking robots that walk like midgets in garbage cans like the movie silent running http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/ did?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why would a person want to live on the moon? This is not meant as a troll, but the only reason a person would on the moon voluntarily (penal colony perhaps...) I can think of is to do research.
The north pole of the moon is chosen as a location because of its access to sunlight and useful resources.
Yes, and by "useful resources", they mean moon-elves.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...Pauly Shore is wondering if the time is now right for "Bio-Dome 2"
So, what are they doing different?
I'll take the Earth, thanks.
That, once 1 year on the moon, the human body would have become incapable of sustaining itself on earth ? Or has this little tidbit been conveniently ignored. We could send people there for long times, we are not capable of getting them back.
Going there, like Laika, is a one way ticket : no way back.
You have to learn to walk before you can run. The moon presents a place where we can learn to create a self-sufficient habitat in a real situation. Before we try and establish ourselves on Mars or even interstellar, we need to prove we can live in space by camping in our own backyard, so to speak.
;-)
And if we do manage to get He3 fusion as a practical energy source, we can at least mine for that as a resource
...when the planet is so overpopulated, that the one and only resource the moon has, space, will actually become valuable enough to justify the expense and trouble of living there.
This news won't result in a resurgence of Pauly Shore movies.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
So, yeah, I read that first line to say that this came from Cosmo...I was confused. I agree with some of the above comments, I can't think of a reason to want to live on the moon, I would however, LOVE to vacation there for a week.
[/war] "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."
There will be plenty of cranky weirdos willing to volunteer. Just don't tell them that the latency of their Internet connections will be god-awful.
Huzzah!
It's a cool idea, but I still remember being all excited about Biosphere 2 when I was a kid, and it turned out to be a colossal failure.
I'm glad they've got a design, but are they planning on actually testing it? This is not the sort of thing you just build and hope it works. I mean, at least a working model would be something.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
I'll make my own Lunar habitat, with blackjack! And hookers!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It's Bio-Dome 2!
Where's Pauly Shore when you need him? The sooner we put him on the moon, the better for movie-goers everywhere.
We are the 198 proof..
After a while, all of the geeks will live on the moon, and they'll take their servers with them. Then, you will be the one with the huge latency!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Rememeber BioSphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2)
Remind me to take this seriously when somebody has made it work here on earth where it should be easy compared to the moon.
I read somewhere that the Russians did experiments with growing plants with 2 weeks of sunlight followed by 2 weeks of relative darkness at low temperature. (Not lunar nighttime temperature, but above freezing.) It seems that there are plants can acclimatize to such conditions. (In particular, peas.) They remain dormant and are able to survive for the 2 weeks when the temperature is lowered less light is available, then continue growing. Using specially tuned LEDs, we could provide the interim power for the 2 weeks "economically." (Relatively speaking. NASA contractors would probably charge million$!)
Here's some folks in New Zealand doing experiments that simulate lunar agriculture. There are many papers related to lunar agriculture as well.
Why is it that we had our first flight in 1903, 36 years later we exploded our first atomic bomb, 25 yeras after that we had a man in space, and only 8 years after that we had human beings on the moon. In the last 38 years what have we done? Why couldn't we put a man on the moon 9 months from now if we needed to? 30 YEARS to get this base going? If we started developing technology at the rate we were 100 years ago, we should have home based cold fusion reactors in 30 years! We should have near light-speed travel in 30 years! We should have mastered matter/energy conversion in 30 years!!!
screw this job, i'm going back to school for physics....oh, wait.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
... that we're getting close to publicly releasing a coffee machine that you pee into and it brews fresh coffee from it!?
1) NASA "ought" to be researching stuff like this... because they are going to need it in 20 years or so. But projects like this have been getting de-funded to pay for the Orion capsule (which, I might add, is in trouble -- it's too heavy and they are trying to make it lighter by removing redundancy and capabilities instead of trying to do things like remove a crew member or switching the first stage away from a 5-segment SRB)
2) This is fairly easy to test on earth. Except for the whole question about how well algae will reproduce in lunar gravity. The ISS was supposed to research these kinds of problems but the module that would have done this research is not going up.
3) "90-95%" self-sufficient is probably a pointless task to try and do all at once. It's probably far simpler to just add extra sufficiency over time so that you don't get nasty biosphere-two-ish surprises.
Gentoo Sucks
Settling in a gravity well is just stupid. I understand the romance of "living on another world", but just the health difficulties are incredibly hard to solve, along with Lunar nights (I know they want the north pole). The practical difficulties are insane. Will plants grow well in 1/6th gravity? Who knows?
If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station. Yes, the engineering is difficult, but nowhere near the problems of building on the moon, and you can build it closer to earth. You get perpetual, consistent sunlight for power, artificial gravity. You can do zero gravity experiments by setting up labs at the hub, which you can't do on the moon. And doing an emergency escape capsule would be way easier than having to launch off the moon.
Why NASA is still talking about going to the moon is beyond me. We should be doing missions to near-earth asteroids to see if the materials would be useful for building large space stations, and experimenting with robotically producing I-Beams.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Set up a WOW realm on the moon. Sure, internet connection with anything on Earth would have latency measured in 10's of seconds...but that's fine for web, IRC, IM, etc (everything but gaming). So the moon would just have its own dedicated realm(s). If they did that I'd go there.
Seeing how the project to build a self-sufficient sealed habitat on Earth ran into some unexpected difficulties, I'd strongly suggest postponing lunar habitats until one has been run at least a full year on Earth. After all, if there's some nasty surprises waiting, it's better to find them when safety is a few dozen meters, rather than 400 000 kilometers, away.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That just hit me as really creepy...sort of a vampire/soylent green kinda vibe..
A goal is a dream with a deadline
The poster asks why go to the moon, and what does the moon have that we don't have, and space is an answer. If you don't think real estate is valuable, then please tell us you think there is gold or water or whatever you think the moon has, and refrain from cowardly marking posts offtopic.
Someone please tell me that kdawson isn't abusing his infinite number of moderation points again.
You mean Whalers.
/~
~/ We're whalers on the moon! We carry a harpoon!
Isn't "90 to 95 percent self-sufficient" another way of saying "Not self-sufficient"?
Here's a link on Lunar Agriculture
http://www.moonminer.com/Lunar_Food_Supply.html
An interesting proposal is to use sulfur lamps, which provide the needed frequencies for plants and are even more efficient than fluorescents. The 2 week lunar night can be bridged by many plants by lowering the temperature and providing a low level of artificial light for 16 hours in 24. (At about the level of an overcast day on Earth.)
Also, algae can be gown in the 2 week period when light is available, then used to feed animals (esp. fish).
Recycles food. (I don't even want to know)
... is pretty worthless; in 30 years our tech will have, hopefully, seriously evolved. In 30 years the earths political systems and power balance could be totally different. If you cant do it in ten years change your focus to something else. I think this is a great idea but giving something this much time is the ultimate form of procrastination. There is *no* reason they cant have this well in the works in a decade. If the money is not there well then put it on the shelve and come up with something people will pay to research.
Send Pauly shore up there.
OK, now the serious part: biosphere 2 probably wouldn't have been the joke that it was on the talk shows if the stated goal of the program was to find out just how sustainable it could be with then state of the art engineering and technology, rather than completely seal it for 2 years and see what happens.
As it turns out, it wasn't 100% sustainable, and they did have to "cheat" which caused endless laughs. Serious science did come out of it, but who remembers any? One thing I remember that was interesting, and in retrospect should have been obvious, was that then ants they brought aboard for typical ant ecological duties _could_not_be_controlled. Duh. Everywhere but where they were supposed to be, getting into everything but what they were supposed to be doing. (When I was in California this summer, I encountered ants small enough to invade (unsealed) jars of peanut butter with the lids screwed down). Another thing was the inefficiency of their oxygen cycle. I think that was the ultimate reason they popped the hatches.
They would have been better off had they sealed up, did a progress report every 1 or two months, and replaced/modified any technology or systems that were not performing as well as planned. And brought the orkin man in.
Even so, I am assuming that these people learned from biosphere 2, and that their 95% sustainability has some basis in fact. But will it be 95% sustainable on the moon? It will be a disaster if you get there, set it up and find out it is only 60% sustainable, and the materials you hoped to mine on the moon are not as easily obtainable as you hoped.
No doubt any such venture should have a lifeboat in orbit and an ascending vehicle.
More music, fewer hits
TANSTAAFL*
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
You can't take the sky from me...
They don't need food, and they hardly breathe.
These stories are free but worth money.
You probably meant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-Dome FTFY
Of course they'll do tests on Earth! What else would they need 20-30 years for? The Moon is different to Earth (less gravity, the fact that you can't call it off when things go wrong, etc.).
So in the long term, the inhabitants are only, what, only 5-10% dead then?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2005/04/67110
"Lunar dust is extremely abrasive -- and unavoidable -- as astronauts quickly learned during the Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s. Within hours, the dust covered the astronauts' spacesuits and equipment, scratching lenses and corroding seals.
Fortunately for the astronauts, their contact with lunar dust was short enough that it didn't cause any major problems. But explorers living on a moon base for weeks or even months at a time are not likely to get away so clean.
Under prolonged exposure, the explorers would be at risk for everything from mechanical failures in spacesuits and airlocks to lung disease, said researchers last week at a NASA workshop focused on the issue."
"The designers say it could be 20 to 30 years before such a habitat could be up and running on the moon."
That's perfect timing. That's exactly when fusion reactors should be available to power the thing.
A number of Chinese asked the same questions in the 12 century and decided to pull back. So they explored quite a bit and then retreated. Likewise, major parts of Europe did the same in the 17th and 18th century. Of course, those spanish, limeys and froggies never did understand that they were to stay where they were (and thank god for that).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Space is more abundant on Earth than the resources necessary to sustain life. We need: food, water, energy, and air. None of these things are on the moon. We can set up production facilities for these things, but for all the expense, the oceans would be the first candidate. Since the oceans cover 3/4 of Earth's surface and we haven't even begun to colonize them, there's plenty of area available before the moon becomes economically attractive.
Overpopulation isn't about needing more space to build houses. It's a problem of over-taxing the life-sustaining resources nature provides.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Hardly the only reason. Reason #1 for me it that I can say that I live on the freakin moon!
Good news! Looks, like we might be on time, before we are done with Earth.
Servant of karma
ONE of these days! POW! To the moon!
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
On the ISS, the most useful module was killed. That is the CAM. It was a large centrifuge that would allow us to test different life at differnt Gs. Hopefully, the next president will allow that 1 module to go up, or perhaps Musk will take it up, once he has the falcon9 heavy working.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We need to know what will work and what will not. This approach did not work. If NASA or even some of the private space guys were thinking, they would buy it, and run more experiments. It would be useful to find a mix that will work.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Russian BIOS-3 project fit the moon goal better I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS-3
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
You must be new here :-)
Wasn't there one of these designed on earth, that didn't work for crap and ultimately is a giant white elephant that nobody wants?
What in THESE plans will make them more successful than that mess?
-Styopa
Sure, everything I know about huge scale digging machinery I learned from the History Channel. But even in the modern day, digging things out is a huge task. You don't go very far in a day, your machinery takes impeccable maintenance, the mining is prone to accidents or destroyed machinery, you need tons of spare parts--and that's in mountains that we've been practicing digging for a few thousand years! A fully self-sufficient mining operation on EARTH is enormous fantasy at the moment, because there's just no replacement for human versatility. And the nature of the work on the moon (terrifyingly sharp rocks vs. space suit, plus nasty temperature conditions) means that this scale of resource extraction will be out of our league, even with humans, for a while yet. I just don't think subterranean lunar mining is realistic right now--In a hundred years it might be slightly reasonable.
This sounds literally like Vaporware.
I remember reading Mars Direct back in Junior high in the mid 90s. http://www.marsdigest.com/MarsDirect.asp That was a plan, using technology from 1990 to get to Mars cheaply and set up a permanent colony for $20-$30 billion (cheap). The author evidentially knows what he's talking about and we've obviously had a wee bit of technology advancement in the last 17 years, but now NASA is saying we'll be barely on the moon in 30 years? It just boggles the mind that we're moving so slowly. Zubrin's plan in Mars Direct involved using low-tech structures and farming the natural resources already present on Mars to create a sustainable colony. He also focused on keeping the payloads cheap enough to use technology that's mass-produced for satellite launches so that costs stay down. Mars is a much better place to hang out for humans than the moon. It has soil that is favorable to some crops. It has gravity that's much stronger than that on the moon. The atmosphere is thick enough that only a slight addition in pressure would make it livable to plants (Zubrin talks about very thin plastic bubbles that could have a slight amount of air pumped in to increase the pressure to growable levels). Mars is also a base that we could use to launch mining missions to nearby asteroids. I wish some politician would step up to the plate and really commit to getting Mars for the good of whichever country he happens to live in (and humanity for that matter).
Seriously. Its a low gravity, 1/6th of earth gravity environment. When i get old older ( and maybe fatter ) i want to lighten up. Moon would be ideal. Also, low gravity would enable sports never possible on earth. Human being could fly around just flapping wings, like they all tried in the middle ages, under atmosphere-filled dome. The possibilities are endless. And that does not even touch on the vistas yet .. no, not THAT Vista.
Seriously, Moon, if developed, would be one real nice resort for old age.
That, and oh, providing all those valuable resources, like platinum group metals, possibly helium-3 and abundant solar power to earth perhaps. But thats up to robots to run and maintain, humans should be the overlords relaxing and kicking back low-g margueritas.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Erm, that only works for cells, for obvious reasons.
http://www.dolphinexim.com/prod_78_1_1.htm (a clinostat for sale with a potted plant fitted into it in the demo picture)Care to list your obvious reasons?
You can't take the sky from me...
Soylent Lunar. . . is cheese!
How long has man been trying to fly? The story of Icarus comes to mind? How about Da Vinci?
The Atomic Bomb? Well, we discovered X-Rays when? 1890s, by Röntgen.
Space, well, lets see, when was the first Rocket? In China, not certain which century, but IIRC, it during the dark ages. In fact, the first rockets powerful enough to go to space where in 1940s with the V2 (though they were not used in that fashion).
Yes, we were set back by piss poor presidents such as Nixon killing us going there, and reagan starting up the ISS. Poppa Bush tried to get America excited about Mars, and now W. (the idiot) has one good thing to his name; Getting the space program somewhat back on track. Of course, that probably had more to do with China pushing to go the moon as well as starwars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As I seem to recall, the original *bio-dome* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 (located just outside Tucson Arizona, was a dismal failure. The untold story, as I remember it, had residents placed on 1200 calorie/day diets, and they began fainting from lack of oxygen. The amount of greenery under the dome was calculated assuming very optimistic crop yields estimates, and the researchers forgot that bacteria in soil consume oxygen. The experiment was aborted when one of the subjects threw a chair through a window to get access to life-giving oxygen when a female subject passed out from the effort of walking up the stairs. If this is the way we are going to treat our astronauts, were going to need a big supply of gullible subjects.
Because... that would mean... ewwww....
"Even pirates like chocolate chip cookies." www.youtube.com/musecast5
..and green moon girls will want to have sex with you.... 95%? then it's NOT self sustaining is it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Gravity does bad things to our bodies. If you're committed to never coming back you could avoid a lot of pain by finishing out those golden years in a low-G environment. (The idea isn't mine, probably stolen from Heinlein. If not him, then some other SF writer)
Sunlight and constant temp? Build at the lunar poles.
Ease of launch? Just a simple rail gun.
Zero Gs. L1 in a bigelow.
As to the knowledge of plants at 1/16th, well, they ahve grown quite well in less Gs. It is possible that they would fail at lunar Gs, but succeed at Earth and ISS G, but not likely.
With that said, I would rather see us go to Mars, but then again, I will have my wish within 20 years (baring some major world disaster). Most of the private space guys will go to the moon because that is where the money is TODAY. But they all want to go to mars, because that is where we can survive and thrive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Make very item of clothing on the moon be lead weighted and that way it will simulate the gravity on earth, you can mine the lead from the lunar rocks and stuff. Once you get a person weighted down to the equivalent to .75G they should be good for a very very long time.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Something tells me that this is mostly fantasy and the time estimate is a SWAG...
I designed a self-sufficient lunar habitat as a high-school science fair project back in the spring of 1969, a couple of months before Apollo 11. Took a couple of prizes for it, too (include a prize from the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, probably mostly for pointing out that the Sudbury Basin is an impact structure rather than (as commonly held at the time) a geosyncline, and may suggest places to look for ores on the Moon.)
Although I daresay this study is probably a little more detailed than mine, I bet it doesn't come with a cool model including one of the Thunderbirds rockets...
-- Alastair
Simply put, Earth won't last forever, and the sooner we start preparing to GTFO and enhance our species' chance for survival, the better.
...
This calls for an Electric Wizard quote!
Construct the pods / we must evacuate
To the stars again / is this to be our fate?
Will we ever reach our journey's end
To find a world and start again?
Completely relevant. (From Son of Nothing, on Come My Fanatics...)
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
...not as easy as the male testosterone-driven mind makes it out to be (believe me, been there done that). Even in a sixth gee (moon gravity), might not be enough to make the repetitive thrusting so... repetitive.
In free fall, every action results in an equal and opposite reaction (and gravity doesn't provide a nice reference frame we call earth) So when you push against the wall to pull out of your lover... what keeps you from continuing to fly across the room? Some ideas that have been proposed are for things like sleeping bags (would limit your motions and provide surfaces to push against), elastic straps, etc. Procreation might actually take work in space.
NASA says it will set up polar moon camp Tuesday December 05, @12:44AM Rejected
Note: that was 5 DEC 2006...
Good old Slashdot editors. Always thinking ahead...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If anyone were to anger us, we'll have mycroft_holmes.lunacity.luna throw rocks at them.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
How about something closer than the asteroid belts like Saturn's rings? No gravity well. Plenty of material to harvest.
And we thought sex at 1 mile was good. Imagine that on the moon. Oh right... Slashdot. Sorry.
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...
... my parents' basement.
Have gnu, will travel.
if you can't keep the delicate balance in a fishtank going...
you better not be in charge of maintaining life support in this closed system...!!
2cents
j
The cynic says it will make for the perfect "Alcatraz". I mean, what a great place to send all the worlds most hardened criminals. Should anyone happen to break free, they still have to manage crossing over 238,000 miles of void to get back to Earth.
Oh, and if something goes wrong and people die; who cares. Just a bunch of murders and rapists that should have died long ago anyways...
Life is not for the lazy.
Or grain, it's just so much tonnage in a metal shell. The impact would be like a small nuke going off, minus the the radiation of course.
Or course I'd suggest getting a better reason than just angry.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Why would a person want to live on the moon? This is not meant as a troll, but the only reason a person would on the moon voluntarily (penal colony perhaps...) I can think of is to do research.
People will move to the moon for religious reasons. For example, if lunar colonies were affordable for a few hundred people, and could be self expanding, and not just sustaining, you'd find plenty of American religious movements heading off to the moon, just so they could set up their own fundamentalist laws. The moon will become dotted with a bunch of varying fundy groups, just like, well, America was when it was first colonized.
This is my sig.
"The project would also help the environment on Earth with recycling and other sustainable practices." First thing that popped into my head was that now we can dump our trash on the moon.
The wingflapping is a nice idea though, I've always loved Pilotwings on the N64 where you could do this. Just don't make 'm out of wax and get too close to the sun^H^H^Hceiling.
Has construction started yet? I wanna put my name on the waiting list. Living in the states is getting to be a real drag, and Antarctica is getting too crowded these days.
You're dead wrong.
In the event of a total destruction of Earth's biosphere, an off-world, self-sustainable colony could take the hundreds or thousands of years necessary to study what happened to Earth, and reterraform it.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
if all nations efforts were put to projects like this and not to MOAB's and FOAB's. I'll keep smoking my pipe dream.
Guy was talking about living in hab modules on the moon and you jump to TERRAFORMING? You might as well lob-off all the way to Dyson spheres.
See, a diving bell is a piece of technology that allows you to survive in a hostile environment for some period of time, but without someone there to resupply you and quickly haul you back in an emergency, it's a tomb. That is the state of human life beyond the earth now and for the foreseeable future until we find a naturally inhabitable planet, which even after useful interstellar travel is a reality will be a stretch, or until such time as we can terraform the Moon or Mars, which is arguably a level of technology further away than viable interstellar transport.
So, yes, in the distant, distant future when it is possible for us to inhabit some other object be it the Moon, Mars or some yet unknown exosolar planet without the aid of terrestrial industry, then such an exit will make sense. But, if the slightest necessity of life requires anything from earth or if unaided exposure to the natural environment is certain death, it is not a viable escape.
Expedition Five Science Officer Peggy Whitson examines plants on the International Space Station.
Mission 15 and 16 include multi-generation plant experiments in low-gravity simulations in centrifuges.
The fact that actual plants have actually been grown in actual micro and low gravity situations is reality which I, for one, do not ignore.
Now, again, tell me why it is obvious that a clinostat cannot be used to grow plants, only unicellular organism. I know why you said that: Because the page I linked only talked about cells, not plants, you had to click deeper in the site to find out about plants. But do go on, tell me why it's obvious that what has been done (unbeknown to you) for hundreds of years cannot be done.
You can't take the sky from me...