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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 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.
They did... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
> I still remember being all excited about Biosphere 2 when I was a kid, and it turned out to be a colossal failure.
A failure as a colony or a failure as an experiment? I'd say they collected plenty of specific data on what went wrong, and by extension, what's wrong with current designs for closed habitats.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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).
Will plants grow well in 1/6th gravity? Who knows?
These guys, maybe? Ronald J. Anderson, Thomas M. Crabb, John G. Frank, Steven M. Guetschow, Jeffrey T Iverson, Olaf Meding, Robert C. Morrow, E. Don Peissig, Ross W Remiker, Robert C. Richter, David Smith, Jon D. Van Roo, Anton G. Vermaak, and John C. Vignali of Orbital Technologies Corp. for Kennedy Space Center.Or anyone with access to a working clinostat, really.
You can't take the sky from me...
That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well.
Whatever advantage there is to the raw material is more than overwhelmed by the practical difficulties of dust and the temperature swings, just for starters. The moon is an incredibly harsh environment -- much harsher than space itself.
The moon is not a perfect site but it seems like a reasonable baby step to me, before we look at building a space station somewhere useful, like the asteroid belt.
That's the problem... it's not a baby step, it's a gargantuan step. Doing a space station is the baby step. Why do you think we have an ISS (as pathetic as it is), and not a moon base at this point?
Hell, forget I-Beams. Send up an inflatable a la Bigelow (which is based on NASA technology that he bought). Why people think the moon is easy compared to the other options is beyond my understanding. It's the *hardest* option.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Disclosure: I work at NASA.
To be fair, we are researching self sufficient lunar habitats. I probably see an average of 6 papers a year on the topic at the ICES or COSPAR conferences. The real trick is making a compelling case that regenerative life support saves you ESM (Equivalent System Mass). Everything at NASA is reduced to the mass of the system, and thus how expensive it is to launch. Harry Jones, Alan Drysdale, and other big wig life support analysts aren't convinced complicated regenerative systems, especially crops, will actually make for a cheaper lunar or orbital system. The farther you are away from earth, however, the more sense it makes. One could make the argument that we should test crops on the moon for eventual deployment on Mars, but it would be a very expensive experiment.
Actually, the ants which ultimately took over the biosphere were never supposed to be there in the first place. They had carefully selected a couple of ant species however the species which dominated road in on some plants which were not properly quarantined. The "alien" species quickly dominated and destroyed the other two. I actually visited Biosphere 2 while I was living in Arizona. Those little brown ants were all over the place.
Other good lessons learned:
It really was a remarkable place, even if it was treated as a red-headed step child by the media. The primary lesson is that building a closed, self-sustaining environment is a lot more complicated than anyone thinks. All the more reason we should keep trying and keep learning.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
Because the moon's lack of atmosphere and magnetic field mean that all that fragile genetic material would be constantly bombarded with radiation orders of magnitude more intense than would happen on the Earth.
On the other hand, maybe it would be possible to bury it under many tons of moon rock, which may shield it and keep it cold. Does anybody know what temperature the moon's subsurface is?
dom
It's been done. I just skimmed TFA briefly, but did see an explicit reference to Bios-3, a (Soviet) Russian closed-loop habitat at a research center in Krasnoyarsk (Siberia). Unlike the later Biosphere 2 (the greenhouse-like one in Arizona you're probably thinking of) this was much smaller, indoors (lighting for the plants was artificial -- and the whole thing had an external water cooling system to remove excess heat) and focussed mainly on recycling air and water. They did grow some of their own food (algae and wheat, yum), but also had regular food inputs from outside. Partly this last was due to Russian regulations governing experiments involving humans, by law they were required to be supplied with a regular ration of meat.
Anyway, the experiments were successful within the design parameters. (I had a chance to visit the facility a few months after Krasnoyarsk was opened to westerners, I still have a sample of the wheat grown within it.)
Biosphere 2 was more ambitious, aiming for 100% closed and no artificial lighting for the plants, for a two-year duration. They didn't make it, due to some surprises in the atmospheric chemistry (and things like interaction with the still-setting concrete), and the thing was way more than would be set up on the Moon anytime soon anyway. Bios-3 was much closer to a Lunar habitat prototype, and proved to be workable. (Yes, there'd still be some supply issues -- it will be a long time before anywhere off-Earth is totally self-sufficient, you need huge buffers and/or very good monitoring to make up for random events in the ecosystem. (Being biological, there are always random events.)
-- Alastair
Remember, cellular mitosis doesn't work well in freefall.
Debatable. Skimming through the hits turned up by a google of "mitosis+microgravity", the experimental results are all over the place, with some of the biggest effects seen in experiments where there was little control against other effects (cosmic rays, high G and vibration effects from launch (sounding rocket experiments), etc. There also seem to be result differences between simple lifeforms (eg yeast), plants, and animals.
If mitosis really screwed up in freefall, astronauts spending more than a couple of months on a space station would start to die horrible deaths due to non-replacement of their blood cells.
-- Alastair