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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.
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.
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
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
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
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!
Actually...
The moon is a really good place to settle. There is a gravity well; but it's such a small one that you get the convenience without the penalty. It's nice having things fall down; it makes all kinds of useful resources --- rock, ice, metal --- easily accessible, and you don't have to worry about stuff drifting off. Not to mention that all the production techniques we know about involve gravity at some point. It's also nice having such a ludicrously small gravity well that you can get into orbit with something the size of an Apollo lander rather than a Saturn V. It's an excellent compromise.
It's also really nice being three days travel away from home. In the event of an emergency, it's entirely feasible to sprint home directly from the lunar surface. You can't do that from an asteroid, where you've travelled for months just to get there.
You're right in that asteroids are excellent places for robotic mining... unfortunately, we don't know how to do that yet. The state of the art just isn't there. Given that we still don't have the technology to travel anywhere in other than a minimum-energy transfer orbit taken months, and that mission planners have to plot crazy momentum-stealing flybys of practically every inner planet in order to minimise delta-V, launching experimental robot refineries from the surface of the Earth just isn't going to happen. Wait another twenty years and build 'em on the Moon instead. You'll have the knowledge, the personnel, the materials, and you won't have to lift them out of Earth's huge gravity well.
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.
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).
Biosphere II wasn't so much of a failure as it was a 'no test'. Despite the gleaming claims they made about being a closed enviroment, only lip service was paid towards it in the actual design and construction. Far more money was spent on hewing to enviromental mantras and meeting the philosophic/aesthetic goals of the project than on even quasi serious engineering. (CIP: The 'lungs' had to be added, at great cost, fairly late in the construction because it didn't occur to any of the enviromental gurus that a closed building of that size would have significant pressure changes as the temperatures changed.)
Like Sydney Opera House, Biosphere II was designed by an artist - and then the design was handed over to engineers to make work. As a result, much time and money was spent ensuring the 'rainforest' had rain, the 'ocean pool' had tides, and that the high humidity levels required inside by enviromentalists didn't corrode the whole structure into junk.
On top of that - they leapt/extrapolated too far from their mockup and existing engineering. (By a couple of orders of magnitude.) Then they leapt right into the full bore lock-in without doing any significant commissioning and baseline testing.
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.
If you check here, you'll see that due to where they are (north pole of moon on a crater rim) they have almost constant access to sunlight.
If I'm on the north pole of any tidally locked body, and (this is crucial) the normal of the plane of orbit of that body is perpendicular to the sun... then the north and south poles of that body will have almost constant access.
Here's how. If the north pole has none of the rest of the body to shade it, then from the point of view of the observer, the sun will always be halfway on the horizon. In other words, the sun will be half-hidden all of the time, sitting on the horizon and "going around" the body. So if I build a building on the north pole, then the upper floors will see the whole sun. If we add some reflective screens that will rotate and point at the sun, then we've got an increase in how much sunlight will hit our target (garden, photoelectric, or whatever).
Also keep in mind - there's no atmosphere to weaken the amount of sunlight. So even if the sun seems to be on the horizon, the light per square meter (measured with a normal pointing straight at the sun) will be considerably stronger. Instead of a satellite with lots of solar cells, consider a solar concentraing cell (those referred to in the link are already in space) inside an airspace connected to the base. Whatever sunlight isn't converted to electricity is converted to heat. All you have to do is pump cool water past the cell to keep it cool enough, and you can then capture the heat from the water.
So it's an environment with plenty of energy available (once tapped), lots of rock-based nutrients for plants, and a slow speed for landing (relative ground speed for landing is at a minimum at the poles). A perfect place to start hollowing out the inside of the moon for an even more secure moon base. Here's hoping they put one at each pole.