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.

Comments

Because it's There

[ivormi]

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 ;-)

Re:Because it's There

[peragrin]

So why don't they set this up in the antartic, or death valley? prove that a closed air tight system can be viable and go from there? Biolab? or what ever was too much in a small space, they should try a simplier version of that.

Once it is working good, then go for the moon. by that point you will have found the way to make it small enough to fit on a rocket anyways.

Re:Because it's There

[mOdQuArK!]

Aside from being able to get some raw materials from the surface of the Moon, it's actually more of a pain to put a colony on the Moon than it would be to build a space colony.

Even though its weaker than Earth's, you've still got that damn gravity well to climb down into & out of, you can't even change the "gravity" like you could in a space station, and you have to deal with all that damn dust which mucks up your machinery & gets into your lungs.

We'd learn a LOT more about living in space by building a fairly self-sufficient space colony, and have quite a few more options of where to put the colony & control over the living environment.

I think the point is pretty moot, though - I don't see either public or private sector with the will to expend the resources necessary to get such an ambitious project put together.

Frankly, short of a potential all-life-ending scare like an asteroid or massive plague, the bulk of humanity seems to have lost any motivation to expand out into space, and are more-or-less content to fight each other for resources until there won't be enough resources left to expand out into space on a large scale.

this article misses several points:

[cmowire]

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.

Re:So the human problem has been resolved ?

[Penguinisto]

Eh?

The longest continuous space trip by a crew (with no gravity... none) was 438 days... that's just over 1.2 years. Another single Cosmonaut managed one day beyond that.

Sure, the three guys who pulled it off were pretty much stuck in a convalescence home for nearly a year before they could walk again, and had to exercise their asses off every day they were up there, but point is that they did manage.

With 0.16 G , one would think you could stretch that out a bit to at least a year-and-a-half (perhaps more) before it got as bad as it did for the current record holders, no? This isn't even counting medical remedies and techniques that weren't available in earlier long-duration spaceflight tests.

/P

Re:Gravity well

[david.given]

Settling in a gravity well is just stupid... If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station.

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.