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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.
Fine! I'm going to make my own moon habitat. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the whole moon habitat.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
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
Lower gravity => less stress on heart + other parts that tend to sag.
...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
For Science! No, but really. The moon is a great place for a few things - like a telescope. You can make a huge one that is always hidden from earth's interference. Also, if you have a place to stay anyway, long-term low gravity experiments. We know you get screwed up in microgravity, we know you do fine in full gravity. But what about a little gravity? We don't really know.
Also, geology. Study the moon itself. In preparation, perhaps, for later mining.
Also, so that you/your country wins.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
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.
To get away from Earth. Some say humanity, in its current form, is doomed to destroy itself. Being on another astronomical body would afford some protection from that, should we Earth-bound folks finally kick the bucket.
Some folks also crave being on the frontier, where everything is new. It's risky, but our species has made quite a living off of that particular trait.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
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!
Why would a person want to live on the moon?
You have never lived in New Jersey have you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?
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.
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
Well, how else are the whalers going to get there?!?
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.
hopefully they are getting rid of the mini ocean, the coral reef, and the desert to concentrate on plants that produce O2, and food.
Biosphere to me was a waste of space. they tried to do too much in to little space. If they concetrated on say just the rainforest r just a group of plant bearing trees, they would have been a lot better off.
It was less about surviving out in space than it was a giant global warming experiment.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Because its there. Because we have to look at it every night, and because there are people out there saying that we can't.
so fuck off.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Isn't "90 to 95 percent self-sufficient" another way of saying "Not self-sufficient"?
... that we're getting close to publicly releasing a coffee machine that you pee into and it brews fresh coffee from it!? You might say we have that already, but if my boss ever finds out about it I am so fired.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).
Is the moon a harsh mistress?
this first base belong to us!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
... 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.
Does that mean that my email box is now going to be flooded with ways to get to the moon?
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
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.
They don't need food, and they hardly breathe.
These stories are free but worth money.
Soylent Brown.
http://blogostuff.blogspot.com/
You don't even need a mile.
I've often proposed that you need to send up a couple drills (think mines or Chunnel) and send them to a crater. Drill into the sides of the crater, laying down an epoxy against the walls as you drill.
Once primary drilling is done, you can place a pressure door on each tunnel, charge to 10 ATM and release a fine mist of polymer. It will find any cracks and seal them, then when you are operating at 1 ATM the 10X margin you have is adequate. The tunnels can be laid out radially from the crater center and a hub can be located in the middle.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
To be fair, the Biosphere probably would have been a lot more successful if Bud and Doyle hadn't thrown that huge party and totally knocked the ecosystem out of whack. Even then, though, they managed to do a pretty good job of cleaning it up, and everything turned out happily ever after, although the deal with the exploding coconuts did cause a bit of a scare.
"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.
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!
You'd have research that would have enormous potential from living on the moon, however.
1. A telescope would have much better visibility, and with a base next to it maintenance would be faster and cheaper.
2. A launchpad for space exploration. It's much easier to blast off a rocket from the moon than it would be from Earth. With 1/6 the gravity, a moon rocket would have to have far less thrust to get itself into space and could use Earth's gravity for acceleration. The parts could be manufactured on the moon or on Earth and shipped to the moon via the regular shipping that has been established. Even if it has to be shipped, it would still be a smaller, cheaper rocket.
3. Adaptation to other worlds. If we ever accomplish superluminal transport, we may come in contact with other planets or other forms of life that live in different conditions. If we know how to sustain ourselves off Earth, we can likely sustain ourselves in other locations such as the moon of Titan or worlds beyond the solar system.
4. Wireless networking. We might have to learn how to blanket the universe (or at least our region) with billions of miles of wireless networking at high bandwidth. I'm serious. If we have multiple colonies on multiple planets and space stations, wireless networking on that scale would make communication easier, even if the latency is limited by the speed of light.
5. Future sustainability on Earth. If the climate on Earth ever goes down the tubes, what we learn on the moon may help us survive on Earth, in the case of runaway global warming, an ice age, asteroid impact or nuclear war.
6. Weapons research. We could test weapons away from forms of life it could harm. This one has its own ethical implications, but I leave that to philosophers.
7. Energy research. The energy sources required to power such a base could lead to more efficient energy at home, such as improved solar energy sources.
8. Recycling. The extreme recycling needed for a space station or moon base could be commercialized and used to conserve Earth resources.
The possibilities are endless.
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).
Tidal Stress from Earth and Sun
You missed a whole bunch of details that make the difference between fantasy and something worth pursuing in the near future. Perhaps the most important is that Lunar regolith is hard-packed and difficult to drill into, and also perhaps the most abrasive naturally occurring substance found. It's been pulverized to fine particles by repeated micrometeor strikes, packed firm by shock waves from strikes nearby, and had no erosion to smooth the edges. Oh, it's also statically charged. Have fun maintaining your machinery.
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...
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.
The objections you mention are actually covered briefly in Peter F. Hamilton's book Pandora's Star - he has his starship crew sleeping in padded 'cages' from which the captain gets a few bruises at one point.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I thank you.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it