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Caves of the Moon
jeno passes along this excerpt from New Scientist:
"A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards. ... The hole measures 65 meters across, and based on images taken at a variety of sun angles, the hole is thought to extend down at least 80 meters. It sits in the middle of a rille, suggesting the hole leads into a lava tube as wide as 370 meters across."
The moon is a harsh mistress...
3.5 billion years into existence and we've finally hit the first plot point.
That's no moon! It's a space station.
That hole is probably where it fires its main weapon from.
This is R. Daneel Olivaw's hideout
Given the moon's lesser gravity, you should be able to jump right over the lava. That's right folks, this going to be one great big real-life Mario Brothers game!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The moon isn't like a truck - it's a series of tubes.
The moon is made out of Swiss cheese...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Sure but the same could happen to your home. Events of that type are pretty rare and hell, if something can smash through solid rock it'll probably smash through the ceiling of your surface moonbase too.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
These are almost certainly "sinkholes" into lava tubes, where lava runs out the center of a partially frozen lava flow. (Apollo 15 showed pretty clearly that at least the Hadley Rill was a collapsed lava tube.) There are lava tubes you can visit on the big island of Hawaii.
The interesting thing to me about this is that the interior of these tubes, being far from the Sun and in a vacuum, might easily contain an appreciable amount of water ice, for the same reason that the lunar poles might, but with a much more convenient distribution across the Moon's surface.
Besides, wouldn't it be cool to explore these 3 billion year old caves?
If Man is going to return to the Moon and make a permanent base there, then it might as well be done in a cave, which is much more naturally sheltered from harmful cosmic rays and meteors, as compared to living in some inflatable habitat on the surface. Heck, that's why our cavemen ancestors liked caves to begin with - because they were uniquely sheltering environments. Shouldn't there be some kind of effort to map out the lunar underground to reveal where the best locations might be? As they say in real estate - it's location, location, location!
This lava flow comes from the late heavy bombardment and so the lava tube is well over 3 billion years old. Yes, the roof might fall in, but (given that there is no erosion, and no ground water dissolving the rocks) if it hasn't collapsed in 3+ billion years, the odds are in your favor.
Now, that doesn't mean that these tubes are necessarily stable, and you would certainly want to be cautious on the first visit, and provide a roof to protect against cave-ins caused by human activity, but many of the lava tubes on Earth are quite stable, and similar tubes on the Moon would be great places to set up shop.
Sorry I can't find a better link, but you don't really need a lava tube for settlement, it just makes it cheaper and easier. You're still going to need an inflatable habitat
The obvious problem with an inflatable habitat is that anything the size of dust is going to make at least one hole in it. Patching is likely to take up quite a bit of someone's time.
or similar (honestly, what else makes sense?) to sit in the tube.
Install two bulkheads some distance apart and pressurize the space in between to 75 kPa.
The Moon has highlands and Mares. The highlands are old (saturated by craters at all scales) and mostly made of a type of granite, while the Mare are relatively younger (not saturated by craters at the km scale) and made of basalt lava. This basalt lava is mostly thought to have come from the late heavy bombardment - a period of massive collisions on the Moon about 3.9 billion years ago which is now hypothesized to be from a disruption of the asteroid belt from the orbital migration of the outer planets.
This isn't a kid's balloon. As I recall, the skin is about six inches thick, and made of kevlar.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"