A Moon Base Made From Lunar Dust

Zothecula writes "The race to build a manned research station on the moon has been slowly picking up steam in recent years, with several developed nations actively studying a variety of construction methods. In just the past few months, the European Space Agency revealed a design involving 3D-printed structures and the Russian Federal Space Agency announced plans for a moon base by 2037. Now international design agency, Architecture Et Cetera (A-ETC), has thrown its hat into the ring with a proposal for SinterHab, a moon base consisting of bubble-like compartments coated in a protective layer of melted lunar dust."

Comments

Cart Before The Horse

[Anonymous Coward]

Why worry about the moonbase construction material when you can't even land on the moon?

First things first.

Re:Cart Before The Horse

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Why worry about the moonbase construction material when you can't even land on the moon?

First things first.

Unless you have a plan for what you are going to do when you land, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to sink a bunch of money into developing the ability to land. Especially since the moon is so hostile, and not at the top of the list in terms of pure scientific interest, you really need a viable plan for your ground game before it becomes remotely worth the hassle.

This is 'first things first'.

Re:Cart Before The Horse

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . build the moonbase first . . . and they will come . . .

Re:Cart Before The Horse

[dywolf]

The desert was hostile too.
So was the arctic.
And the ocean.
And beneath it.
And atmosphere above 15k feet.
Hostility to human life is simply an engineering problem, and each of these, including space, has been solved.

Moon base construction 101:
First off, large facilities on the surface are out the window, unless absolutely needed. Good for TV, bad for actual use.

Everything that can be gets built/housed under the surface. Companies and engineers with experience building pressure tight subsurface/subsea tunnels could make a killing bringing that experience to the moon. Again, it's a solved engineering problem. This solves the multiple problems of pressure vessel, habitat, dominant construction material, meteorite impact, and so on.

Main objective of the base? If it's not science, then it must be industry. Which makes perfect sense actually. There are vast resources in the solar system to be exploited, but returning them to Earth to be refined is problematic. We can't really get them down to the surface easily...and if they're destined to go back into space, thats rather hard to do on a large scale too. And refining in orbit is problematic because of multiple factors: some processes require gravity, orbital stations need to be protected from debris, large enough to do meaningful refinement, yet small enough to be launched into orbit.... But the moon simplifies a lot of these. You dont need to build the large space station or launch it (re, first apragraph stuff). Still has gravity, which keeps many existing refining processes practical (ie, no need develope new special process that may not yeild results that conform to known engineering..such as steel alloy design/use). Yet not nearly as big of a gravity well, so getting on and off the surface is much easier.

Do the refining there, and then send the finished material back to Earth (if that's its destination). Much more useful to send 6 tons (let's say) of finished steel (again, let's say) back to earth, than 6 tons of unprocessed iron ore that would only yeild say 2-3 tons of finished steel. Or if its destined to be used in space, good news, cause it's already there. Nearly. Certainly far easier than climbing back out of earth's gravity well. Long duration mission to Mars, sending more than a handful of folks on a scientific journey? Need a fairly large, comfortable, transport for them, more than a traditional capsule? Build it on the moon!

Plus doing it for the first time on the moon, getting the experience, learning the engineering lessons that ALWAYS result from these sorts of endeavors, relatively safe and near to home, instead of doing it for the first time a billion miles and 3 years away.

Re:Cart Before The Horse

[Poeli]

The desert was hostile too.
So was the arctic.
And the ocean.
And beneath it.
And atmosphere above 15k feet.

They are all still very hostile to humans. None of those places support permanent human life. We can survice there, but only for a little while. You always need a vast influx of energy/materials from the outside. And that is very expensive on the moon.

Re:Cart Before The Horse

[TangoMargarine]

So *when* (not if) some extinction-level (or mass-destruction-and-suffering-level, anyway) event happens to Earth, humans don't go extinct? How's that a reason for ya?

Re:Cart Before The Horse

[Synerg1y]

All we need to do is get the inflatable protective air-tight internal structures on the moon

Would give a whole new meaning to not running with scissors.

Re:Cart Before The Horse

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Don't forget you need a base for the Interceptors and Moon Mobiles.

Pay attention!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sintered != melted.

Re:Pay attention!

[LeadSongDog]

Mod parent up. Sintering is closer to baking. But solar heat is cheap and plentiful on the moon, with periodic availability. Use it to make lego bricks and automate the process of lego assembly. No need for rebar, as moonquakes are not severe. After the structure is up, all the bricks are compressed and strong. Spray the interior to seal pores. Add air.

Re:Pay attention!

[nitehawk214]

Mod parent up. Sintering is closer to baking. But solar heat is cheap and plentiful on the moon, with periodic availability. Use it to make lego bricks and automate the process of lego assembly. No need for rebar, as moonquakes are not severe. After the structure is up, all the bricks are compressed and strong. Spray the interior to seal pores. Add air.

The lego moonbase set was my favorite as a kid.

Re:Pay attention!

[nitehawk214]

The lego moonbase set was my favorite as a kid.

Wait, who am I kidding? It's still my favorite!

Re:Pay attention!

[garyebickford]

The classic cathedrals of Europe were all built using the compressive strength of stone, without any significant tensile elements. So it is possible to build domes and vaults of essentially arbitrary size without rebar. And the moon does not have significant issues with the ground shifting under the structures. Having said that, I won't argue that's the right way to do things! :D But it certainly might be for the early structures. I don't recall who, but some university is already experimenting with a '3D printer' that builds room-sized structures out of something similar to moon dust.

My own group, Space Finance Group, is considering putting together funding for some experiments related to this.

buzzword bingo /. edition:

[Thud457]

Only if John McAfee pays for it with bitcoins mined with an Beowulf cluster of Arduinos.

Re:buzzword bingo /. edition:

[wonkey_monkey]

A Beowulf cluster of Arduinos emulated in Minecraft running on a Raspberry Pi.

Which I won't believe unless it's announced at SXSW.

The only plan that makes sense...

[Covalent]

...for a moon base is to use native materials. The cost of launching all of the base's construction materials to the moon would render the project prohibitively expensive. The notion of digging into the moon and building sub-surface bases runs into a similar problem: digging equipment is big and heavy. To my mind, this is one of only two economically feasible ways to build a lunar base (the other being to use existing lava tubes or caves).

Now, that's not to say this method would be cheap, but it would certainly be cheaper than building a base from materials brought entirely from Earth.

Re:The only plan that makes sense...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This is what is wrong with people today..... Everything has to be as easy and must in no way involve manual labor.... Mining equipment.... BAH

Just few hundred years ago we were digging tunnels with showels!

Do you know how expensive it would be to ship enough Irish or Chinamen to the moon to dig the tunnels? Even if we packed them like sardines in the steerage section, and limited their whiskey and tea rations, that's still a lot to carry out of the gravity well...

Not a bad idea

[wbr1]

It is plentiful, you just have to engineer the printers to use the material, which may be difficult as there is not much of the real stuff to test with.
The last thing you want is a popup saying "HP LunarJet 1050P has detected a nonstandard or refilled cartridge. Printing suspended."

Re:Not a bad idea

[wbr1]

Lunar regolith is just minerals, but the structure is different. Dust and grains on earth tend to be rounded and smooth due to erosion. Not so on the moon, it is largely sharp and jagged. It holds footprints without slumping as a result [Mythbusters 1].
I am sure there are artificial substances that can be tested, but there's nothing like the real thing baby!
More Info

Re:Not a bad idea

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Even better, it apparently manages some wonderful static cling in the nonconductive lunar vacuum. Razor sharp, unweathered dust, peppered with glassy melt products from micrometeorite impacts, that static-clings like mad to anything it gets on. Probably eats any machinery whose lubricants it contaminates for breakfast, and I wouldn't be too optimistic about breathing the stuff that will end up getting tracked into the habitubes. Silicosis is a bitch of a way to die.

Re:Not a bad idea

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hmm, a joke about HP printers gets modded flamebait. I didn't know HP could afford /. shills.

The problem was that you made a joke that implied that an HP printer would last long enough to empty its starter cartridge...

Back in the heroic age, toner was cheap and the printer was built such that anything short of small arms fire wouldn't perturb it(though the firmware on the jetdirects was always total shit, even then).

During the silver age, the printers were still pretty decent; but they bled you dry on the ink.

Now, the printers are so ghastly that you'll be lucky to have yours live long enough to accept the overpriced replacement cartridges.

Re:Not a bad idea

[ModernGeek]

I believe this is one reason why the new suits are entered through the back and directly attach and detach from the ship. When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they brought their suit in with them and would get moon dust all over them. Now do this with a long duration stay, or on Mars where we know even less about the soil, and we have a real problem. The Z1 Suit solves a lot of cross contamination issues. Granted, this solves almost no problems in the arena of making a base out of local materials.

Moon-brick machine

[bill_mcgonigle]

A while back one of the universities (I want to say in the Southwest US, AZ maybe) had a project to build a machine to make bricks out of moon dust; their process also liberated oxygen and hydrogen from the dust, which could be bottled for human use. As I understood it they had a fully-working prototype.

Anybody know what happened to this?

So, have all the Sci Fi fans dies=d?

[TrentTheThief]

Holy crap. There have been dozens of moon/asteroid/airless-planet habitat ideas published since the 40's. While not all of them were well reasoned and possible, a huge number of them were. All that was lacking when the stories were written was a way to get there and the material technology to build the damned things. Most of those issues were resolved decades back.

Don't hail the sintered dome idea a new, unless you want to be in the same category as people raving about "new and improved" dish detergent. The idea's already been written about. But then, so have most of the habitat ideas.

Not true

[bussdriver]

NASA costs about $8 per year in taxes for most Americans. If most Americans want to do something with NASA they can afford to give up 1 pizza per year. Even doubling the funding is feasible. The debt and deficit matters amount to larger problems that actually have little to do with spending and more to do with the broken political system, ignorant public, and incompetent/corrupt media. If we spent $10 per year we could properly fund PBS and somewhat restore the press to what the founders had; (Yes, the founders subsidized the press and by a whole lot more too.)

FYI: I'm opposed to the whole program including going to mars.

Melting Sand with fresnel lense

[angel'o'sphere]

I once watched a video from an "artist" who has built a kind of 3D plotter using a fresnel lense to melt sand. When I saw that I immediately thought: that is how you built on the moon.

Perhaps someone knows that video and can link it?

A lot of these ideas are overlooking one thing

[eksith]

Lunar dust is a recipe for Silicosis. It looks like broken shards of glass under a microscope and that's because there's no weathering, nothing to smooth the edges, and breathing in this stuff for any length of time will make short work of your lungs. If they're gonna build it with melted lunar dust, it would have to be bloody well melted and that's including the floor. If bits and pieces chip off as you're walking or bringing in machinery from the outside, it's still no good.

The moon ain't Tatooine. You can't just slap together some domes, filter the air and make it habitable. If the astronauts are still confined to suites, that would get old pretty quick.

The astronauts will still have to wear filtering masks even if they manage to maintain a normal atmosphere inside. Living/sleeping quarters will effectively have to be clean rooms. Can their "bio-regenerative life support system" take care of the airborne stray particles of lunar dust? If HEPA type filtering is involved, they'll become useless pretty quick. Talk about swimming up a waterfall.

Re:A lot of these ideas are overlooking one thing

[TrentTheThief]

It should be possible to remove the dust using static electricity. Back in the vinyl LP days, there were a couple of systems that used static electricty to make dust "jump" off an LP. Considering the system's cost and that it was a consumer product, there's probably "professional" version that does the job quite well.

Solar Sinter

[AndyKron]

Old story, Solar Sinter video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsk-24UYFs0