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NASA, as it prepares to return humans to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, is thinking about building a place for them to live. The Apollo astronauts only needed the lunar module to rest between moonwalks. Artemis astronauts, who will eventually stay on the moon for months at a time, will need more spacious facilities.
NASA just signed a contract with Austin-based company ICON to develop technology using 3D printing to build key components of the lunar base, including habitats, rocket landing pads and roads. The process would use lunar regolith as material to build the structures layer by layer. The more components of a lunar base that can be built with materials on hand, the less must be brought to the surface of the Moon from Earth at great expense.
Landing pads will be of particular importance. When a rocket lands or takes off from the lunar surface, it kicks up dust and soil at 10,000 miles per hour, blasting the surrounding infrastructure. A landing pad, according to the University of Central Florida, can be made by microwave mixing lunar soil, melting where rockets would land and take off.
Other facilities a lunar base would need include greenhouses to grow food, rovers to take astronauts to different parts of the moon’s surface, mining equipment to extract oxygen and water, and a power source, such as nuclear power plants that NASA is developing with private contractors.
SpaceX’s Human Landing System (HLS) will be a huge asset to the construction of the lunar base. The HLS can carry 100 metric tons of equipment and other materials to the lunar surface.
However, the current factor limiting the size and scope of a future lunar base is NASA’s reliance on the Orion/Space Launch system to get astronauts into lunar orbit. Orion will have a crew of four astronauts. When it docks with the Lunar Gateway — which will be the first space station planned to orbit the moon — two astronauts will stay behind and two will ride the lunar landing system.
Even with robots to complement humans, the Artemis mission would not have much more capability than NASA had during Apollo. The only advantage is that Artemis astronauts will be able to stay on the lunar surface for weeks or even months instead of days, as was the case during Apollo.
Two people on the moon at the same time are not enough to take full advantage of life on the moon’s surface. Indeed, that number of people may be hard pressed to maintain a lunar base, much less explore the Moon to expand scientific knowledge and resource prospects.
It is clear that NASA and its international and commercial partners must develop an alternative to the Orion/SLS system to get more people from Earth to the Moon more often than once a year. Such an alternative could be based on SpaceX’s Starship HLS. Maybe it’s something else.
Eventually, hundreds, even thousands of people could live and work on the moon. Scientists, lunar miners, tour operators and others will likely be busy bringing Earth’s closest neighbor into humanity’s economic and social sphere.
Will the lunar base ever turn into a lunar colony, where families will live and children will be conceived and born? The US Sun interviewed NASA astronaut Stan Love, who suggested that no one will actually live out their lives on the moon. He drew an analogy with Antarctica, which has a number of science bases where people serve their services before going home. The moon will be like Antarctica, in Leo’s opinion, because the conditions are too harsh and harsh.
The bigger problem with lunar colonies is that science has yet to discover the long-term effects of one-sixth gravity on the human body. For example, children born on the moon may never be able to leave it. Earth’s gravity would be six times that under which their bodies would develop.
On the other hand, maybe one day science will develop a combination of drugs and physical fitness that could allow people born on the Moon or Mars to visit Earth without being crushed by gravity.
But first, NASA and its partners must return men to the moon and bring them home. They have to do it over and over until it becomes routine. Only then will both the Earth and the Moon become the realm of human civilization.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of the space exploration studies “Why is it So Hard to Get Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and “Why Is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
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