NASA has revealed a plan to build a permanent moon base the size of a city as part of a historic push to keep humans living on the lunar surface full-time by 2032.
The space agency also announced a major deal involving Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin as it races toward a planned human moon landing in 2027.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will provide a pair of landers to deliver moon buggies to the lunar surface, at a spot near the moon’s south pole. These so-called lunar terrain vehicles will be built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost. Firefly Aerospace, which landed successfully on the moon last year, will deliver the first drones to the moon.
All this hardware is ideally supposed to arrive before the first Artemis astronauts land on the moon, planned for as early as 2028.
The goal of the moon base is to encourage a lunar economy while conducting scientific research and laying the foundation for a Mars expedition, Isaacman stressed.
Article doesn’t say how frequently the individual astronauts will be rotated off base. Can’t imagine keeping them in space for longer than a year. But then a round trip to Mars is in the range of 3 years. They will have to figure out how to counter act body changes due to microgravity.
We’re not going to Mars. Not unless the astronauts have a death wish. The radiation will destroy their kidneys. They might get there, but they’d never survive the journey back. There was an article about it published a couple of years ago.
Moonbase will have a similar problem. Not so much the transit (just a few days). Long term habitation will have to be underground, and probably on the Earth-facing side (to use the Earth as a radiation shield). Not sure how deep the habitat would have to be with lunar soil, but enough to stop most of the cosmic radiation (maybe 3-5 meters, just as a guess). Which can be done, of course, but it would require excavating that 3-5 meters, plus whatever habitat space is required, and there aren’t any backhoes on the lunar surface. Very expensive.
2032 is less than 6 years away. They won’t be able to get this all together that fast. They could get a lunar mission in that time, but not building a base.
Complete aside, but I found out an interesting factoid the other day. Artemis’ solid rocket boosters were used on the Space Shuttle. The same physical boosters, they’ve all flown in space before. However, unlike the Shuttle they don’t recover them after Artemis missions. They just throw them away.
For the very earliest and smallest base, you’d probably just create a “dirt” mound. Take your habitat building and place it on a stable location, with an access tube leading out a few meters. Then use a lunar bulldozer to push regolith around it and on top of it. Nothing fancy, just a big heap - but since there’s no wind or weather, it would be relatively stable. Lower gravity gives you a higher angle of repose for lunar regolith, which lets you get a nice amount of coverage on the top without having to have too huge of a cone.
The other possible alternative is water. We believe that there is water frozen in the permanently shadowed portions of the moon. Any lunar base would likely be located near one of those pockets. Water is an excellent shield against cosmic radiation, and is (obviously) incredibly useful and necessary for human habitation. So if you have a habitat that’s got thin aluminum shielding (to protect against solar radiation) and surrounded by water bladders (to protect against cosmic rays), it should be well protected on the surface.
That water would be finite. The Moon doesn’t have the water cycles we do on Earth.
However, the few serious proposals I have seen actually have water storage ABOVE the ceiling of the habitat for exactly the reason you mention.
I looked it up. I was pretty close. You need about 3 meters of compacted regolith. Which translates to about 10 tons per square meter. So, you can’t just use a lunar bulldozer (which we don’t have there). You need to compact it to provide adequate shielding at a depth of 3m. If it’s loose, you’d need more thickness.
If you were to excavate a single level habitat (say 8’ ceilings), plus water storage on top…maybe another meter thickness), and that was level with the surface, you’d have to pile and compact an additional 3 meters of regolith on top (~10’). Almost as big as someone’s house on Earth. Again, it could be done. But very expensive with little pay-back (other than living out “Space 1999” or the Brit show “UFO”).
Ah, Space 1999. Now that takes me back! Martin Landau…innnnn spaaaaaace!
I think there would be enormous payback. This would be a research facility, not a colony. There’s no need for us to be raising children on the moon. But there’s enormous benefit to having a permanently manned research facility. The analog would be the base in Antarctica, or the ISS - outposts that exist solely because they allow us to do research on (and in) environments that don’t exist elsewhere on earth. The moonbase would enable long term low-gravity experiments (materials, equipment, biology of humans and other life forms), experiments with exposure to radiation or environmental conditions that are very difficult to duplicate on earth. Those permanently-shadowed regions get down to -400 degrees F, colder than the surface of Pluto, with no atmosphere to worry about. Imagine the superconductivity possibilities!
As for Lunar Base One, I think there would certainly need to be some earth-moving involved (or whatever we call that on the Moon). But I think it’s something you could do with just a lunar bulldozer, if you pick the right site. The first meter or so of depth of the regolith is basically the same density as earth soil. So if you scraped a 15x20 area (the size of an ISS module) a meter deep, you could put a water bladder on top and just heap uncompacted regolith to create a berm around it. The berm would only need to be about two meters tall, and you could make it as wide as necessary fairly easily. If the water bladder is a meter thick or so, you even don’t need any regolith on top - that’s sufficient to protect from cosmic rays.
You’re forgetting meteoroids. The Moon is constantly bombarded by them. Often no bigger than a pea, or a bb. You would want a meter or two of regolith (preferably compacted) to protect your water supply. And the habitat. A hole gets punched in the water tank, and it will disperse very quickly. A hole punched in the habitat could lead to some excitement, too. Plus, the insulation would help to prevent the water from freezing in the tank (probably not a bladder) once you stabilize the tank temperature.
I thought the Moonbase in “UFO” was cool, even if the women on the base had weird hair. Maybe a genetic mutation to deal with cosmic rays? I don’t recall that they ever went into detail. Probably didn’t even care, really. They just thought purple hair was cool. As a pubescent, I just thought their outfits were cool.