I think the most efficient construction on the moon would be inflated structures constructed underground in the mooncaves.
Let the caves block the radiation and just focus on the thermal insulation and the air pressure integrity.
This means it would be possible to build large volume spaces, like sporting arenas.
And that’s the segue I need to share a deck promoting “Moonball.”
“A Modest Thesis on Moonball:
Billions of people will want to watch professional athletes playing sports on the moon. A successful event or sports franchise could fund economically sustainable human habitation by 2035.”
I am convinced by your thesis. I'd add more details on the potential revenues garned by such an event, however- and how it'd compare to the cost to construct such a sporting arena. For example, FIFA is supposedly raking in 4.7B in revenue for the World Cup this year.
The plea for sports on the moon we didn't know we needed. It's a good departure from some of the usual ideas around Moon bases. Create a mainstream event around moon sports, fun and absurd enough to catch billions of eyeballs and drive revenue for future exploitation of the whole satellite. Brilliant.
That headline/title "NASA Awards $57M Contract to Build Roads on the Moon" condenses information so much that is becomes both false and deliberately misleading.
The actual article says:
> to develop construction technologies to build infrastructure on the moon—including landing pads, habitats and roads.
So the contract isn't to build anything but to develop technologies that could be used to build a wide variety of needed infrastructure on the moon.
Plus, most of that money is probably intended to focus on building landing pads since that's still NASA's biggest "unknown" risk factor regarding bringing large amounts of cargo down to the lunar surface.
It isn't really clear if a large lander like Starship would be at risk of digging itself into a hole (and potentially tossing regolith into an orbit such that it comes around and hits the lander or surrounding infrastructure) if it landed using its main thrusters. For now the HLS design includes separate landing thrusters higher up, but since those add more complexity they're probably fairly interested in exploring other possibilities.
Misleading title, funny enough the road outside my house is nothing more then compacted gravel that the intentionally leave the dust in... its called B2 modified I think. so as long as your moon buggies have reasonably wide tire to weight all you need to do is grind it to the right size and compact it. ... but the article itself is about much more then that and it will be interesting if 57M can actually build a solid structure from those materials. As others have said no water or anything so if it can be done without a big supply chain then I bet the "tech" will be to compress what's there into bricks of some sort. So they just reproduce the materials here and see how much they need to be compressed to make something usable.
Since my childhood home is next to a gravel road, I somewhat doubt that compacted gravel would be feasible. Gravel roads of all kinds spin up a lot of dust when you drive on them, and on the Moon it would take even longer to settle than on Earth. A constant cloud of floating particles can not be good for your gear if you want to travel through it with any reasonable frequency.
> A constant cloud of floating particles can not be good for your gear if you want to travel through it with any reasonable frequency.
I bet on the Moon that dust behaves very different. No atmosphere, so no usual clouds. Static electricity, so some possible weird behavior. No erosion and soil, so dust is sharp and hard.
It would be interesting to see how road construction looks like on the Moon.
Moon dust is totally weird stuff. Because there's no erosion, it's super shardey and pokey. This also means that points of contact between individual dust particles are minimal, so it's highly insulating and also has very poor thermal conductivity across the bulk.
I wonder if it would be worth it to set up a mid/high frequency vibration device up to the moon and just run it for a few months? Years? To cause vibrational contact erosion in the immediate environs of wherever you intend to land to soften up the shards... Would that even work?
“I wonder if it would be worth it to set up a mid/high frequency vibration device up to the moon and just run it for a few months? Years? To cause vibrational contact erosion in the immediate environs of wherever you intend to land to soften up the shards...“
I recall that one of the moon rovers had a broken fender, and the dust it was kicking up was causing all sorts of problems. So the next day they fashioned a homemade fender out of duct tape and some laminated maps. On the moon.
> One dousing with dust was enough to make a deep impression on Schmitt. Back on Earth he opined that "the dust issue is one that just has to be addressed. It's going to be the major environmental issue for future missions to the Moon."
I'm pretty sure I first heard about it in Gene Cernan's book The Last Man on the Moon. It's a very good read, and not too long (5hr audiobook), so if you want more of those stories that book is filled with them. He also narrated the audiobook himself, and did a pretty good job.
To make a solid from moon dust just by pressure would need a too high pressure.
Nevertheless, it should be possible to sinter the dust into ceramic blocks, by moderate pressure and temperature, together with some kind of binder.
As a sintering aid that works as a binder, there are various oxides that could be extracted from moon rocks, e.g. yttria, though some of the more abundant oxides, e.g. of magnesium or calcium, might also work.
So I think that the most difficult part of making solids from moon dust or broken moon rocks is the extraction from the rocks of the oxides that can be used as binders for sintering.
Sintering has the great advantage that it needs only energy and materials that are abundant on the Moon. Cements and adhesives, which are cheaper on Earth, need materials that are very scarce or absent on the Moon.
That would not work like that on Moon, because the technique described works for sand, which is highly enriched in silicon dioxide.
Such deposits of rocks with very high content of silicon dioxide, like sands, are formed on Earth by the action of water, which dissolves the more alkaline oxides from the rocks, leaving sand made mostly of quartz. There are no such sands on the Moon.
However, I have not mentioned above that besides sintering, there is an alternative way of making solids from lunar dust and rocks, which is to melt them completely and cast them into solid blocks.
However, this would be more difficult than sintering, because it must be done inside a sealed space, filled with some gas (materials do not melt in vacuum, they sublimate), and it would require a greater energy.
When introducing in the sealed space and extracting from it the raw materials and the end products, there would be some losses of the pressuring gas. Nevertheless, when melting rocks made of oxides, unlike when melting metals, the gas could be oxygen extracted from the lunar rocks, so its losses would not be important.
However, the use of oxygen as the working gas would make difficult to find a material from which to make the walls and the casting die, because such a material would have to resist both oxygen and melted oxides at high temperatures, which few materials are able to do, except some platinum-group metals, but even those do not last forever and need periodic replacements.
What I really would like to see on the Moon: more investigation about peaks of eternal light[1]. These are points close to the poles of a body which receive sunlight (almost) continuously. On the Moon, if there is an area with a few peaks which are illuminated for long enough and with icy water close by; it is possible to store energy in the form hydrogen and use it for the periods without light.
That could enable permanent settlements on the Moon.
Just curious, I get low gravity, extreme temperature and flying debris, what are the physical challenges of building infrastructure on the moon? For example, I assume we are probably use local material to build stuff. What can we get from the moon or do we need to ship the whole thing there?
Well, there is nothing organic on the moon, so you can't build with wood, don't have the oil and tar used in material like asphalt and roofing bases. There also isn't any oxygen for producing the fire that would be needed for smelting and what not. You need water for concrete. There is water on the moon, but it's not flowing or nearly as accessible as the water on Earth. It's largely bound up in ice at the poles. The moon is also lacking minerals that contain water as part of their own structure, like clay, which is a common construction material.
It is an interesting design problem for sure. I'm not expert on this stuff, but the first thing that comes to mind is gravel roads. Plenty of moon rocks would be available to be crushed into gravel. You might not even have to do that. Robots might be able to rake up enough material of suitable size.
Once you have your gravel, use robots to make a path and compact the regolith. Put down the gravel over the compacted regolith, and there's your road. I have no idea if that would actually work or not, but it's interesting to think about.
Yeah and to compact it, you need more mass than on earth because gravity is lower. Or you somehow compact it between two pistons that can provide lots of force and not be limited by gravity.
If your compaction includes application of force vertically, top down, you need something opposing that force. On the Earth it's usually gravity, and on the Moon it could be the same, just the gravity on the Moon is ~1/6 the Earth one.
Again, I think I'm lost with this. A hydraulic press needs gravity to oppose it? Like, the hydraulic cardboard compactor that pushes down on a bale of cardboard somehow uses gravity?
I am legitimately confused by what you're getting at. I feel like maybe we're not even talking about the same thing.
> hydraulic cardboard compactor that pushes down on a bale of cardboard somehow uses gravity?
If the compactor is only pushing down, and it is not secured to the ground, then yes, it needs gravity to hold it in place. But most compactors are secured to a frame, so the force is produced between the hydraulic ram and that frame.
Most (all?) road equipment is held down by gravity: if it weighs 10 tons, then it can't apply more than 10 tons of downward force. However, if you need to apply more downward force, the easy answer is to secure your compactor to the ground.
No you're not missing anything. You're right. I'm saying that you'd need such a device on the moon because of the limited gravity. A compactor doesn't care about gravity.
Using only materials existing on the Moon and solar energy, it is possible to make some kinds of ceramics (e.g. to be used as bricks), by sintering, it is possible to make various kinds of glasses, and it is also possible to extract many metals, some of which are much more abundant in the lunar rocks than at the surface of the Earth, e.g. iron, titanium, manganese, chromium, zirconium.
Similar to what we can get from the Earth (The mineral composition of the two bodies is similar), with the key difference being that terrestrial construction sites don't turn undifferentiated piles of rocks into buildings, doors, windows, elevators, and roadways.
There's a colossal supply chain that turns those piles of rocks into usable building materials. We're likely to see moon roads sometime after we get flying cars, and economically viable fusion energy.
That paper is not careful about the meaning of the used words and it does not discuss any of the difficult parts.
"Concrete" normally refers to rocks that are bound with cement, without having to use high temperature and/or pressure.
The paper does not explain how such a cement could be made from lunar rocks.
The Portland cement and most other usual cements, which are used on Earth, require water, which is not available in most places on the Moon.
What could be done is to extract the calcium oxide (quicklime), or other similar oxides, e.g. magnesia or yttria, from the lunar rocks.
Without water, these oxides cannot be used to make cement, i.e. a binder that becomes solid without applying high temperature or pressure, but due to chemical reactions at low temperature.
Nevertheless, these oxides can be used as binders in making ceramics, by sintering at a high temperature and moderate pressure, like making bricks on Earth.
Thus one can make ceramics or glass on the Moon, which should be the cheapest materials, but not cement or concrete. There is no chance of making a building by pouring concrete, like on Earth. It should be possible to make a building from bricks, which might have shapes holding them together, but which must also use some metal parts, e.g. bolts or rivets, to ensure that they stay in place, in the absence of cement that could be applied like on Earth.
It might be possible to seal the spaces between ceramic bricks with some kind of easily fusible glass, to make them airtight.
That section can be safely ignored, because the proposed solution is not feasible, being based on non-lunar resources.
Bringing hydrogen from Earth in quantities large enough to allow wasting it in construction materials, instead of using it only for making precious food and drinking water, for making water and acids used in certain chemical processes, for certain plastic materials used in small quantities and for fuel, is a completely impractical idea (this being a polite way of not calling such a solution for making construction materials on Moon as completely stupid).
Hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and sulfur will be the most expensive materials on the Moon, so they will be reserved for things where they are irreplaceable, not for construction materials, which are needed in huge quantities in comparison to the materials needed for any other application, so they must be made from the most abundant materials that can be found around.
IIUC you refer to "flying debris" from outer space hitting the surface of the moon. But the local lunar dust itself is a big challenge to be addressed for future moon mission EVAs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k9wIsKKgqo
This dust would probably be a physical challenge to equipment used to build infra.
In practice, the only reason the treaty is still up is because it is not very practical to go to terrestrial wars over possession of a piece of Moon surface or an asteroid while you have no realistic method of making any use of it.
It is likely one of the powers will withdraw from the treaty when they are finally ready to take possession of a significant asset in space and the benefits outweigh the risk of terrestrial war. And then other countries will do pretty much the same not to get behind.
The Outer Space Treaty has provisions for non-interference of science. So if you set up a lab on the surface of the moon, nobody is allowed to interfere with it. Non-interference implies a keep-out zone around the lab.
So while it's not ownership, it has many of the same benefits and properties.
NASA puts the west in a very bad position, India will want its roads too unless they'll be forced to do like ESA/CSA/JAXA and become just an equipment supplier for NASA
How can you negotiate to prevent other organization to go solo and claim ownership, if you yourself go solo?
We are headed for a big mess, thanks to Greed, that guy is omnipresent nowadays
China is prepared, they know how to build autonomous space stations, they replaced the ISS
Describing ESA/CSA/JAXA as 'just an equipment supplier for NASA' is exactly the issue you're attributing to the West. They aren't prevented from developing their own crewed spaceflight capability. They aren't even prevented from working with China (ESA has experiments on Tiangong for instance). They just find it more effective to put aside greed to work closely with NASA.
It is well understood that the only reasons ESA and JAXA in particular don't have crewed spacecraft is a lack of need, as both are clearly capable of developing reliable rockets and having supplied modules for the ISS are also clearly capable of designing spacecraft that can keep humans alive.
If India wants its Lunar infrastructure in the hypothetical case where the West somehow has already fully colonized it before India has had a chance to establish and maintain its own colony, perhaps India too should put aside its greed and seek to work through things via mutual cooperation?
In all fairness, the legal situation in outerspace is very anti-private business. It was based on the Antarctic Treaty which basically says "everything here must be done under the auspices of a government, and non-public activities are to be avoided."
We should have based it on the Law of the Sea which says "As long as a ship is flagged by a government, it can do pretty much what it wants as long as it follows customary rules."
You can't own territory on the open sea, but if you're using it for something, it's yours for as long as you're using it. That would be a good rule for the moon but realistically, if a powerful agency wants you to move, you move.
Some countries are auctioning long-term seabed leases within their national waters or EEZ for purposes like offshore wind farms. But the seafloor under international waters isn't being auctioned off.
Let the caves block the radiation and just focus on the thermal insulation and the air pressure integrity.
This means it would be possible to build large volume spaces, like sporting arenas.
And that’s the segue I need to share a deck promoting “Moonball.”
“A Modest Thesis on Moonball:
Billions of people will want to watch professional athletes playing sports on the moon. A successful event or sports franchise could fund economically sustainable human habitation by 2035.”
I would love any feedback on this totally modest proposal: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16QpeWjf1Hbxp_15D5Vtx...