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Self-Sufficient Lunar Habitat Designed
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Oct 09, 2007 02:57 PM
from the hydroponics-with-a-side-of-tilapia dept.
from the hydroponics-with-a-side-of-tilapia dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Cosmos Magazine reports on a design for a lunar habitat that is 90 to 95 percent self-sufficient. The proposed habitat uses a closed-loop life support system that recycles and regenerates air, water, and food, reducing the need for costly supply trips. The north pole of the moon is chosen as a location because of its access to sunlight and useful resources. About 11 astronauts could live and work in the habitat for 2 to 3 years. The project would also help the environment on Earth with recycling and other sustainable practices." The designers say it could be 20 to 30 years before such a habitat could be up and running on the moon.
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Submission: Self-Sufficient Lunar Habitat Designed by Anonymous Coward
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the north pole (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, and by "useful resources", they mean moon-elves.
With any luck (Score:4, Funny)
Cool...I guess (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm glad they've got a design, but are they planning on actually testing it? This is not the sort of thing you just build and hope it works. I mean, at least a working model would be something.
Re:Cool...I guess (Score:4, Informative)
A failure as a colony or a failure as an experiment? I'd say they collected plenty of specific data on what went wrong, and by extension, what's wrong with current designs for closed habitats.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, building a self sustainable base on the moon IS the test.
Re:Cool...I guess (Score:4, Interesting)
Biosphere II wasn't so much of a failure as it was a 'no test'. Despite the gleaming claims they made about being a closed enviroment, only lip service was paid towards it in the actual design and construction. Far more money was spent on hewing to enviromental mantras and meeting the philosophic/aesthetic goals of the project than on even quasi serious engineering. (CIP: The 'lungs' had to be added, at great cost, fairly late in the construction because it didn't occur to any of the enviromental gurus that a closed building of that size would have significant pressure changes as the temperatures changed.)
Like Sydney Opera House, Biosphere II was designed by an artist - and then the design was handed over to engineers to make work. As a result, much time and money was spent ensuring the 'rainforest' had rain, the 'ocean pool' had tides, and that the high humidity levels required inside by enviromentalists didn't corrode the whole structure into junk.
On top of that - they leapt/extrapolated too far from their mockup and existing engineering. (By a couple of orders of magnitude.) Then they leapt right into the full bore lock-in without doing any significant commissioning and baseline testing.
Parent
Russians Used Lunar Day / Night Cycles (Score:5, Informative)
Here's some folks in New Zealand doing experiments [asi.org] that simulate lunar agriculture. There are many papers related to lunar agriculture [purdue.edu] as well.
we need more russians (Score:3, Funny)
screw this job, i'm going back to school for physics....oh, wait.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, you are quite mistaken. In the past 30 years, we have not had any major human engineering feats (for example: Shuttles, satellites, ISS, etc.) compared to the previous decades leading up to the lunar landings. Instead, we have integrated technology and scientific advancements into new space age. Products of this are ever present in our eve
this article misses several points: (Score:5, Interesting)
2) This is fairly easy to test on earth. Except for the whole question about how well algae will reproduce in lunar gravity. The ISS was supposed to research these kinds of problems but the module that would have done this research is not going up.
3) "90-95%" self-sufficient is probably a pointless task to try and do all at once. It's probably far simpler to just add extra sufficiency over time so that you don't get nasty biosphere-two-ish surprises.
Re:this article misses several points: (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, we are researching [google.com] self sufficient lunar habitats. I probably see an average of 6 papers a year on the topic at the ICES or COSPAR conferences. The real trick is making a compelling case that regenerative life support saves you ESM (Equivalent System Mass). Everything at NASA is reduced to the mass of the system, and thus how expensive it is to launch. Harry Jones, Alan Drysdale, and other big wig life support analysts aren't convinced complicated regenerative systems, especially crops, will actually make for a cheaper lunar or orbital system. The farther you are away from earth, however, the more sense it makes. One could make the argument that we should test crops on the moon for eventual deployment on Mars, but it would be a very expensive experiment.
Parent
Gravity well (Score:5, Insightful)
Settling in a gravity well is just stupid. I understand the romance of "living on another world", but just the health difficulties are incredibly hard to solve, along with Lunar nights (I know they want the north pole). The practical difficulties are insane. Will plants grow well in 1/6th gravity? Who knows?
If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station. Yes, the engineering is difficult, but nowhere near the problems of building on the moon, and you can build it closer to earth. You get perpetual, consistent sunlight for power, artificial gravity. You can do zero gravity experiments by setting up labs at the hub, which you can't do on the moon. And doing an emergency escape capsule would be way easier than having to launch off the moon.
Why NASA is still talking about going to the moon is beyond me. We should be doing missions to near-earth asteroids to see if the materials would be useful for building large space stations, and experimenting with robotically producing I-Beams.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Settling in a gravity well is just stupid... If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station.
It is not stupid, it is a trade-off. Sure it is a gravity well, but a weak one that is not hard to overcome. That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well. The moon is not a perfect site but it seems like a reasonable baby step to me, before we look at building a space station somewhere useful, like the
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well.
Whatever advantage there is to the raw material is more than overwhelmed by the practical difficulties of dust and the temperature swings, just for starters. The moon is an incredibly harsh environment -- much harsher than space itself.
The moon is not a
Re:Gravity well (Score:4, Informative)
Will plants grow well in 1/6th gravity? Who knows?
Or anyone with access to a working clinostat [arizona.edu], really.
Parent
Re:Gravity well (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually...
The moon is a really good place to settle. There is a gravity well; but it's such a small one that you get the convenience without the penalty. It's nice having things fall down; it makes all kinds of useful resources --- rock, ice, metal --- easily accessible, and you don't have to worry about stuff drifting off. Not to mention that all the production techniques we know about involve gravity at some point. It's also nice having such a ludicrously small gravity well that you can get into orbit with something the size of an Apollo lander rather than a Saturn V. It's an excellent compromise.
It's also really nice being three days travel away from home. In the event of an emergency, it's entirely feasible to sprint home directly from the lunar surface. You can't do that from an asteroid, where you've travelled for months just to get there.
You're right in that asteroids are excellent places for robotic mining... unfortunately, we don't know how to do that yet. The state of the art just isn't there. Given that we still don't have the technology to travel anywhere in other than a minimum-energy transfer orbit taken months, and that mission planners have to plot crazy momentum-stealing flybys of practically every inner planet in order to minimise delta-V, launching experimental robot refineries from the surface of the Earth just isn't going to happen. Wait another twenty years and build 'em on the Moon instead. You'll have the knowledge, the personnel, the materials, and you won't have to lift them out of Earth's huge gravity well.
Parent
Oxymoron (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything which is '20-30 years away' ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Biosphere 3 (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, now the serious part: biosphere 2 probably wouldn't have been the joke that it was on the talk shows if the stated goal of the program was to find out just how sustainable it could be with then state of the art engineering and technology, rather than completely seal it for 2 years and see what happens.
As it turns out, it wasn't 100% sustainable, and they did have to "cheat" which caused endless laughs. Serious science did come out of it, but who remembers any? One thing I remember that was interesting, and in retrospect should have been obvious, was that then ants they brought aboard for typical ant ecological duties _could_not_be_controlled. Duh. Everywhere but where they were supposed to be, getting into everything but what they were supposed to be doing. (When I was in California this summer, I encountered ants small enough to invade (unsealed) jars of peanut butter with the lids screwed down). Another thing was the inefficiency of their oxygen cycle. I think that was the ultimate reason they popped the hatches.
They would have been better off had they sealed up, did a progress report every 1 or two months, and replaced/modified any technology or systems that were not performing as well as planned. And brought the orkin man in.
Even so, I am assuming that these people learned from biosphere 2, and that their 95% sustainability has some basis in fact. But will it be 95% sustainable on the moon? It will be a disaster if you get there, set it up and find out it is only 60% sustainable, and the materials you hoped to mine on the moon are not as easily obtainable as you hoped.
No doubt any such venture should have a lifeboat in orbit and an ascending vehicle.
Re:Biosphere 3 (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the ants which ultimately took over the biosphere were never supposed to be there in the first place. They had carefully selected a couple of ant species however the species which dominated road in on some plants which were not properly quarantined. The "alien" species quickly dominated and destroyed the other two. I actually visited Biosphere 2 while I was living in Arizona. Those little brown ants were all over the place.
Other good lessons learned:
It really was a remarkable place, even if it was treated as a red-headed step child by the media. The primary lesson is that building a closed, self-sustaining environment is a lot more complicated than anyone thinks. All the more reason we should keep trying and keep learning.
Parent
Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
TANSTAAFL*
Perfect timing (Score:5, Funny)
That's perfect timing. That's exactly when fusion reactors should be available to power the thing.
Re:In 20 or 30 years... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Because it's There (Score:5, Interesting)
And if we do manage to get He3 fusion as a practical energy source, we can at least mine for that as a resource
Parent
Re:Because it's There (Score:5, Interesting)
Once it is working good, then go for the moon. by that point you will have found the way to make it small enough to fit on a rocket anyways.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Because it's There (Score:4, Funny)
To sum:
1) Small closed habitat on earth
2) Test habitat on Moon
3) ???
4) Profit!
Where ??? becomes:
a) Colonize Mars
b) Open Lunar Real Estate Office
c) Mine for He3
d) Perform industrial espionage of the Google lunar offices
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember, cellular mitosis doesn't work well in freefall. It may or may not work better at lunar gravity.
Re:Because it's There (Score:4, Informative)
Debatable. Skimming through the hits turned up by a google of "mitosis+microgravity", the experimental results are all over the place, with some of the biggest effects seen in experiments where there was little control against other effects (cosmic rays, high G and vibration effects from launch (sounding rocket experiments), etc. There also seem to be result differences between simple lifeforms (eg yeast), plants, and animals.
If mitosis really screwed up in freefall, astronauts spending more than a couple of months on a space station would start to die horrible deaths due to non-replacement of their blood cells.
Parent
Re:Because it's There (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, the experiments were successful within the design parameters. (I had a chance to visit the facility a few months after Krasnoyarsk was opened to westerners, I still have a sample of the wheat grown within it.)
Biosphere 2 was more ambitious, aiming for 100% closed and no artificial lighting for the plants, for a two-year duration. They didn't make it, due to some surprises in the atmospheric chemistry (and things like interaction with the still-setting concrete), and the thing was way more than would be set up on the Moon anytime soon anyway. Bios-3 was much closer to a Lunar habitat prototype, and proved to be workable. (Yes, there'd still be some supply issues -- it will be a long time before anywhere off-Earth is totally self-sufficient, you need huge buffers and/or very good monitoring to make up for random events in the ecosystem. (Being biological, there are always random events.)
Parent
Re:Because it's There (Score:5, Interesting)
Even though its weaker than Earth's, you've still got that damn gravity well to climb down into & out of, you can't even change the "gravity" like you could in a space station, and you have to deal with all that damn dust which mucks up your machinery & gets into your lungs.
We'd learn a LOT more about living in space by building a fairly self-sufficient space colony, and have quite a few more options of where to put the colony & control over the living environment.
I think the point is pretty moot, though - I don't see either public or private sector with the will to expend the resources necessary to get such an ambitious project put together.
Frankly, short of a potential all-life-ending scare like an asteroid or massive plague, the bulk of humanity seems to have lost any motivation to expand out into space, and are more-or-less content to fight each other for resources until there won't be enough resources left to expand out into space on a large scale.
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ask that again in 20-30 years (Score:3, Insightful)
oceans to be colonized first (Score:4, Interesting)
Space is more abundant on Earth than the resources necessary to sustain life. We need: food, water, energy, and air. None of these things are on the moon. We can set up production facilities for these things, but for all the expense, the oceans would be the first candidate. Since the oceans cover 3/4 of Earth's surface and we haven't even begun to colonize them, there's plenty of area available before the moon becomes economically attractive.
Overpopulation isn't about needing more space to build houses. It's a problem of over-taxing the life-sustaining resources nature provides.
Seth
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, geology. Study the moon itself. In preparation, perhaps, for later mining.
Also, so that you/your country wins.
Parent
Nah! (Score:3, Funny)
Just wait (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some folks also crave being on the frontier, where everything is new. It's risky, but our species has made quite a living off of that particular trait.
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
so fuck off.
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've often proposed that you need to send up a couple drills (think mines or Chunnel) and send them to a crater. Drill into the sides of the crater, laying down an epoxy against the walls as you drill.
Once primary drilling is done, you can place a pressure door on each tunnel, charge to 10 ATM and release a fine mist of polymer. It will find any cracks and seal them, then when you are operating at 1 ATM the 10X margin you have is adequate. The tunnels can be laid out radially from the crater center and a hub can be located in the middle.
-nB
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Biosphere to me was a waste of space. they tried to do too much in to little space. If they concetrated on say just the rainforest r just a group of plant bearing trees, they would have been a lot better off.
It was less about surviving out in space than it was a giant global warming experiment.
They're Sending Supermodels. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Muscle and bones can be trained much more easily than on ISS for example, since there is some gravity. Good old weight lifting and running (possibly with weights) will be possible on the moon. Walking and such might need retraining since astronauts might get used to skipping and jumping or whatever, but that's no big deal. So what is it that you think will happen?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We know that coming down to Earth after a year in freefall sucks a big one. But we know nothing about how coming back from the Moon after more than a few days will work.
Also, having a reasonable sized colony of a few hundred that doesn't need too much more care other than being swapped out every few months so that nobody wastes away too much but doesn't require too much other logistical support is a useful thing.
Re:So the human problem has been resolved ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:So the human problem has been resolved ? (Score:5, Interesting)
The longest continuous space trip by a crew (with no gravity... none) was 438 days [hypertextbook.com]... that's just over 1.2 years. Another single Cosmonaut managed one day beyond that.
Sure, the three guys who pulled it off were pretty much stuck in a convalescence home for nearly a year before they could walk again, and had to exercise their asses off every day they were up there, but point is that they did manage.
With 0.16 G , one would think you could stretch that out a bit to at least a year-and-a-half (perhaps more) before it got as bad as it did for the current record holders, no? This isn't even counting medical remedies and techniques that weren't available in earlier long-duration spaceflight tests.
Parent
Lunar Agriculture Link (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.moonminer.com/Lunar_Food_Supply.html [moonminer.com]
An interesting proposal is to use sulfur lamps, which provide the needed frequencies for plants and are even more efficient than fluorescents. The 2 week lunar night can be bridged by many plants by lowering the temperature and providing a low level of artificial light for 16 hours in 24. (At about the level of an overcast day on Earth.)
Also, algae can be gown in the 2 week period when light is available, then used to feed animals (esp. fish).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)