NASA Plans To Build Houses On the Moon By 2040 (forbes.com.au) 100
Several scientists from NASA told the New York Times that the agency is planning to build houses on the moon by 2040. Forbes reports: The agency is set to return to the moon and is hoping its astronauts can stay long-term -- in a house built on the moon via a 3D printer. The idea is to build the house structure out of a special lunar concrete from the moon's surface, and NASA has found just the company to do it: Austin-based 3D printing company, ICON. In what's been dubbed Project Olympus, ICON
ICON created its first 350-square-foot prototype home in Austin in March 2018 with a proprietary machine called Vulcan. This year, it showcased its first model home at Wolf Ranch in Georgetown, Texas, which is part of its 3D-printed 100-home community project. The start-up first received funding from NASA in 2020, and in 2022 it announced an additional $60 million for a space-based construction system that can be used beyond earth. The idea is to send a 3D printer up to the moon via a rocket, and the printer completes its job from there. "We've got all the right people together at the right time with a common goal, which is why I think we'll get there," NASA's director of technology maturation, Niki Werkheiser told The New York Times. "Everyone is ready to take this step together, so if we get our core capabilities developed, there's no reason it's not possible."
ICON created its first 350-square-foot prototype home in Austin in March 2018 with a proprietary machine called Vulcan. This year, it showcased its first model home at Wolf Ranch in Georgetown, Texas, which is part of its 3D-printed 100-home community project. The start-up first received funding from NASA in 2020, and in 2022 it announced an additional $60 million for a space-based construction system that can be used beyond earth. The idea is to send a 3D printer up to the moon via a rocket, and the printer completes its job from there. "We've got all the right people together at the right time with a common goal, which is why I think we'll get there," NASA's director of technology maturation, Niki Werkheiser told The New York Times. "Everyone is ready to take this step together, so if we get our core capabilities developed, there's no reason it's not possible."
Funding? (Score:2)
Re:Funding? (Score:5, Informative)
i got you, this was difficult to spot, buried deeply into the second paragraph of tfs:
The start-up first received funding from NASA in 2020, and in 2022 it announced an additional $60 million for a space-based construction system that can be used beyond earth. The idea is to send a 3D printer up to the moon via a rocket, and the printer completes its job from there.
so they have something to keep experimenting. however, tfa adds some clarification:
and the plan is little more than that – a plan
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Is the plan funded?
Ironically enough, yes.
By the very same taxpayers who often can't afford a house on this planet.
That 60 million works out to about 20c per American. Hope you weren't relying on your 20c as part of your home deposit...
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57% of U.S. households paid no federal income taxes for 2021, either because they couldn't afford to or could afford not to.
So as usual it's the hardest working Americans who actually had to pay, not that they had to pay much. But the nickels and dimes add up.
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Only because the really rich parasites at the top have bought plenty of tax loopholes.
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Only because the really rich parasites at the top have bought plenty of tax loopholes.
That, and they are eliminating the jobs that the people not paying taxes because they are too poor used to have, and they keep the minimum wage down with their lobbying against a living wage. I mean what's the point even of buying the justice system if you can't keep down the plebes?
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I'm more angry about tax dollars going to fund various ways to directly kill people than I am about a whole $.20 going to fund somebody's day-dream of a moon-home. Maybe it'll come to something, but a ton of these NASA day-dreams never get off the launchpad, so to speak. But, even if it doesn't go anywhere, at least it's a form of progress that may be tapped in the future for something else. And $.20 less of my money going directly toward killing other people.
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Is the plan funded?
Ironically enough, yes.
By the very same taxpayers who often can't afford a house on this planet.
That 60 million works out to about 20c per American. Hope you weren't relying on your 20c as part of your home deposit...
Hilarious you assume that number is real. Don't go holding your breath for the next Government budget estimate to be anywhere near a number they sell you.
We can piss away $60 million on nothing but patent fights and lawsuits, arguing over who has the 'best" lunar vaporware before a product is later 'validated' by...future class-action lawsuits, because cancer. It's damn near that predictable today because of what Greed N. Corruption gets away with, all day every day. Hope you weren't relying on much mor
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If they do their job as best they can, voting on every question the way they think those 450,000 people would want them to vote, how are they voting? With the majority on every question? With a supermajority? Does that make sense for every vote?
Are their constituents polled for every vote?
Should they rather 'vote their conscience? '
I dis
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How? (Score:5, Funny)
NASA doesn't believe in reusable rockets. Instead, they are blowing billions on Artemis/SLS which uses ben franklins as fuel. And that cash is forced not out a rocket nozzle but an actual toilet. I've seen it myself, I was more surprised about it than you.
Re:How? (Score:5, Interesting)
What are you talking about? SLS isn't a NASA program, it's a congressional pork program NASA is forced to administer and dump much of their funding into.
NASA meanwhile has been investing as heavily in reusable rockets as they can get away with without the Administrator getting fired. Which wasn't much at first, but SpaceX wouldn't exist without them.
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Literally nobody who's paid attention to the US space program since the Shuttle was surprised at all.
Re: How? (Score:2)
Chinese idea of using lava tubes seems better (Score:2)
Radiation is pretty high on the surface so better to hide underground.
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How bad can the radiation be? Buzz Aldrin was outside the Earth's atmosphere for like 8 days (mostly within the capsule) and he's still kicking. How many of the Apollo astronauts got cancer? I think most of them lived well into their 80s or 90s.
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Ahh... kicking maybe. But is he still punching?
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How bad can the radiation be? Buzz Aldrin was outside the Earth's atmosphere for like 8 days (mostly within the capsule) and he's still kicking. How many of the Apollo astronauts got cancer? I think most of them lived well into their 80s or 90s.
Why didn't they get cancer? Probably because they didn't grow up eating Adderall and High Fructose Corn Syrup for breakfast every morning.
(Estimated lifespans are in decline, and it ain't because we're spending too much time surfing the cosmic waves.)
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How bad can the radiation be? Buzz Aldrin was outside the Earth's atmosphere for like 8 days (mostly within the capsule) and he's still kicking. How many of the Apollo astronauts got cancer? I think most of them lived well into their 80s or 90s.
Why didn't they get cancer? Probably because they didn't grow up eating Adderall and High Fructose Corn Syrup for breakfast every morning.
(Estimated lifespans are in decline, and it ain't because we're spending too much time surfing the cosmic waves.)
Or bisphenol-A impregnated plastic binky's and baby bottles, or phytoestrogen and other endocrine disruptors, or lived close to field with a lot of glyphosphate spraying. Or had been put in a chemical straitjacket of Ritalin, which screwed with their brains.
I'm not even a granola, but I do read the literature, which seems to be largely ignored.
To top it off, remember the opioid crisis? Taking legally and properly prescribed drugs is the number 3 cause of death, far far beyond opioids (largely fentanyl)
Re:Chinese idea of using lava tubes seems better (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Chinese idea of using lava tubes seems better (Score:5, Interesting)
Astronauts use dosimeters to measure their short-term and lifetime exposures; their career in space ends when they've hit their exposure limits.
LEO is a low-radiation environment compared to the moon.
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Building on the surface is an obvious bad idea. If automation were to excavate and backfill on top, maybe. But I would think that automated printing would require a significant amount of some kind of binder in additional to the local regolith - which we'd have to send up there.
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My personal experience, while anecdotal, disagrees with the message of that report. I didn't read the report, just had some friends who were astronauts (RIP).
I saw that report going by when it came out, but I didn't read it. Maybe they're looking at something else or perhaps there is an error. For example, a sampling error.
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"How bad can the radiation be? I know it isn't 100% fatal. Who'd complain about a thing that doesn't give you cancer 100% of the time?"
Re:Chinese idea of using lava tubes seems better (Score:5, Informative)
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That's pure speculation.
At present we only have data for 1g and 0g. We have absolutely no idea how intermediate levels of gravity will affect people. Will 14% gravity do 86% of the damage of 0g? 99%? 1%? Right now we don't have any idea, because we really don't understand the biochemical mechanisms behind the problems
There will probably still be some muscle degradation, though how much is an open question. But there's reason to hope that at least the skeletal problems will be greatly mitigated by the reg
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Not give up, because centrifuges can handle it. But they might need to be pretty large. Which would mean not this decade.
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In theory, yes. Unfortunately in practice building and maintaining huge pressurized centrifuges on the surface of a planet is going to be insanely expensive. You think housing costs are bad on Earth?
That might still be viable for research or industrial outposts, but is going to put a huge damper on colonization - AKA people migrating with the plan that they and their descendants will live there in perpetuity.
I suspect that if they prove necessary, would-be colonists will instead opt for much cheaper giant
Reaction Force not Gravity (Score:2)
Its the gravity that will doom you.
Technically it's not gravity - astronauts in low earth orbit where gravity is almost identical to that on the surface of Earth suffer the same effect. What you need is a reaction force acting on your body and simulating things like this is how we have had astronauts survive for periods well over a year [wikipedia.org] and still return successfully to Earth afterwards.
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And if that doesn't do it the sheer boredom of being trapped in a small, sub-like, building existence might drive you mad. Maybe you'll have people snap t each other like they sometimes do in Antarctic bases. Then there is the need to take care of any medical emergencies on your own.
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The Apollo astronauts literally reported seeing the flashes of cosmic rays hitting their retinas.
Only being in a hazardous environment for 8 days is kinda not the same thing as being in that environment for 8 weeks, 8 months, 8 years, or 80 years.
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How bad can the radiation be? Buzz Aldrin was outside the Earth's atmosphere for like 8 days (mostly within the capsule) and he's still kicking. How many of the Apollo astronauts got cancer? I think most of them lived well into their 80s or 90s.
1) The Apollo capsules had some aluminum shielding. It turns out the shielding was not great in hindsight. 2) 8 days is much less exposure than weeks, months, years that people will live in homes. That's like asking how bad can be outside exposed to the elements (for 8 days) be? Short term exposure is not the problem.
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Plus, the normal chances of getting cancer are very low. Even with the chances being multiplied by a factor of 10 for the astronauts, it still isn't very large. And we're talking about a very small sample of very extraordinary people (physically).
If you have 10,000 astronauts, you might see the uptick in cancer rates. With a dozen? Not likely.
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The radiation level varies a lot. And the trip home from the moon takes long enough that you can't just evacuate. So good shielding is necessary. Whether you can do it with a 3-d printed "house", I don't know. There's no reason why not in principle...but it sure wouldn't be something light. (Not unless you carried your own building materials along. Plastics have lots of light elements, and they tend to be what you need. A nice dense hydrocarbon would make a pretty good shield, largely because of all
Re: Chinese idea of using lava tubes seems better (Score:2)
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Hypothetically. But given that we've never even sent a probe to even near a lunar lava tube, the TRL is quite low. There's also the issue of access to the surface being key for (A) solar power (if not using nuclear), and (B) all person and goods transfer in and out of the tube.
I'm all for studying lunar lava tubes better! But it's a bit early to start calling them great habitats without knowing what they're like and what tech would be needed to make them livable.
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Well, China is busy hunting for lava tubes with surface-level access to give it a shot. Having to use "skylights" would be a much more challenging proposition, though simply fully collapsing a section of roof and backfilling a ramp to the surface might be an adequate solution if the tube is small enough. Though you still have the fragility and limited shielding of a surface-level roof to consider.
Obviously you'd put your solar panels outside - I don't know why you even bother mentioning that. Much of what
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So now we're going to be collapsing thousands upon thousands of tonnes of rock on another world? And we're not going to worry about instability / debris fall after that?
This is basically TRL 1 at best.
Because of the distance and potentially long vertical cable runs as well. I'm not sure you're grasping how hard it is to do anything on another celestial body, let alone complicated engineering. Anything that co
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So now we're going to be collapsing thousands upon thousands of tonnes of rock on another world
Not if we can avoid it - hence the search for walk-in tunnel openings that likely lead to deeper tunnels that will also be more stable and offer more shielding.
But if we have to - a skylight severely compromises the structural integrity of an arch, and as such they tend to span the entire width of the tunnel, resulting in two independent tunnels leading away from a sinkhole - if collapsing one of them compromises the other, you probably didn't want to build there anyway. And importantly, breaking things (a
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I live in Iceland, I know what Earth lava tubes are like :)
No two are the same, and lava tubes on the Moon are not expected to be like those on Earth.
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You really can't. Gravity is different (flow rates / scales), lavas are different (indeed the light areas are mainly anorthosite), there's no atmosphere for subsequent oxidation (fresh lava is much sharper than old), outgassing is probably much more vigorous, and cooling is only radiative, for starters.
You cannot just make assumptions with space exploration - you have to actually investigate and try things out. Even in the huge rush of the lunar space race both the US and USSR launched a significant series
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To second Rei's comment - lava tubes are all different. They've got a national park in California I visited as a child - dozens of tubes mildly developed with paths and approved for public exploration, and countless miles more that you can explore at your own risk.
And every single one of them different - within the span of a few blocks, sometimes even within the same tunnel and its branches, you'll see everything from sections as smooth as flowstone, to covered in razor sharp spikes or edges, and everythin
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Sorry, but if you don't know the environment, you can't estimate the technology readiness level. That we need to know more about the environment is clear, what or readiness level is, isn't. (At 70 degrees we may already have several self-sealing envelopes that would work. I have a question as to whether they could be repurposed for a vacuum on the outside, but having a question isn't an answer. Someone will know.)
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If you haven't even quantified the basic parameters of the problem yet (like the environment), you're TRL=1.
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Seems like they're huge fans - even resorting to building massively expensive telepresence robots so that the would-be astronauts can work safely from home whenever possible instead.
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Both the book and the movie were packed with so much sheer nonsense disguised as "science", but the potato cultivation was especially - pardon the pun - grating.
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I thought the science was mostly OK. Except for the Martian storm. But I would like to know which other "science" the book or movie got wrong?
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God, I don't have time to re-read through the entire book (up to the point when I put it down in disgust). Starting with right off the bat, the Martian "windstorm" ripping things apart like a tornado (you can't even feel a severe wind on Mars, the air pressure is simply too low) (this is one of the very few things Weir tried to defend, pretending that he knew this and added it in for dramatic effect - no, Andy, I don't even remotely believe you). Let's just skim through the start past that. Remember that
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The only reason I read as much as I did initially was because Slashdotters and people like Adam Savage were going on and on about how this was some great "hard science" book, and I figured, surely there must be some point in the book where the hard science comes in, rather than stuff written by a person who clearly wasn't even paying attention in grade-school science and who writes some of the worst dialogue I've come across.
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It just now occurred to me, rereading this comment, that he wrote that NASA had sent fern seeds to Mars.
***facepalm***
Funding struggle sessions ahead (Score:3)
Considering how denialism, shortsightedness in planning and advancement of personal interest within the political machines have been put ahead of meaningful admission of repeated ecological neglects comparable to the The Dust Bowl, preparation comparable to the Netherland's policy for defense of coastline and flooding (spectacular recent example in New York) and removal of corruption within a political party "because the other side are WORSE" I think there's going to be a pattern of crisis-to-crisis reaction spending that's going to see a loss of support within the public for spending money in space.
This is even with the money printer going BRRRRR.
Re:Funding struggle sessions ahead (Score:4, Interesting)
To be entirely cynical... two things in the US have historically pushed space exploration - propaganda and pork barrelling.
This leads to both parties wanting to spend money but not in a terribly efficient way that produces optimal science progression. And then both parties can argue about the waste and each can say it's the other's fault.
But in the end, some damn spectacular stuff gets done.
Now, however, there's a third motive starting to pop up - power. First there's territorial control, second comes profit. A manned presence on the Moon means you control territory on the Moon in a very real way. Controlling territory on the Moon means, if you're able to do any effective in-situ resource utilization, you have better access to space-based resources than those who don't have territory there.
I'm not convinced we're there yet, LEO is still better for pretty much everything and anything that might interest a politician, but maybe the politicians believe that's changing and they're competing for the high ground.
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Space development is also beginning to leave the domain of political funding, which I suspect will be what really saves it.
The asteroid belt promises a gold rush to dwarf anything ever seen on Earth - with gold actually being one of the less valuable treasures to bring home, and at over $50M/ton even that will be *incredibly* profitable to ship back for the foreseeable future.
And the moon is both a short-term testing ground for the needed technologies, and a long-term source of pre-made industrial equipment
Good name for a band though (Score:2)
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Definitely postrock.
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they seemed mohave a shot for a while.
And then, as more people showed up to see them than ever before, they opened the garage door.
And everyone died the vacuum.
NASA finally solves the homeless problem (Score:5, Funny)
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Cyril Kornbluth [wikipedia.org] already had that figured out. Although today, I suspect it would involve free Fentanyl.
NASA uses glacial time (Score:3)
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You misspelled Senate Lunch System. HTH, HAND
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Then it's about time (Score:2)
...to create SeleneB&B to rent them out.
Not just houses (Score:2)
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Certainly not great, but it remains to be seen how big a problem it really is.
After all, most of the dust from a rocket launch will be moving fast enough to be scattered across the entire surface of the moon, while the dust from earth-moving equipment will mostly land right back on your equipment and habitat.
If we've got hundreds of flight a day it'll likely start to be a problem, but that's LONG term.
In the short term the bigger problem is the risk of throwing debris all the way into orbit, where it will f
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The nice thing about the Moon is that low escape velocity and lack of atmosphere puts things like a linear induction motor for launch in to play. If your engines are reliable enough, you might consider a linear induction launch tower that gets you far enough from the surface to ignite safely. The downside? A failure to light is death vs. troubleshooting the motor on the pad. Ironically, the existence of a base makes this a bad idea since you're taking unnecessary risks whereas the Apollo program had to
Yes! Finally... (Score:2)
Finally a nice place where we could house all the pesky politicians and extremists of all kind so they could enjoy each other's company.
It's a moonshot (Score:2)
Literally.
Because Houses on the Earth (Score:2)
Preserve the moon (Score:2)
Re: Preserve the moon (Score:2)
Plan vs do (Score:2)
Finally (Score:2)
Finally, it took NASA scientists to come up with a solution to the homeless problem.
Re: Finally (Score:2)
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So long as we don't do WW3 (Score:2)