Could you train a horse to live on the moon?

Several decades from now travel to the moon is do-able, but still challenging. A bit like going to Antarctica today - you live a little rough, but humans have a foothold. There are pressurized domes and people live there for months or years. Somebody decides to bring the first horse to the moon. What training could you do on Earth to acclimate the horse to the lunar environment, and what could you do after arrival to help it survive there?

We know a lot about human physiology in space in large part because of experiments on animals. Humans now go to space for months or years at a time and we understand a lot about the physiological changes, the need to exercise, etc. But it’s difficult to explain to a horse (and some humans) about 1/6 gravity.

Let’s assume the horse is sedated during transit and has no awareness of zero-G. It wakes up in a pressurized dome with enough room to run around in the lunar regolith, there’s a barn, sufficient food / water and a human trainer the horse knows and trusts.

Before the trip you could harness the horse to helium balloons to simulate 1/6 gravity. After arrival you could weigh it down and gradually introduce it to the low gravity environment. That’s as far as my thinking takes me. Would the horse freak out? Hurt itself? There have been some interesting experiments with spiders and fish that show initial confusion and then adaptation. If we picked a horse with a good temperament, would it just figure out the new gig and go back to munching oats?

It’d probably freak out at least at first, and it might fall a few times due to mistiming a step or the like. But falls in lunar gravity are a lot less dangerous than they are here on Earth, and I doubt that it’d injure itself. It’d probably eventually get used to it on its own, though I don’t know how long it’d take.

I say horses have adapted to much, (in association with us) Heavy iron shoes nailed to them Things in their mouths and strapped on them. Humans on their backs. No freedom.

I think they are hjghly adaptable.
Heavier shod with extra weight on the saddle I think the weightlessness problem can be overcome.

I can’t see anyway to prepare them on Earth that wouldn’t be scary as heck for them.
They would need to be chosen for calmness and high trainability. And steady with ease of handling.

NASA has a reduced gravity simulator called ARGOS that’s basically a complicated crane that partially supports a human while they move around, to simulate low gravity. Given enough funding, something similar could probably be developed for a horse. However one difference is that it would probably need to allow the horse a much larger space to move around in compared to the ARGOS system. Maybe balloons would be easier.

Astronauts train for zero G in a swimming pool so that might work. First you gotta train the horse to wear a scuba mask.

That should help with the full Horse Space suit he’ll have to get adapted to.

On the moon, the horse would live in a pressurized chamber so no spacesuit would be needed. Though he/she might appreciate a nice view of the earth.

You can’t train away bone loss.

Start him out with some simple exercises…like water polo

So, it is a misnomer that training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory is intended for use in training or conditioning astronauts for freefall (“zero gee”) conditions. The purpose of the facility is really to allow astronauts to experience and practice extravehicular activities (EVA) in their bulky and awkward Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), the A7L-derived suit, which at nearly 145 kg for the current suits is far too heavy to just walk around in on the surface of Earth. The neutral buoyancy provided by the pool helps the astronaut relieve that weight of the suit, and (with the assistance of divers and buoyancy control bags) kind of simulate being in different positions and orientations while trying to manipulate tools and hardware, but although it is possible to become disoriented in water it really doesn’t provide the experience of being in freefall and vacuum of space, and in particular the way that any action that applies a force results in a sudden and unexpected rotation around center of mass because it is retarded by the drag of the water in the pool.

For training in simulated freefall conditions astronauts do many sessions in the sometimes hated ‘Vomit Comet’, flying ballistic trajectories that give a few tens of seconds of genuine weightlessness at a time. I had the opportunity to fly on a commercial freefall flight simulator (I got to slot in for someone who had to bail out for a nominal medical exam fee), and while I have not been in the NBL I have extensive experience in scuba diving including occluded and restricted overhead (wreck diving) environments and can attest to how different those two experiences are.

As for a horse in the ~1/6 gee environment, it is going to have some severe problems compared to humans. A quadruped with digitigrade locomotion, it is evolved to most efficiently move at a trot and to sprint for relatively brief periods to escape predators, and it stops by essentially digging its front hooves into the ground. It is not evolved to shuffle along or balance delicately on the frog of the foot the way humans balance and pivot on the ball (their equivalent) or to hop along. Even worse, a horse has an enormous amount of mass with a relatively high center of gravity, and even though the downward acceleration (and thus, the reaction force) is much less on the Moon the inertia will be the same. That means that even if the horse can get enough traction to get up to a trotting speed, when they try to stop they are pretty much going to plow forward and potentially even go end over end if they can get traction on the front feet. Horses, of course, are pretty skittish animals that have a tendency to panic in unfamiliar conditions, and while falling over in Lunar gravity wouldn’t do the kind of damage that it might do on Earth, the lack of traction and unaccustomed mechanics would probably make it just as difficult to get back up. A donkey might adapt slightly better, although frankly if you plop a donkey onto the Lunar surface it is probably just going to stand there and refuse to budge until the gravity returns to normal because they are nothing if not obstinate in response to unscheduled changes in their lifestyle.

If you notice videos of NASA astronauts on the Moon, they are mostly hopping because that turned out to be the most efficient way to movie around. Some astronauts on the later missions did manage to adopt a “big step” kind of gate but that turned out to be problematic and in one case resulted in Jack Schmidt faceplanting with concerns that he might damage the helmet or get stuck on his side. Admittedly they were in those bulky A7L suits, not the shirtsleeves environment posited by the o.p., but the point remains that even humans have difficulty in adapting to the reduced gravity environment and we are basically evolved to be extremely efficient and adaptable walkers.

If you were going to try to adapt a quadruped to walk on Lunar gravity, an elephant would probably be your best choice given their plantigrade motion and maneuverability. It is left as an exercise for the reader as to how you would get an elephant to the Moon, what you would feed it when you got it there, and how you would deal with the resulting mounds of waste.

Stranger

A horse could probably adapt to the lower gravity for motion, eventually. Frankly it would depend on the horse and his reactivity, trainability, and athleticism.

The thing that might make it an impossibility is their digestive system. Their guts don’t have much in the way of stabilization in the body cavity, and one of the main killer of horses is colic due to a twist somewhere. That twist is usually caused by too much gas in the colon, sometimes exacerbated by their rolling in discomfort.

Horses must have a very high forage diet, and the digestion of that causes gas - lots of it. What would happen to that gas-filled gut in low gravity, especially combined with unnatural movement (a horse’s motion actually plays a part in their digestion and their lung function) is anyone’s guess.

My guess, after 50 years of daily horse care, is that it would not be good.

That’s only an issue if you ever plan to come back to Earth. Most human astronauts want to come back home, but that’ll be less of an issue once we’re at the permanent-colony-with-inhabited-domes stage, and I imagine we’ll just ignore it entirely for our companion animals.

This was depicted in an episode of The Expanse (sci-fi TV show). ← NOTE: While it is fiction this shows someone being tortured.

A “Belter” (someone born and lived in the space between planets) was tortured on Earth merely by having to exist in the higher Earth gravity.

I think this would be reality were we to ever have people born and raised on the moon or in space.

I wonder if a horse would have trouble with its circulatory system on the moon. As well as vine structure and digestion.

The idea begs the question - Why would anyone even want to take a horse to the moon?

For bragging rights.

I’d try a cat. It would freak out, at first. But i bet it would adapt. Well, not the car that won’t eat without being watched (mentioned in another thread.) But i young, moderately intelligent cat.

Neigh-sayers always bridle at great ideas. :slight_smile:

In his barn, sure. But what if you want to take him out for a ride? You need a special horse spacesuit with a slot for a human in a human spacesuit to clip on.

Given the conditions described in the OP, I don’t think either a human or horse would need any training at all. Time and space for self-conditioning yes, but not being trained by a trainer.

Horses are quadrupeds, which is a much more stable way of walking and standing. They have excellent instincts with regard to foot and leg mechanics. Horses train themselves to walk on Earth within minutes of being born. The only training they need is how to be ridden and take commands from a human.

For that matter, the only reason human astronauts needed advanced preparation is that they were executing an expensive, high-profile mission within some tight parameters and specialized equipment. There was no time to let them self-train. If you just dropped them into a big pressurized dome with plenty of time, space and resources, and no task other than learning to walk, they’d have mastered it in days with no outside assistance. Probably just an hour, actually.

The only real concern I can imagine for horses would be self-injury. If they were to jump, leap, or bound, the timing might make it hard for their instincts to figure out a safe foot placement for landing. I’m not sure if that would be an issue, or if it could even be trained. This could probably only be figured out by running a few horsetronauts through the program.