What equipment would be needed to out a Moonbase?

[Jurph]

First of all, I’d like to point out something that the Boy Scout in me remembers that a lot of other people forget: we already have moon buggies up there. The batteries are probably dead, but I’m sure we’ve got the owner’s manuals somewhere (Houston?). We could bring up a few batteries and a solar charger, and have a few buggies ready for use.

Now, on to a short list of things you’re going to need:

• Air
• Food
• Water
• Shelter (including temperature regulation)

In the very very short term, doing things the way we do them on the ISS makes sense - sending up ration packets and jerry cans of water from earth is great. Sending mass up to the moon is bloody expensive, though. To serve any appreciable population, you’re going to need to get some sort of self-sustaining cycle going. The only inputs you’ve got are sunlight and the moon’s raw materials; everything else is going to cost thousands of dollars per pound to ship.

I think it’s safe to say that any system designed to conserve all of the above maximally is going to require electrical power (and for many other reasons, electrical power is a must). Solar seems like a good idea, since you’ve got lots of sunlight, but I think that the moon goes through two-week solar cycles (in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, he calls these “semi-lunars”).

During bright semi-lunar, you’re pulling down lots of solar power, and hopefully storing 90% of it in batteries for the cold dark semi-lunar coming up. You can leave the greenhouse shutters open so your plants are soaking up their own brand of solar power. With a field of broad-leafed plants, this could be an amazing benefit.

During dark semi-lunar, you need to close all your windows (to avoid losing heat energy), turn on the greenhouse heat lamps, and it’s the ideal time to go exploring the surface nearby or conducting internal maintenance. It might be a good time to head down into the tunnels; bring back a few kilos of rock every day and throw them into a furnace designed to break them down into oxygen and various metals.

I don’t know how much power air scrubbers use, but the ISS requires shipments of bottled liquid oxygen. The plants will help a little bit, but until you can extract oxygen from the local rock, you’re going to be an unhappy camper.

Recycling water is probably not too tough; if you make sure you pull the water out of urine, feces, plant matter not used for food, and keep a healthy amount of water airborne as vapor, you should be fine. The stuff left over from the urine and feces can probably be converted into plant fertilizer (because otherwise you’re going to need to bring up dirt!).

As for your plants, the startup costs are going to be extreme (like everything else!). Crushed moonrock or loose lunar gravel will work just fine for a base, but there need to be nutrients and water in it before it’s “soil”. I imagine you’d want to send teams up with their own rations for almost a year before you even tried to become self-sufficient. And remember that a compost heap requires microorganisms which are probably not present on the moon, so you need to not only have a supply of them, but a backup supply in case your compost heap is accidentally exposed to vacuum, direct unfiltered sunlight, or direct unfiltered darkness. You need to be able to restart the composting process if it stops.

The only thing I haven’t yet settled on is what kind of shelters to build. Underground or surface? Erectable, or built with local materials?

[CurtC]

Sam Stone wrote:
Been a while since I looked at GPS, but I thought it used distances from the receiving station to 2, 3, or 4 satellites and then based on that did triangulation. It seems to me that the system’s accuracy would decrease as the angular distance between the satellites and the receiving station got smaller.

This is a tangent, but the angular distance wouldn’t get smaller - you’d still have X satellites (24?) in orbit, still with several of them above your horizon, so the angles would be about the same. The distances would be much farther, but I can’t think of any reason that this would decrease accuracy.
By the way, the reference to gold rolling through your veins wasn’t meant as an insult - I was assuming that your user name came from the song.

Grey wrote:
so the “balloons” you are dismissing worked… Sounds like a cheap, easy way to throw a small constellation of comsats around the moon to me.

I’m speechless.

[Grey]

There was a thread were we figured that molten moon dust could be cast as “bricks”. You could then build a structure that would hold together under compression due to the loading of material on the base to cover it. Since you’re trying to get oxygen out of the rock anyway the residual material is “free”-ish.

As for retrieving the Apollo rovers, we’d have to land there and I doubt there was much water at those sites. Since water is the critical component to any future base, it’s a waste of money to go and get them.

Initially I think it will be tin cans in the shadows near water. As others have said, water is critical. Any landing craft built should be able to be used as stations. 1 for a geological lab, 1 for a hydroponics system (minimizing the need for organic material to grow food), 1 communication hub etc. I’m assuming a 2 stage lander like in Apollo, except in this case the lower level is livable. The first one makes sense to be the communication hub, the second the geological lab after that I’m not sure. I don’t really see any need to build a real “greenhouse” with windows. That just adds complexity to the whole thing. Keep them inside, under controlled lighting.

So by 3 landings we’ve actually planted a small research base on the moon. The next stage is to make it sustainable and that means landing the same kind of mass as the previous mission, only this time there is no return stage. Those would be the reactor/solar panels and a small solar furnace, perhaps along these lines. That gives us a base, a power station and a way to melt rock. For 5 launches similar to the Apollo setup.

[Eli]

so the “balloons” you are dismissing worked. They were cheap and there were no active components to power, maintain or purchase. Sounds like a cheap, easy way to throw a small constellation of comsats around the moon to me.

How can you use balloons without an atmosphere?

[AndrewL]

The baloons are in lunar orbit. They obviously aren’t floating in the moon’s non-atmosphere. They’re just mylar spheres inflated with gas to give them shape, just like the Echo baloon tests in Earth orbit.

[Lumpy]

Assuming you’re limited to one lunar base, and the vast majority of your exploring will be within a hundred kilometers or so of your base, where on the moon would be the best place for it?

[Grey]

We don’t really know yet. The South Pole has tentative signs of ice. That seems to make it the default destination right now. I would assume that NASA would launch a second Lunar Prospector style probe to nail down a specific site.

[xejkh]

Lots of Lego.

http://www.scibrick.org/moonbase/

[eburacum45]

Just two things; of course a space elevator would not be practical, as it needs to extend past the stationary orbit (which intersects the Earth)

so rotating tethers are the only type of skyhook available for Moon landings; luckily the gravity is not that great.

Takeoff could be assisted by mass drivers and long inclined planes powered by collected sunlight.

the other thing is - we don’t need to take water to the Moon; just hydrogen… much lighter.

There is plenty of oxygen up there, although it is combined efficiently with the local rocks.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

What equipment would be needed to out a Moonbase?

A shape-shifting resident alien named Maya.

Hey! Somebody had to say it!

[scotandrsn]

Well, I’d say you’d have to start with some pretty persuasive evidence that the entire population of the base was indeed homosexual.

I’d say some interglobular mailing labels showing proof of subscriptions to Out or The Advocate, a marriage licence between base personnel and Liza Minelli, documentation like that.

It might be enough to get you access to a satellite dish so you could beam a Cher or Streisand Pay-Per-View event up to the base, and then it’s simply a matter of counting the number of male buyers…

(…I’m so sorry…)

[thinksnow]

I would think, in the interest of KISS, we could send an awful lot of the equipment up there unmanned.

Thinking this way: based on all previous missions (manned and unmanned) we can, most likely, figure out to a very high degree, just where something will be coming down, so it would behoove us is deploy all or quite a bit of the gear we would need before hand in the proximate area of the planned Lunar site.

[45_70]

First we need to develope a heavy lift vehicle. One with a propulsion system that will allow taking off from a conventional airport. This is something we should have been working on ever since the Apollo program was scrapped. Without a propulsion system that allows us to leave earths garvitational pull and return without massive atmospheric heat the point is moot. When we develope a vehicle that allows us to take off and land vertically the rest will be fairly easy.