MMM Classics Year 10: MMM #s 91-100 - Moon Society

Making do without the “Outdoors”
by Peter Kokh
Relevant Readings from Back Issues of MMM
MMM # 5 MAY ‘87 “M is for Middoors” [MMMC #1]
MMM # 8 SEP ‘87 “Parkway” [MMMC #1]
MMM # 37 JUL ‘90, p 3, “Ramadas” [MMMC #4]
MMM # 55 MAR ‘92, pp 4-6 “Xity Plans” - [MMMC #6]
MMM # 74 APR ‘94, p 7 “Sun Moods” - [MMMC #8]
MMM # 89 OCT ‘95, pp 3-4 “Shelter on the Moon”
[MMMC #9]
If the principal theaters of lunar life and activity will
be subterranean (in lavatubes) or sub’lithic (under the [rego]lith
blanket), the supporting roles will be “out on” the surface.
Using the Australian experience as a model of sorts, in which
their great relatively barren continental “back yard” is known
as the “outback”, we’ve coined the phrase “out-vac” for the
lunar surface. The out-vac will be a place visited and a medium
of passage rather than a place lived in. Most Lunans will never
don a spacesuit except in “decompression drills” reminiscent of
our fire drills. Vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to habitat “docklocks”
will allow people to travel anywhere on the Moon in
“shirtsleeve environments”. There will be the geologists or
selenologists, the prospectors and explorers, and the overland
truckers and others whose jobs keep them in the out-vac for
long periods. And there will be the self-elevated rugged individualists
who throw themselves into various out-vac “sports”
such as out-camping, out-cycling, out-climbing, etc.
Shielded ramada canopies will offer protected “lee
vacuum” for those with regular work duties just outside the
airlocks and dockgates of the town or outpost. In such areas
only pressure suits, not hardened space suits, need be worn.
But for most Lunans, the hostility of the out-vac will
threaten a wholesale forsaking of what on Earth are “outdoor”
activities. Without compensation or accommodation, this loss
could be demoralizing for a significant cross-section of a
normal population. Some, as we’ve just suggested, will find
ways to fashion out-vac activities that are reasonably safe and
yet satisfactorily thrilling as well as liberating from the all-solimited
confines of even the most spacious and extensive of
settlement mini-biospheres. The importance of such a safety
valve cannot be overemphasized.
But for the greater part of the population, the answer
may lay in the creation of very generous pressurized commons,
nature and picnic parks and playing fields and parkways that,
while sheltered from the cosmic elements, nonetheless have an
airy and supportively verdant feel to them. As opposed to the
more confined spaces within individual habitat homes and
edifices which they will serve as interconnectors, we have
called such sheltered yet open spaces the “middoors”. The
middoors lie between the doors of private spaces and the
airlocks and docking gates of the settlement proper.
The more generous and more high-ceilinged spaces of
the Lunan middoors can be offered by several architectural
devices. Pressurized cylinders carrying vehicular traffic can
have a radius generous enough to support green strips with
hanging gardens, trees, walking and jogging paths, even
meandering trout and canoe streams. Spherical or ovoid or
torus structures can serve as more self-compact nonlinear park
and nature space. Farming and food production areas can
provide for public footpaths and picnic oases.
Solar access can be provided more conservatively by
bent path “sundows”, by optic fiber shielded “sunwells”, or
more radically, as Marshall Savage suggests, by water-jacketed
double domes. [See the illustrations in #74 article cited above.]
Well-designed middoor spaces provided in a generous
acre per citizen ratio can probably substitute for the open air
greenspaces of Earth for a large cross-section of the population.
Others will need to come to personal terms with the out-vac.
Still others will never be able to leave behind the green hills,
the ocher deserts, the blue skies, the thick forests, or the
horizon to horizon expanses of ocean deep on the only world
they have collectively and individually ever known.
For while we may be able to walk and hike and bike
and row and trout-fish in lunar middoor spaces, many other
cherished outdoor activities will be difficult to replace: skating
yes but skiing and snowmobiling no. Human-powered flight
maybe, but powered flight, soaring, and skydiving no. Rowing
and canoeing yes, but motorboating, sailing and ocean cruising
no. Caving or spelunking in lavatubes yes, in limestone caves
no. Berry picking and trout-fishing yes, but hunting not likely.
Each person pondering signing up for the lunar frontier
must weigh his or her attachments to cherished activities
that may not be supported in lunar settlement biospheres any
time soon, if ever at all. And those who take the plunge will
owe it to themselves to be politically and civilly active in
guaranteeing that the settlement middoors is as generous and
diverse and user-friendly as economically possible. Nothing
less than the morale and mental health and long-term survivability
of the whole settlement is at stake.
Lack of global biosphere has a silver lining
by Peter Kokh
Relevant Readings from Back Issues of MMM
MMM # 8 SEP ‘87 “Colonists I.Q. Quiz”: Q. 6 [MMM C #1]
MMM # 15 MAY ‘88, “Rural Luna” [MMM Classics #2]
MMM # 56 JUN ‘92, p 5 “Quarantine” [MMM Classics #6]
MMM # 79 OCT ‘94, pp 13-15 “Lunar Roads”; “Waysides,
Service Centers, and Inns” [MMM Classics #8]
MMM # 83 MAR ‘95, p 5 “Tarns” [MMM Classics #9]
MMM # 84 APR ‘85, p 5 “Ghost Towns & Ruins”[“]
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 39