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

Well down the road, if ways are developed to safely
seal and pressurize their vast volumes, lava tubes could provide
all the elbow room Lunans will want for a long time to come.
But that day does not seem to be just around the corner.
Altered expectations
The American expectation of some 750 square feet of
housing per person, will not translate well to the Moon, nor
should it. In the typical room, many spaces are minimally used.
Dining rooms for example. Even bedrooms. The Lunan home
architect / planner will need to develop multi-use spaces, with
fewer rooms that are in fuller use.
Bedrooms can double as office, sewing room, den, or
whatever. How? Back to the Murphy bed and the efficiency
apartment idea. A bed that is unoccupied and neatly dressed
may look nice, but two thirds of the day is just wasting dearly
bought space. Dining will be another function that time-shares
space with other activities. And so on. Native-born Lunans
who’ve known no other way to live, will look on our homes as
expressions of an obscene waste of space. (A four bedroom
home to himself, this writer is more guilty than most).
The Great Home concept
This said (on the need for fuller time use of domestic
space), opposing considerations demand attention. Families
and households do not stay the same in their need for space.
They grow and they contract. Our typical response is to move
to larger or smaller quarters as appropriate. Or we add on to
existing structures as the household grows, building additions.
As the pool of new housing may be in priority demand
for new arrivals on the Moon, the mobility index of Lunans
could well be much lower. Moving may be a less facile
solution. Nor will expansion be easy. In the early era, habitat
space is likely to be modular and individually shielded against
the host vacuum. That will make construction of additions a
much more expensive, difficult, tricky, and even risky
proposition than on Earth. It’ll be more logical and easier to
build a homespace large enough from the gitgo to accommodate
the average fully grown family, perhaps even with
“mother-in-law space”. The “Great Home” concept.
Properly designed, a Great Home’s temporarily extra
volume can be put to good use. For example it can include a
separable autonomous apartment that can be rented out to new
couples on a waiting list for their own home, or as bed and
breakfast space for travelers. Or it can house a family’s startup
cottage industry. It will be easier and less expensive to put
room space designed for future household growth to good use,
than to disruptively construct add-on room when needed.
The street
The pressurized passageways of the settlement will be
the glue that holds everything together. Modular individually
shielded pressurized units will open onto the street/alley/gallery
network, tying everything into one continuous minibiosphere
complex. We suspect such passages will also be multi-use
social glue areas, with broad enough shoulders for landscaped
strip parks and garden terraces, areas for marketing cottage
industry wares, wears, and homemade foods, for rummage
sales and street entertainers, sidewalk cafes and relaxing park
benches amidst the thriving activity of an intensely productive
settlement. Like our suburban malls, settlement streets will be
the place the place to hang out and socialize.
Well sound-buffered, the streets will be active 24
hours serving a fully three-shift settlement, with no shift having
any natural privileges. During the nearly 15 day long dayspan,
streets can be naturally sunlit around the clock. During the
equally long nightspan they can be artificially lit.
Commercial and industrial space
In similar fashion, shops and stores (those that are not
Ma and Pop operations, anyway) and factories will need to
justify their expensive pressurized square footage by being
open for business and operating around the clock to serve and
employ three equal shifts of the population. This will even go
for administration, libraries, schools, and parks. Nothing short
of this can possibly be justified.
Tricks again
As with domestic spaces, good human factors design
can make small spaces seem larger. Important in public spaces
will be variety and change of ambiance from place to place.
Much as in the Moscow Metro (subway) each station is a
totally different work of art remarkable unto itself, street architects
and landscapers may be called on to give each individual
passage its own personality, probably with strong neighborhood
involvement and feedback. Surface finishes can differ.
Landscaping patterns and the planting mix can differ. And
surely, as a unique expression of each neighborhood, sidewalkshowcased
cottage industries will differ. The result will be to
make the settlement-as-a-whole seem satisfyingly larger and
more “metropolitan” in flavor and complexity than its small
population might suggest. That’ll be a happy, healthy effect.
More than a short term problem
Some generations into lunar development and settlement,
Lunans may begin to move into more Earthlike settings
as pressurized megastructures are built within which individual
buildings of a type more familiar to us can be built, open to the
faux sky blue firmament of a crater spanning dome or rillebridging
vault or within a spacious sealed, pressurized, yet
sunlit lava tube complex. We dare predict space will still be at
a premium. For we’ve been neglecting (rather postponing the
discussion of) something vitally important.
Mini-biospheres need elbow room too!
It is not enough to relieve psychological crowding for
the inhabitants. If they are to thrive, it is even more important
that the biosphere be ample and grow, not just in pace with the
population, but well ahead of it. That is it should be the goal to
quadruple the supporting biomass as we double the population,
so that the per capita biosphere support increases to a more
healthful, more Earthlike ratio. Not only will lunar settlements
see the return of the farming village, we will want to add wilds
and nature preserves, greatly diversify the flora as well as the
food crop mix, and continue to work in ever more wildlife.
Long term, it is only such a development that can secure a
settlement’s future, advancing it toward biospheric self-maintenance.
Also long term, it is only the hope and expectation of
continued real progress in this direction that will make lunar
settlements psychologically healthy places for Lunans to live
and work and raise families.
Conclusion — The quest for elbow room will be a permanent
feature of Lunan settlement culture.
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 59