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

For generations, Luna will remain a
by Peter Kokh
Relevant Readings from Back Issues of MMM
MMM # 3 MAR ‘87, “Moon Mall”
MMM # 13 MAR ‘88, “Apparel”
MMM # 15 MAY ‘88, “Rural Luna”
MMM # 18 SEP ‘88, pp 3-4 “A strategy for following up
lunar soil processing with industrial M.U.S./c.l.e.”
MMM # 29 OCT ‘89, p 4 “Cottage Industries”
MMM # 32 FEB ‘90, pp 3-4 “Import-Export Equation”
MMM # 47 JUL ‘91, p 5 “Native Born”
MMM # 55 MAY ’92, pp 7-8, “Moon Roofs”; “Shantytown”
MMM # 56 JUN ‘92 pp 3-4 “Harbor & Town”
MMM # 57 JUL ‘92 pp 4-5 “Space Xity Biomass Ratios”
MMM # 65 MAY ‘93, p 8 “MUS/cle Substitutions”
MMM # 83 MAR ‘95, p 5 “Tarns”
MMM # 84 APR ‘95, p 5 “Ghost Towns and Ruins”
“Praise the darkness, and creation unfinished!”
- Ursula K. LeGuin in “The Left Hand of Darkness”
In the Moon, we have a lifeless, barren world that
would seem to be anything but friendly. We cannot deal with it
at all as “naked apes”, but only through the mated interfaces of
technology and biospherics. Far more than other “alien shores”
we’ve come across before, on this globe of unrelieved horizons
of rock and rock powder against an unfiltered sky of cosmic
hazards, we have little of past precedent to go on - little except
the spirit of our pioneering past.
The Moon presents itself as a frontier in a much more
pervasive and deep-challenging sense than has any previously
unexplored and uninhabited niche on Earth. True, terrestrial
frontiers have confronted us with challenges we don’t have to
worry about on the Moon: wild animals; strange diseases; the
elements of fire, wind, water, and ice; and unfriendly natives.
Our acculturation to the Moon will have to be more
far-reaching and all-encompassing than any humans have had
to make to date. This will be necessary if we are someday to sit
back and realize that through seemingly endless struggles with
one problem after another, through battles lost and won, with
ourselves as much as with our adopted world, we’ve somehow
come, amazingly, to feel enough “at home” to experience real
contentment, to let go of standby plans to return to Earth if in
the end the rows of hurdles are just too much.
Frontier Interfacing 1.01
It would seem to some that the technical challenges to
extended human presence on the Moon are either solved, on
the way to being solved, or present only modest difficulties. In
fact, most of the more flippantly offered solutions exist only on
paper, or have been tried only in a laboratory without review
by the engineers who would have to scale them up, and
certainly not in any integrated systems approach. The early
challenges include low-leakage pressurization integrity,
thermal management, dust control, and overnighting power
supply.
Beyond that, we must quickly progress beyond
imported habitat volumes (rigid, inflatable, and hybrids) to (a)
demonstration of building materials easily, efficiently, and
reliably processed from lunar materials, (b) demonstration of
fabrication of modules and modular elements made from them,
and (c) demonstration of construction techniques based on
them. Nor will this ever be a “been there, done that” step.
Lunar pioneers, deprived of the enormous repertoire of manufacturing
stuffs and building materials nowadays available on
Earth, will be challenged into the indefinite future to come up
with new solutions, better fit for newer applications. It will not
be enough to demonstrate crude sintered iron technology or
crude glass composites (Glax - suggested generic trade name
for the whole family of likely formulations) technology.
Lunans will have to aggressively seek to add to their stable of
metal alloys, ever more specialized and higher performing
glass and glass composites, ceramics, lunar concrete, sulfur
composites, and other inorganic possibilities. All of these
curiosities will not come on line together, or quickly. And until
we’ve learned the whole suite of “lunar tricks”, for all our
achievements, we’ll still be on a frontier.
“Nuke” solutions notwithstanding, there will always
be more power available during dayspan (when “solar” can be
tapped) than during nightspan, baring the achievement of some
circum-lunar superconducting power grid in which dayspan
solar cogeneration additions anywhere can feed nightspan
power demands anywhere else without appreciable losses. This
means that the dayspan-nightspan polarization of processing,
manufacturing, and labor duties that we have forecast (energyintensive
and labor-light vs. energy-light and labor-intensive) is
likely to characterize lunar living rhythms for a long time.
Even after good solutions to the overnighting problem have
been found, relics of this sunthly task-switching routine are
likely to endure, having become endeared to the population.
Settlement architecture and general plans are likewise
not soon likely to be mature. Regolith-buried modular towns
are the early likely favorite, along with modular outposts
within the protective cavernous “lee space” of handy lavatubes.
But beyond that the vision lures of more “Earth-normal” type
of habitat architectures within atmosphere containing megastructures:
domed craters and crater chains (“catennae”),
vaulted rille valleys [the LRS “Prinzton Settlement Study”,
detailed in the MMM series “Ventures of the Rille People” in
MMM #s 26-33 JUN ‘89 - MAR ‘90], pressurized lavatubes,
and similar farther-future dreams. It is dreams that provide any
frontier with its fountain of youth, and with the vision of how it
was, how it is on Earth taunting rugged lunar pioneers, they are
not likely to ever be satisfied until they have been able to
token-reproduce as much of Old Earth on the Moon as
possible.
How extensive can lunar settlement become? Those of
little imagination would go to their graves content and satisfied
if we establish a vintage Little America type outpost with a
handful of people. But the Moon is a very empty world, and
only the size of the interdependent interplanetary economy can
limit the growth of a lunar human population. Even if we limit
our settlement areas, including biological natural parks and
parkways, to the available “square miles of prime turf” (the
definition will change as our capacities change: “ideal size”
craters, crater chains, lavatubes, and rilles, etc.) - we will find
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 66