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

Sooner or later someone will die on the Moon either
by accident, by sudden illness, or by foul play. Shipment of the
remains to Earth should not be automatic. The person in
question will have signed a living will which states his or her
preferences. Internment on the Moon should be an option. Nor
need this mean “burial”. If the outpost has a furnace that can
serve as a crematorium, one can specify his/her ashes to spread
inside in the outpost “flower garden” or “pocket park” or
outvac in some chosen or favorite spot. If not, another option is
simple surface internment, under UV-proof glass, otherwise
exposed to the vacuum, and the stars. More than any flag, a
burial site makes a place, however desolate, forever human.
Longer term. So much for beginnings. Our humble
lunar outpost will have to number more than a hundred before
there is enough diversity of talent, occupation, opportunity, and
social interaction to make indefinite stays tolerable even for the
hearty few.
The mini offspring biosphere with which the frontier
community reencradles itself will have had to become much
more massive, self-regulating, and forgiving before all but the
most determined will be willing to give up ever returning to the
lush green hills of Earth. We will have had to have progressed
from outpost-with-houseplants to biosphere-with-farm-andfarm-village,
and a tad of compatible or insulated industry on
the side.
Economically, we will have to be manufacturing on
location a visibly large portion of our needs, particularly
expansion shelter and furnishings. Thriving indigenous arts and
crafts will begin to endear pioneers to their new would be
home and start to add to the list of things they would have to
“give up” were they to return to Earth. When this list becomes
personally more cogent than the list of still missed things they
gave up to come to the Moon, the balance will be tipped.
We will have had to made the commitment to the less
direct productivity of child rearing and retirement. And perhaps
these two needs can take care of each other. Parents can work
while retiree “grandparent” volunteers (with enough energy)
can teach and raise the young. In general, there must be
programs to keep all citizens as productive as possible. In this
light, retirement becomes more of a shifting of gears, of
switching to less stressful, more relaxed, less demanding “halftime”
assignments. Besides teaching, administrative paperpushing
duties come to mind. There will be other things.
Everyone must, and must be given a full range of opportunities
to, pull his or her weight in the forever upward struggling
pioneer frontier community.
Population will have to grow too before their will be
enough of a gene pool upon which to base a stable permanent
population, if, for some reason, the traffic from Earth should be
cut off, forcing the infant community to go it alone, hopefully
in economic interdependence with other similarly stranded off-
Earth pockets of humanity. While this seems far off, it is a
scenario which has long motivated space supporters.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first
step. We’ve tried here to outline some of these first steps, as
well as some other forks in the road a bit further along. If it is
going to all happen, we will have to consciously take these
steps in a timely fashion.
Rethinking the moon
buggy
Reflections from Dale Amon
[amon@vnl.com - Dale, chair of the ‘87 “Merger” ISDC
in Pittsburgh, now lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.]
Who would want to [build new lunar rovers from the
old Apollo era plans]??? By today's standards the electronics
on that thing are a science fair project...
Replace the frame with composites from Scaled
Composites. The electric motors will be a fraction of the size
and weight because magnet materials have improved vastly
since then. Storage technology has not improved by as great a
degree but still, it has advanced. We'll have commercial micromachine
accelerometers on the market soon, so the navigation
hardware will be built right onto the chip with the electronic
interface. The comm gear has shrunk to nearly nothing.
Compare a walkie talkie in a 60's era Edmund Scientific
catalog with what you can pick up down at your local Tandy
Radio Shack. R/C toys have better radio equipment than some
of those 60's comm units...
And then, most importantly of all - we know the
environment it is to work in and have those old rovers, their
problems and performance as an initial data point. And that
data point is basically that it is no big deal building one. They
are a piece of kit that a hobbyist could successfully build. It
doesn't take an aerospace company to build an electric dune
buggy.
Just a bit of caution on vacuum, a bit of thought on
rad hardening, a bit of care on temperature range... And you
needn't bother about outgassing of your materials. They'll never
be inside your breathing space so who cares? That makes it a
lot easier.
Oh, and some care in packaging may be required to
insure it isn't damaged by the vibration. I remember ruining a
tire on my DT400 by not tying the tire down when hauling it in
a trailer behind my car. Tire spun from the vibration and wore
the nobbies bald...
From Rovers to Cycles — Human Power
While walking home recently one night I remembered
some thoughts I had on lunar rovers a number of years back.
There will be a need for different sorts of vehicles, and
undoubtedly large hauling vehicles, whenever they are
required, will need a good power source. Whether that be fuel
cell, battery, solar power, beamed power or some mix I won't
go into here. But the type of vehicle needed for a small
relatively self sufficient group should have a number of
characteristics that few of the designs in the literature ever
consider.
fi The motive source should be 100% field repairable
preferably with only a few tools and simple spare parts.
fi Spare parts should be such that they can be
manufactured locally from small amounts of raw materials.
fi The vehicle should have a fail safe criteria that it can
bring the driver home under almost any circumstances in
which the driver is still capable of driving.
fi It must use indigenous energy supplies.
Now if you look at these requirements through the old
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 7