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

Spacesuit design has been hampered by thinking of it
only as a garment. It is also a small space vehicle. A conventional
suit is no place to be for more than a few hours. For
longer durations, you need to be able to pull your arms in so
that you can scratch, or eat, or sleep, or void. This suggests that
the lunabike should be integrated with the suit -- in other
words, the suit would be a lightweight pressurized canister with
wheels (4, for stability), with a shirtsleeve internal environment
for pedaling and living. The canister would be equipped with
pressurized gloves, waldoes or other attached tools for
manipulating the external environment.
It might be necessary to carry a conventional suit,
donnable inside the canister, so that you could get out and get
under if something broke, or go climb that cliff over there
(where, as Arthur Clarke has told us, The Sentinel is waiting),
or, in extremis, walk home. For routine use, (such as getting
from one pressurized dome to another) the mobile canister
alone might be sufficient. The real safety reason for carrying a
conventional suit is to avoid potentially fatal single-point
failure modes, an objective that might be met by careful design
of the canister/bike alone. PC
No, what we need is a Volkscycle!
Response from Dale Amon to Chapman’s suggestion
[What I have in mind is an outvac cycle that fit’s
every lunan’s budget. So] the bike must be mostly buildable
from local materials with simple tools and basic stock
materials; all systems required for it to function as transport
must be field repairable. Simplicity. Something a back yard
mechanic can build and repair - exclusive of the electronics, of
course - but there should be no electronics that are absolutely
required for the bike to operate. Electronics must be something
that is bolted on and if necessary unbolted and tossed into a
crater to lighten the load...
The minute part of the design requires a special tool or
material, my design criteria demands that that element be discarded
from consideration. Simple. Indigenous. Independent.
Ad Astra! - Dale
Human-Powered Moon Trike
Call for a Technology Demo
for ISDC ‘98 - Milwaukee
One of the more ambitious goals outlined in the plan
for ISDC ‘98 - Milwaukee is to present a number of low budget
[$100-$5,000) technology demonstrations of tidbits of
technology that will be needed, or useful on the space frontier,
and which should not take that much money to demonstrate.
A human-powered Moon Trike is such a possibility.
Because gravity is only 1/6th Earth-normal, but momentum
remains full Earth-normal, to prevent tipping, the vehicle
should have a very wide track, wheels that lean into turns, and
a low center of gravity (hence a recumbent rider position seems
ideal). Any interested group should attempt to find its own
industrial and corporate sponsors, advisors, project managers
etc. and register their effort with ISDC ‘98 - Milwaukee, P.O.
Box 2102, Milwaukee WI 53201 which will attempt to provide
advice and assistance.
[Pioneering a Moon-appropriate art medium]
R&D Report: #4 — 11/05/’95
by Peter Kokh, amateur artist
RECAP: This is a “Lunar Arts/Craft” R&D Project aimed at
determining if “paints” suitable for use by artists in a pioneer
settlement can be made entirely from elements recoverable
from lunar regolith soil. The idea is based on the fact that
sodium silicate, commonly known as “waterglass” and a liquid
at room temperatures, is the only known inorganic adhesive. It
can be produced from lunar soil, and the basic experiment is to
see if adhesive-based (rather than solvent-based) “paints” can
be made by mixing in colored metal oxide pigments.
The first painting, Moon Garden #1, was produced
9/29/’94 using sodium silicate, titanium dioxide (white),
manganese dioxide (black), ferric iron oxide (rust), chromium
oxide (green) and sulfur (yellow) and combinations of these to
produce gray, orange, and pink. The “canvas”, again picked
because it could be produced locally in a lunar settlement, was
glass, painting, foreground first, on the backside.
An article about the project appeared in the Jan/Feb
‘95 issue of Ad Astra, pp. 46-7. Since then other pigments
have been tried, not all successfully. The most notable (and
costly) addition to the palette being cobalt aluminate blue.
The Aging Problem - Worst fears allayed
In a few months, the first two paintings had begun to
show patchy delamination from the back surface of the glass.
The prime suspected culprits were low winter indoor humidity,
a film of windex on the glass, or, worse, a temporary aspect to
the adhesive quality of the medium. The third painting, done in
mid May addressed both the first two concerns. The pane was
baked after cleaning to remove residual windex film. And the
air was now more humid. Six months later, this painting looks
much as it did the day it was produced.
While this allays the worst fears, that waterglass
painting may turn out to be suitable only for “temporary art”,
we are not ready to claim that the problem is solved. This is an
experiment, and it is the nature of experiments that sometimes
the desired result is not, even cannot be, produced. Time alone
will tell whether or not this “aging” will continue, whether or
not it can only be postponed, etc. We will not resort to organic
additive “fixatives” as this would invalidate the experiment.
New Pigments, methods tried
In the past several months, some new pigments have
been purchased. Iron Sulfide, FeS2 (fool’s gold), yielded disappointing
results. Vanadium Pentoxide, which promised a bright
golden orange joined the ranks of three previous “failing”
pigments in immediately reacting with the waterglass and
gumming up. Chemicals that had not worked now represented
an investment of well over $200. However, a somewhat crude
“work around” application method promises to recoup some of
this invest-ment and expand the palette. We have succeeded in
“flocking” one of these four powders on glass wet with plain
waterglass. Potassium chromate gives us a brighter, more vivid
yellow than the pastel sulfur we’ve been using so far.
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 9