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

can either be by freight and passenger elevator shafts or by a
ramp road up the talus slope of a nearby natural entrance. We
think the first option will bear the brunt of the traffic.
KEY to illustration above: (a) sunshine access via
suspended “daylux” defuser grid instead of coatings; (b)
elevator shaft through “skyscraper”; (c) transit system on
stiltway over tube floor.
The tubes are given to us dust-free. Thoughtful engineering
of tube access systems will help keep them that way.
For example, elevators could have their topside terminals
opening not onto the dusty surface directly but onto a suspended
platform/launchpad complex.
Appearances aside, a vital part of the settle-ment will
be out on the surface and building material and component
manufacturing out of “pre-mined” regolith, “the” asset of the
surface. Once a processing, manufacturing, or gas scavenging
posi-tion is past the “dust-using” phase, further processing,
manufacturing, assembly, or separation can be more safely and
more economically done in the lee vacuum environment within
the lavatube. Industrial siting decisions will take into account
the degree of involvement of solar power and concentrated
solar heating. Operations that are electricity driven and not
reliant on moondust, will be the first to move into the tube.
For the lunar architect and contractor, however, freedom
from the need to be concerned with shielding is a
considerable gain. Tube residences and other structures can
have simple windows, and lots of them, through which to
behold these nether-world landscapes. The shielded windows
of in-surface structures which use mirrors and bent optical
paths to thwart radiation, will be a cumbersome relic of pioneer
beachhead days, still used where Lunans must live in the
regolith blanket surface rather than in provident subsurface
voids. Tube structure windows may be characteristically
convex, curved in to the pressurized interior, so as to put the
panes under compression. Glass and concrete are stronger
under compression than under tension. Nor will in tube
windows need sacrificial panes.
The subsurface Moonscapes within the lavatubes will
be quite different from the surface ones, though sharing one all
important, all infecting aspect: their barrenness and sterility. So
tubers may share with topside moles the practice of placing
plants in front of windows as a psychological filter.
Many architectures are possible. One simple tuber
home plan would be a squat 2-story vertical cylinder section
topped off by a convex-paned geodesic dome to let in the
tube’s ambient light. The design type might be called the Yurt
or Hogan after the Mongolian and Navaho home shapes it
resembles.
KEY: (a) 2-story vertical cylinder section, bedrooms on the lower
level; (b) lunar translation of the geodesic dome for a high translucent
ceiling vault over the family room and other common areas
including a central garden atrium; glass panes are neither flat nor
concave, but convex; (c) cable stays prevent internal pressure from
literally “blowing off the roof”; (d) the residential deck of the
townsite, leaving the tube floor ungraded.
NOTE: upscaled, the yurt/hogan design will make a fine
church, synagog, or meditation chapel, with the simple use of
stained glass convex panes in the roof dome. A shaft of direct
sunshine on such a dome would surely help set the mood.
The early lavatube settlement will not be an assembly
of individually pressurized buildings, but rather, like the insurface
burrowings, a maze of structures conjoined by pressurized
walkways, streets, alleys, and parkways. In the netherspaces,
thoroughfare cylinders can be generously paned with
convex windows to flood their interiors with ambient reflected
and diffused sunshine and views.
KEY: (1) cylinder section; (2) convex-glass panes to let in
ambient reflected sunshine and views; (3) Yurt/hogan style homes
opening onto street via entrance tubes (4); (5) pedestrian
“sidewalks”; (6) rail-suspended goods delivery platform;
(7) “crosswalks”; (8) landscaped, concrete free garden strips; (9)
dust-purged, conditioned regolith geoponic soils.
Along with solar access for reflection off coated upper
tube surfaces, there can be some sunshine ports that direct
intense pools of light downward, say on the convex-paned
lunar geodesic domed park squares. Nothing is so soul-renewing
as a visit to a pool of strong over-illumination, the feeling
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 94