Homestead on the Moon

Hooray! There are homes for the taking on the moon!

Don’t start packing. They aren’t exactly built yet. It’s more like they’ve found empty lots where homes could be built. If you like living in caves.

Scientists have convincing evidence of a cave where astronauts could work and live in relative comfort. They suspect there may be hundreds of caves on the moon and want to use radar to find others.

Plans to build a permanent lunar base have been stymied over the conditions found on the moon’s surface. During the moon’s day, the temperature can reach 250 degrees F, and during the night, it dips to -200 degrees F. Solar and cosmic radiation is also a hazard that must be prepared for. Some plans for a lunar base called for the base to be built, and then buried in at least 2.5 feet of moon dirt.

But caves can mean less work to build a lunar base, because you wouldn’t need to move all that moon dirt around.

The data about this first cave discovered indicates the cave is approximately 150 feet wide and possibly 260 feet long, slightly smaller than an American football field. This cave sits in a deep pit which likely formed when a lava tube collapsed. There are no active volcanoes on the moon now, but billions of years ago, lava flowed through valleys, creating tubes across the lunar surface.

Over the ages, some of those tubes collapsed, creating pits. The scientists don’t have a clear idea what the cave looks like inside, but lava tubes like those in Hawaii have been studied. NASA has identified over 200 of these pits on the moon, suggesting the presence of hundreds of caves also.

The cave’s thick rock ceiling is ideal to protect people and infrastructure from the extreme hazards of the moon’s surface. In a cave such as this, computer simulations suggest that the cave’s temperature would remain at around 63 degrees F. Sounds like the place to build, right?

However, reaching these caves could be another matter. The Mare Tranquilitatis cave is located over 400 feet from the surface, near the bottom of a steep slope of loose debris. Traversing that slope would require technological ingenuity. That could be jet packs to fly people in and out, a lunar elevator, or something else.

There’s also a chance that moon cave could harbor water, in the form of ice. It’s long been known that there’s frozen water on the moon, particularly in its permanently shadowed craters. Since caves are shielded from the merciless radiation of the sun, they also could have ice.

Such water would be a crucial resource for any future moon bases. It wouldn’t just be a beverage, it could also be broken down to its elements–oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for rocket fuel. Thus an abundance of water on the moon could help launch astronauts to Mars.

But in the meantime, let’s all put on our thinking caps and start designing lunar cave bungalows, shall we?

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-discover-an-underground-cave-on-the-moon-where-astronauts-could-live-and-suspect-hundreds-more/ar-BB1q6Hzp?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=d181ab3114dd46d7ae8dcdf13bc73e29&ei=57