Wanted: Home-builders for the moon

‘Honey, I Shrunk the Space Station’
Why inflatable habitats? Bienhoff explained that the metal-hulled modules used on the international space station couldn't make it to the moon because they're too heavy.

The typical space station module weighs 30,000 pounds — but NASA's moonships, as currently planned, would have a maximum payload capacity of only 13,000 pounds.

Inflatable modules could get around that limitation. Dave Cadogan, research director at ILC Dover, said the modules would be compressed to fit a smaller space on NASA's smaller spaceships, dropped off on the moon, and only then filled with air, equipment and all the comforts of a lunar home.

Bigelow Aerospace already has lofted one inflatable test module into orbit and is gearing up to launch another one in April. Last year the company's billionaire founder, Robert Bigelow, told reporters that "we definitely have lunar architecture in mind."

ILC Dover, meanwhile, has built one inflatable prototype for NASA's Langley Research Center, and it's in the midst of designing another for the NASA-NSF test in Antarctica. NASA's Toups said the new prototype would be shipped in compressed form to the South Pole this fall and inflated to full size for use by polar researchers — as, say, a dive shack or a meeting place.

"We'll have monitors and sensors built into it so we'll be able to track how it does with sustained use," he said.

Antarctica and other extreme environments on Earth — such as the Canadian Arctic, the Arizona desert and the underwater Aquarius habitat — are becoming key proving grounds as NASA and its partners develop their exploration technologies.

"What I see the Antarctic experience doing is actually being an analog for what we might do on the moon, and then once we get to the moon, keep in mind that we'll be using that as an analog for the operations that might be required for Mars," Toups said.

More alien than Antarctica
But there are some lunar challenges that go far beyond what Antarctic researchers have to deal with.

Slide show   How to build a moon base Get a glimpse of present-day experiments and futuristic concepts for a moon base. more photos

For example, radiation exposure poses much more of a risk on the moon than it is beneath Earth's warm blanket of atmosphere. Habitats on the moon might have to be covered by heaped-up lunar soil, also known as regolith. Other shielding materials could include tanks of water, or strategically placed hardware, or extra layers of reinforced polyethylene.

Then there's the dust: During the Apollo missions, abrasive moondust worked its way into every nook and cranny — even the joints on the astronauts' spacesuits. "After three days on the lunar surface, they had work through the metallic protection on their gloves, because of the abrasion," Bienhoff said.

If too much dust gets inside the lunar habitat, it could pose the kinds of health problems suffered by miners and asbestos workers in the past. To keep the dust down, astronauts  might have to wear disposable coveralls during surface operations, Cadogan said — and lunar robots might need coveralls as well to protect their mechanical joints and bearings.

Living off the dirt
Moon dirt isn't all bad, however. If you know how to treat it right, it can serve as a building material as well as a source for vital supplies — and that's where companies such as Caterpillar enter the picture.

"When you're moving large pieces of equipment, using whatever types of devices you are using, how is the soil going to react?" NASA's Humphries said. "How is it going to compact underneath the wheels? Could it potentially get in the way and ball things up? What is its usefulness in terms of being bulldozed around to help make barriers to radiation, or even to flatten out the surface for ease of maneuvering things in an outpost-type area? They're looking at a lot of different things in that regard — in particular in the area of robotics, because they're anticipating that robotics will be a key component there."

NBC VIDEO NASA's moon plan Dec. 5: NBC's Tom Costello reports on NASA's plans for an moon base. Nightly News

Construction and mining companies have been advising the more traditional aerospace companies on all those issues, said Larry Clark, senior manager for Lockheed Martin's spacecraft technology development laboratory. It turns out that a heavy-duty Caterpillar tractor probably wouldn't be suitable for the moon, he said.

"We can't afford to launch a large vehicle like that, so we've got to make things smaller and lightweight, but just as efficient mechanically," he told MSNBC.com.

Pint-size robo-tractors could be used to build up protective berms around lunar facilities, or dig up loads of moon soil for industrial-scale extraction of water and oxygen. Researchers have already started to map areas where frozen water may lurk — perhaps in the depths of permanently shadowed craters near the poles. And if the water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, that could provide rocket propellants as well as air for breathing.

In addition to potential traces of frozen water, lunar soil contains oxygen-rich minerals.

"It doesn't take a lot of soil to make the oxygen we need," Clark said. The way he figures it, processing the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) of soil from an area half the size of a basketball court could yield enough oxygen to keep four astronauts alive for 75 days.

Moon dirt in the microwave
Another neat trick involves cooking the lunar soil right on the surface to turn it into a concrete-hard crust. "You take a microwave and heat the soil up, and it actually fuses into a solid," said John Stevens, Lockheed Martin's director of business development for human spaceflight.

Larry Taylor, a University of Tennessee planetary scientist, has proposed building "lunar lawnmowers" that could go back and forth to create hardened launch pads, roads and even radio telescope dishes.

Over the long haul, such technologies could turn the moon into much more than a way station on the road to Mars, said Bob Davis, director of business development for space exploration at Northrop Grumman.

"We're learning what the moon has to offer as not just an outpost, but as a location where we might derive economic benefit," he told MSNBC.com. "Who knows?"

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