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What will life be like on the moon?

Alok Jha

AT A meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco at the weekend, details emerged about plans of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for a permanent moonbase.

The agency hopes that by 2020, four-person crews will be making week-long trips to the moon to start building a base. By the mid-2020s, astronauts will be staying there for six months a time. So what do scientists think life will be like for those first moon residents?

The moonbases of science fiction tend to be airy, well-lit, Eden-project-style glass domes in which lunar residents wander around effortlessly in their futuristic jumpsuits. The reality will be a bit more mundane, and a lot less comfortable, at least at first. "Eden-style domes are not very good at filtering our solar radiation," says Colin Pillinger of the Open University. "If you have a solar storm or something like that, you don't want a nice little glass dome over you. You want something a bit more substantial." (Solar radiation, by the way, could give you cancer.)

Workplaces

NASA wants its first few astronauts to live in around six "modules" (think large metal tubes each the size of a small Portakabin) that will be launched separately and then joined together on the surface of the moon. The atmosphere inside the modules would consist of breathable air, theoretically made by mining and processing oxygen-rich minerals on the lunar surface.

Anyone going on trips outside would need to don a spacesuit and then go out through an airlock.

If the base eventually grew to welcome more residents, a more permanent solution would be to build something into the lunar surface. "Find a crater that's the right sort of size and roof it over," suggests Professor Pillinger.

Powering the base could best be done with solar panels spread across the south pole of the moon — at certain points in this region, there is almost continuous sunlight. "The problem for spacecraft is that you can't build the structure big enough to have all the solar cells you want," says Professor Pillinger. On the moon, there would be no such problems.

Health factor

There are lots of unknowns here, and the biggest issue is what happens when gravity goes missing. By studying astronauts who have spent long periods in the space station, scientists know that muscles and bones start wasting away when people spend a long time in zero gravity. Whether the same thing would happen on the moon, which has only one-sixth of the earth's gravity, is uncertain; the longest an astronaut has spent on the moon is three days. "We don't know if the same consequences will follow, but not as fast, or whether some of the most harmful ones will not happen at all," says Ian Crawford of the school of earth sciences at Birkbeck College.

The radiation from the sun at the surface of the moon is safe enough on a day-to-day basis but, again, no one knows what kind of dose a person might get after a long time on a moonbase. "These are things we have to find out," says Professor Crawford.

The first permanent residents on any moonbase are likely to be scientists; NASA has outlined a wide programme of research that it wants to do. There are plans to measure cosmic rays and hunt for exotic subatomic particles in space, as well as looking out for asteroids on a collision course with the earth.

The moonbase, as it grew, could also provide important information for a manned mission to Mars, which would take more than a year.

Professor Pillinger says that a moonbase could test the technology needed for staying in space for long periods and also test how people fared mentally and physically during long periods in isolation.

In the short term, food would have to be brought from Earth. The dream, however, is to grow things in greenhouses on the moon. "You'd grow things hydroponically — there's no reason why that wouldn't work," says Professor Pillinger. This would involve suspending plants in a nutrient-rich solution of water. "Soil is superfluous to plants; it's only to keep them standing upright," he adds.

It would take at least a decade of experiments after the base was established before such a scheme would work, however. The main problem is working out how to extract nutrients from the lunar soil. "Getting all that to work requires a minimum level of infrastructure present before you can start experimenting with greenhouses and hydroponics," says Professor Crawford.

Finding hardy plants to grow in space will also be tricky, though scientists are already working on it: microbiologist Amy Grunden of North Carolina State University has been working with NASA on genetically engineering food crops that can be grown in harsh, off-planet environments.

Water is a somewhat easier prospect. One of the reasons that NASA wants to put its base at the moon's south pole is that it suspects that, in the permanently shaded craters, there are large pools of frozen water. If that's true, it could easily be mined and used to drink and to create oxygen for the habitats.

Once the lunar residents find their water, they could then keep reusing it. "People who use water on the space station take it and recycle everything," says Professor Pillinger.

Moving around

At the weekend, Harrison Schmitt, who landed on the moon in 1972, said that cross-country skiing would be the best way for astronauts to move around quickly and easily on the moon. Professor Schmitt, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said: "Once you get a rhythm going it's very easy. You can propel yourself with a push. On the moon you don't slide, you glide above the surface."

But skiing won't be a long-range solution. For the last few Apollo missions in the 1970s, NASA designed a two-seater buggy that allowed astronauts to explore further away from their landing site than on previous missions. For the upcoming moonbase, the space agency wants someone to design a pressurised vehicle that could wander hundreds of kilometres from the main camp. Inside, astronauts would work without spacesuits and could transport heavy equipment to study places of interest.

Random space danger

The moon is no place for the faint-hearted. "The most dangerous thing is the possibility of solar flares. These flood the solar system with powerful blasts of radiation ... unprotected astronauts could be killed by them," says Professor Crawford. Fortunately, scientists can predict when flares are on their way using satellite measurements. Professor Crawford recommends that any designs for a moonbase incorporate a storm shelter, buried at least two metres under the lunar surface, where the residents could hide in the event of a massive solar flare.

The moon and earth are also struck regularly by meteorites. The earth's atmosphere protects all of us from most of these rocks; the vast majority burn up before getting anywhere near the surface.

But on the moon, there is no protective atmosphere. Spacesuits are designed to keep astronauts protected from the tiniest rocks, but would be useless against anything bigger than a centimetre in diameter. Fortunately, anything of this size is rare, according to Professor Crawford, and the risk of getting hit by one is minimal.

So that just leaves those pesky little green men to worry about. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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