Resources. In Situ Resource Utilization is necessary for any colony of any size. (It could also dramatically reduces transportation costs for a smaller colony.) Unfortunately, “magnificent desolation” sums it up pretty well. Yes, you can make lunar concrete, any yes, they found ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the loner poles, and yes, there is silica in the sand, just like all sand on earth. But, that’s about it. I’m all for unmanned mining, but humans would be putting the cart before the horse.
The moon is tidally locked to the earth, meaning that the same face is always facing us. As a result, it rotates exactly once a month. That’s a really long day. If using solar power, that means needing enough batteries to last 14 days. For colonization, it means crops cannot be grown using sunlight, necessitating enormous amounts of solar energy. Yes, the peaks of eternal light on the poles are in continuously in sunlight, but they don’t have a ton of surface area, and would need extremely tall, rotating solar panels to take advantage of the solar power. So, the growth of any colony would be extremely limited.
On the resource side, Mars has enormous icecaps, large glaciers, and small concentrations of chemically bound water in the soil even near the equator. It even occasionally has liquid water on the surface, in areas where the salt concentration is high enough that frost can form a liquid brine. This provides a ready source of both H2 and O2. Mars also has CO2, Ar, and N2 in the atmosphere. The moon, however is lacking in carbon, which makes it difficult to grow food, and it doesn’t have any inert gas handy for a breathable atmosphere. (You don’t want to breathe 100% O2.) N2 is also a necessary component in fertilizers.
With respect to power and crop growth, Mars has a day that lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes, which makes solar power viable without massive batteries to store the electricity for 2 weeks. The downside is that Mars is further from the sun. Wind isn’t strong enough to be useful, and geothermal may or may not be possible, so we’re stuck with mediocre solar. A small nuclear reactor like what is used on nuclear submarines would be helpful to power growing colonies on either the moon or mars, but politically difficult.
So, if you want to maximize the probability that a self-sustaining colony is built in space, I would concentrate on tech applicable to mars. Particularly, rather than looking at all the components needed by such a colony, I would try and figure out a different question. What is the minimum amount (number, mass, etc.) of machines necessary to produce most of the heaviest components of such a colony?
There are already plenty of people in the space community, but as far as I can tell almost all of them are bikeshedding. If you want to make a difference there, I strongly recommend finding a clever, minimalist solution to the problem of bootstrapping a martian (or lunar) industrial base.
No, but maybe a Mars colony.
The moon has a couple issues:
Resources. In Situ Resource Utilization is necessary for any colony of any size. (It could also dramatically reduces transportation costs for a smaller colony.) Unfortunately, “magnificent desolation” sums it up pretty well. Yes, you can make lunar concrete, any yes, they found ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the loner poles, and yes, there is silica in the sand, just like all sand on earth. But, that’s about it. I’m all for unmanned mining, but humans would be putting the cart before the horse.
The moon is tidally locked to the earth, meaning that the same face is always facing us. As a result, it rotates exactly once a month. That’s a really long day. If using solar power, that means needing enough batteries to last 14 days. For colonization, it means crops cannot be grown using sunlight, necessitating enormous amounts of solar energy. Yes, the peaks of eternal light on the poles are in continuously in sunlight, but they don’t have a ton of surface area, and would need extremely tall, rotating solar panels to take advantage of the solar power. So, the growth of any colony would be extremely limited.
On the resource side, Mars has enormous icecaps, large glaciers, and small concentrations of chemically bound water in the soil even near the equator. It even occasionally has liquid water on the surface, in areas where the salt concentration is high enough that frost can form a liquid brine. This provides a ready source of both H2 and O2. Mars also has CO2, Ar, and N2 in the atmosphere. The moon, however is lacking in carbon, which makes it difficult to grow food, and it doesn’t have any inert gas handy for a breathable atmosphere. (You don’t want to breathe 100% O2.) N2 is also a necessary component in fertilizers.
With respect to power and crop growth, Mars has a day that lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes, which makes solar power viable without massive batteries to store the electricity for 2 weeks. The downside is that Mars is further from the sun. Wind isn’t strong enough to be useful, and geothermal may or may not be possible, so we’re stuck with mediocre solar. A small nuclear reactor like what is used on nuclear submarines would be helpful to power growing colonies on either the moon or mars, but politically difficult.
So, if you want to maximize the probability that a self-sustaining colony is built in space, I would concentrate on tech applicable to mars. Particularly, rather than looking at all the components needed by such a colony, I would try and figure out a different question. What is the minimum amount (number, mass, etc.) of machines necessary to produce most of the heaviest components of such a colony?
There are already plenty of people in the space community, but as far as I can tell almost all of them are bikeshedding. If you want to make a difference there, I strongly recommend finding a clever, minimalist solution to the problem of bootstrapping a martian (or lunar) industrial base.