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| Friday / 31 March 2006 | ||
Moon: Not
For the Faint of Heart, But Many Seek to Make it Home.
Larry Toups,
head of Habitation Systems at NASA's Constellation Program’s Advanced
Projects Office, discusses with Astrobiology
Magazine the limits and challenges
of designing the first frontier outpost on the Moon. For astronauts dreaming
of lunar exploration, any kind of house would
be an improvement over the cramped Apollo landing capsules. NASA currently is
using mockups, drawing on generations of habitats in Antarctica,
in an attempt to design the optimum lunar living rooms. One of the structures,
called the Lunar Habitation Vertical Mockup, has a long, cylindrical shape reminiscent
of the ISS and has a similar
layout. Toups says the VSE initially
calls for sortie missions consisting of four crewmembers going down to selected
sites along the lunar surface, and staying for perhaps ten days. Eventually,
a more permanent outpost could be built allowing a crew of four to six to stay
from thirty days to six months. To protect the outpost from radiation, lunar
regolith could be used in sandbags placed on top of the habitat. In
the beginning, oxygen and water would be brought in. Toups believes over time
there will be small demonstrations of extracting oxygen and water from the lunar
soil, and eventually the life support system will be based on using lunar resources.
Although scientists do not believe there is any life on the Moon, Toups says
there should be awareness of any potential by-products that may be produced by
humans. They would need to be stored for reuse, or brought back to Earth.
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