Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think the most viable long term option would be to build solar farms with 120 degrees separation on the moon's circumference so you'd always have a fairly constant amount of solar power generation & run a HVDC grid. From what I can make out, a 1000 Amps capable Aluminum Composite core power cable seems to weigh about 500kg per km [1](I may be mistaken here, happy to be corrected). Moon's circumference is about 10000 km & so you'd need about 7000km of cabling or about 3500 tons. That's only about 20-40 Starship trips to transport the cables itself. Maybe with some minimal cladding (no rain/ice etc on moon), it could possibly even be laid or buried on the ground vs. requiring pylons. Once the solar panels are installed, there's little maintenance needed compared to earth (dust) and you could progressively add over time.

[1] https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/480556O/3mtm-accr-techni...

There must be a redundancy of minimum 2 independent cables though. Can’t risk losing power with any single fault event.

Just add another 3000 km of cable to complete the ring main then every point is supplied from both directions.

That 1000 A rating probably assumes some conductive and convective cooling, and earth-surface temperatures.

It'd need to be bigger. And 1000 A isn't much if you're planning to make anything at scale on the Moon.

Great idea though.

If you solved constant uninterruptible power though via solar, then you've solved a lot of other expansion problems.

So your real challenge is what can be done if you just lay cable over the surface - then you use that power source (and importantly: heating source - lunar night is why rover missions struggle to last over 2 weeks) to power your second-wave rovers which would lay in higher amperage stuff (which would basically just need to in contact with regolith while shielded from sunlight to be cooled).

The cable could be manufactured from the Aluminum in the Lunar regolith which could simplify the logistics.

Although shipping the cable-manufacturing plant out there might not be entirely trivial either.

Well, if you can manufacture high power aluminum cables on the moon, it would be worth some extra pain setting it up. Assuming any real plans for permanent settlement.

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