https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lunar_Research_S...
(nuclear power plans by Russia not so much)
Is there enough gravity on the moon to prevent the long-term health problems from the space station like bone, muscle and vision loss?
Nobody knows. You might think scientist can science up answers to any question but it is impossible to know this without long term data which is simply not available.
There were some experiments done in parabolic flights [2] but those only last for a very short time.
There is this literature review [2]. They are not optimistic: "It can be anticipated that partial gravity environments as present on the Moon or on Mars are not sufficient to preserve all physiological systems to a 1 g standard if not addressed through adequate countermeasures." Which is space speak for "you will need to go to the gym on the moon". But they are willing to admit how little there is to know for certain: "The methodological quality of the vast majority of the available/included studies is too low to generate a compeling evidence."
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10411353/
2: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10....
To date, no mammals have given birth in space. We sent pregnant mice and had them return to Earth to give birth, and we've sent mouse zygotes and grown them in space, but no birth!
Or perhaps even the 2nd generation could be even more telling. Why not simply run the experiment until they all die off, or go full Malthus? Another interesting idea would be to create a faux terrarium type enclosure instead of a plain cage. Would the mice exhibit a bias towards the "ground"? And also it's kind of odd that none of the studies thought to include a lens wiper for their cameras after the first one demonstrated the problem. In 0g, various 'matter' ends up getting stuck on the camera lens, increasingly trending towards 0 visibility.
Generating these data is one of the biggest pay-offs of a lunar colony.
Is this one of those generational things like "on accident" vs. "by accident" or regional things like "math" vs. "maths"?
While it’s used interchangeably a lot, it’s also based on whether you have a scientific or CS background. My hunch is that the scientific plural usage will eventually largely die out except in very specific situations after a few generations given that software is eating the world.
[1] https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/data-is-or-data-are/
"On accident": Abomination! Kill it with fire, now! </OldFartRant>
Why? Any lunar base without nuclear power plans is not a serious effort.
Giant radiators?
edit: fixed typo, derp. fusion=fission
I also meant to write fission in my original question, not fusion.
Radiators though, are constantly used in spacecraft, and seem to work well. Low gravity, no motion might let the thing be mostly the radiator, with not much support structure. Except it might need to be in shade, in the shadow of a building? hill? solar panels?
I wonder if recycling human liquid waste through evaporation could be of some use for that purpose.
Are you thinking of radioisotope generators? Those aren't reactors. They use thermocouples and need to get rid of the waste heat. The Voyager RTGs have radiator fins.
Yup, that's the thing on top [1].
Oversimplifiying: All new plnats have cooling towers, so the water they return to the environment is not too hot.
Maybe you could use helium or liquid sodium metal as the primary coolant, but then you still need to generate electricty via secondary water coolant loop that runs a steam-powered turbine. Really not plausible on the moon.
Or normal panels on the rim of Shackleton [1]. (You'd still want to bootstrap with fission.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shackleton_(crater)#Potential_...
It's not serious with chemical propulsion and the Moon's day/night cycle. Put another way, if one team uses nukes and is, as a result, power unconstrained, while the other spends all its energy launching solar panels and batteries to keep life support online, it's obvious who's going to be doing any science.
> All reactors require coolant circulation and water is going to be among the most valuable commodities on the moon
Sodium and sterling, no water [1]. There is a reason even NASA is only seriously considering nuclear power [2].
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/tech-demo-missions-pr...
Even on earth, giant grid-scale storage system are not able to supply all the power for region they serve alone for more than some 4 or 6 hours. In the moon, they would have to supply power for some two weeks.
Battery storage is not a real solution on earth, it is even less plausible in the moon.
It's just that we're close enough to the Sun, and that a lot of us are living in low-density residences.
Solar ray density reduces to half of what we get on Earth on Mars our closest outer planet, simply from inverse square law. And deep space people always said it goes down so fast a space nuke is a hard requirement for Jupiter and beyond. There might be ways to make it work on Moon, but PV plus battery is just rural inner planets thing, not the way forward or anything. It's just temporary hype technology.
Sure, once you have two-week power-storage infrastructure. (And the scale to harvest a useful amount of energy once a month on average.) In the meantime, i.e. our lifetimes, you have countries that can build space nuclear reactors and countries being performative.
Beyond all this, I meant novel when I said novel. The regular extremes of heat and cold offer all sorts of interesting ideas. You've got room for predictable and endless convection on basically an arbitrarily large scale there. There is certainly going to be some clever way to exploit this in a novel fashion.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
1. Batteries are heavy, and space ain't cheap. Current launch pricing is about $1.5k/kg to LEO. The Moon will be more, it's further away. Even if Starship brings that down by a factor of 10, transportations costs are still going to be astronomical.
2. The day-night cycle on the Moon is slow. Your batteries are going to need to be able to store half a month worth of power. You'll need 15x more batteries on the Moon than you would on Earth.
Otherwise the need to bring enormous power storage to handle the half month of darkness and bitter cold makes solar a bit impractical and the only other reasonable alternative is nuclear power.
The big problem with attempting to exploit the temperature differential is that it happens on such a slow cycle that the total amount of energy available is quite low.
If you did have viable babies in low (not zero) gravity situations though, would you in fact be starting a new species.
* Like 100.000 years, probably more. (From the split of us from chimps 5.000.000 I counted like 30 species in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution , but the number depends a lot on who count them.)
* Isolate the populations so they can't interbreed (first because they can't meet and later becuse the dna is incompatible)