Chinese Plan a Moon Colony

Timothy Birdnow

Chinese Igloos on the Moon?

Most articles on this are calling them igloos, but they really are just domes made from lunar soil (dust and rock). The articles all speak of this:

I've seen it described in other articles as "dystopian" or even just ugly because the authors do not understand the realities of life outside of Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. The Moon is bombarded by radiation, radiation blocked here on Earth by the aforementioned attributes. Cosmic rays pass through astronauts; in fact, the Apollo astronauts all spoke of seeing them as flashes of light. They are relatively harmless over short periods of exposure, but their effects are uncertain over a longer period. Suffice it to say they can't be good. But there is more to worry about; solar flares shoot dangerously radioactive particles at the Moon during flares. The solar wind alone is composed of electrons and protons and eight percent of alpha paticles (two protons coupled with two neutrons) and it is ionizing. But the flares themselves are lethal, spewing high energy particles out towards the source of magnetism anywhere in the system. Most strike Jupiter, which is why the great gas giant has a radiation belt that is lethal within seconds. Europa sits at the center of Jupiter's radiation belt. Earth's magnetic field attracts flare energy but less so, hence we have a weak radiation belt (the Van Allan belt). But if a flare strikes the Moon, which it frequently does, anybody on the surface will die a horrible death from radiation sickness.

The only way to avoid that is by putting a lot of mass between yourself and the flare.

The chinese proposal makes perfect sense; they plan to use lunar soil to build domes (the best, easiest way to build when holding pressure in or out) thick enough to make colonists safe during solar storms.

Any settlement on the Moon will have to either be built this way or built in an underground bunker of some sorts, either in a Lava Flow Tube or in a lunar rille and covered with dirty (and rilles are just lava flow tubes that have collapsed.)

The article also mentions temperature swings:


250 degree days and minus 200 at night! You need very good insulation to protect against such temperature swings.

I have always advocated using "Earth Bags" to do the job. On Earth, people build dome-like structures and other structures using what are essentially sandbags filled with dirt or sand. You pile them up just as if you were trying to protect a place from rising floodwater. In the case of a lunar settlement you could just make really long bags and scoop up dirt with a radio-controlled tractor then fill the bags up and stack them. These would be wider than flood water sand bags, of course, and be connected together with a kind of barbed wire layed between courses. The domes can be done as pure domes or corbelled (which would be easier - think nuclear reactor domes).

In fact, you could put such domes over smaller craters and colonize the interior. Turn lunar rock and dust into soil (it's been done experimentally on Earth using Earth rock of similar composition and sterilized.) Water and air fills out the habitat, and you then bring in people.

I hope they do it. I want to see Americans do it, but if we won't then I'll be happy to see China or any other nation do it. plenty of room for everyone in space! The Moon is about the size of Africa, so a Chinese section can exist and an American section as well.

I want to see large structures on the Moon, habitats that feel much like being outside on Earth. It can be done. Lava flow tubes are quite large, some of them - as big as tem miles wide and as long as six hundred miles. They generally are at minus 50 F. all the time - much better than the see-sawing temperatures on the surface. Minus fifty is cold on Earth but with no air it wouldn't be a problem; apply some heat and you can warm those caverns up to a comfortable temperature. You could use light tubes to bring sunlight in during the day, and stored energy or beamed from solar orbit to provide light at night (the nights are two weeks long). You can avoid all of that by settling at the South Pole, and get water to boot, as water is available at that pole, frozen in permanent shadow.

Earthlike conditions can be recreated quite closely. The only thing we cannot recreate is gravity; you will always be in 1/6 Earth-normal G. It may not be possible to live under such low gravity for long periods of time. It is also possible children cannot be conceived under such low gravity, or they may not develop properly in the womb. A moon colony could be a dead end.

But it wouldn't be the end of space colonization; we can build colonies in space itself that rotate for gravity, giving us as much as we need. Either hollowed out asteroids or specially constructed structures (much like building a suspension bridge without any endpoints) you can build such a colony and live there provided you have adequate mass to shield you from flares and cosmic rays. Oh, and from meteor impacts; mustn't forget those. But you have to fear meteor impacts on the Moon too.

Any way you look at it, Humanity needs to take this next step into the universe. We cannot continue to exist trapped on this one ball of rock and water. It's getting a bit uncomfortably full and we need new horizons. People need a frontier, need a place to go to test themselves and to expand and to feel free. Continued life on Earth is a zero-sum game and it will become increasingly oppressive as it becomes more developed, more crowded, more regulated and controlled. We need to move into space. Our ancient ancestors moved out of the oceans onto land. Our later ancestors came out of the trees and invented fire and spread across the globe. Now it's time to take the next step.

Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clark famously stated "The Earth is our cradle, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever". Right he was.

Time to move on.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:44 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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