Comments on: Blast a Home in the Moon?

By: spayced

spayced — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:35:36 +0000

While there are certainly some problems with the article, I think they are on the right track with covering your lunar base with lunar soil. The moon doesn’t have a protective atmosphere like the earth, and that would be an easy way to defeat evil cosmic rays and comets and such.

Check out some of the plans NASA is considering: http://www.nasa.gov/missions/s.....cepts.html

By: jayessell

jayessell — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:58:35 +0000

Illustration D: What? No elevator?

I think The Moon has enough holes in it already!
Find a crater with steep sides, build your habitat there, and bulldoze Lunar soil over it.

Was there an article posted that proposed finding a mountain at one of the Lunar poles and building a circular railroad track 3/4s of the way up around the mountain?
The entire building would then travel a bit a day to stay in the sunlight.
At the Lunar equator, they’d have to travel 10 mph continuously to stay in (or out!) of sunlight.

By: Stannous

Stannous — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:47:11 +0000

I think trying to “sculpt” with explosives on the Moon with 1/6th gravity would be a waste of time and only succeed in creating more craters.

How do you create enough heat to fuse the soil without nukes? And even then you’ve created nothing but a bunch of radioactive chambers.

By: Azrael Brown

Azrael Brown — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:23:11 +0000

If you nuke it and ‘vaporize’ it, you’re just changing the matter’s form, not removing it. Nuking 20-tons of dirt into vapor results in 20-tons of super-heated gas erupting from the hole it made. Not pleasant, methinks. I suppose, if you calculate it right, a nuclear charge could expand the dirt without vaporization, compress it around the edges, and then glassify it to hold it in place…but there’s a lot of mechanics going on there. When we did underground nuke testing, it resulted in a coneshaped creater, not an underground void. Even with a conventional explosive, ‘expanding’ and pushing out the sides would leave behind a lot of loose dirt prime for a cave-in. It’s not a well-thought-out plan, no matter how it’s cut. If it were that easy, we’d be doing it here on Earth.

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:16:34 +0000

It looks like they would aim for a low density area, something that would compact well. The cavity would result from the compaction of the material, nothing to dispose of on the surface. The material could also be used for the glassy substrate.