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If you want to understand why there will never be a Moon base on the Moon, all you have to do is to take a look at any photo of the Moon itself - without atmosp

If you want to understand why there will never be a Moon base on the Moon, all you have to do is to take a look at any photo of the Moon itself - without atmosphere the planet is being been bombarded so often that you would have to go underground. Deep underground. Too deep underground!

azernik 7y ago
Not very deep at all - meteoroid protection requires only about 15-20cm of regolith, and radiation protection requires about 2m. Easily doable. https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/human.html https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/human.htm...
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Sure, if you're only trying to protect against meteroids and radiation. But there's a whole lot of craters deeper than 2m on the moon. If you're trying to protect against the impacts that produced them, you do in fact have to be a long way down.
  - azernik 7y ago
    (Nitpick: those impactors are also meteorites, just big ones; the numbers in the paper I linked numbers are based on probabilities over time of an impactor large enough to get through shielding.) Giant impacts are relatively rare - in the ~13 years of NASA's monitoring program, the largest impactor seen on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the moon left a 15m (inner diameter) crater [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.6458.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.6458.pdf], and most have been orders of magnitude smaller. Remember - the Moon has no active tectonics, no atmospheric weathering, and no water or other liquid evaporation/condensation cycle. The craters you see are an aggregate over billions of years, including some periods of much higher levels of random debris than currently (e.g. the Late Heavy Bombardment, which left most of the truly stupendous craters). In any given human lifetime spent on the Moon, you're unlikely to even be within visible distance of an impactor that can go through 2m of regolith.
mLuby 7y ago
Some plans suggest sealing an old lava tube for micrometeorite and radiation shielding and not having to build all the walls.

azernik 7y ago

Not very deep at all - meteoroid protection requires only about 15-20cm of regolith, and radiation protection requires about 2m. Easily doable. https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/human.html https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/human.htm...

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Sure, if you're only trying to protect against meteroids and radiation. But there's a whole lot of craters deeper than 2m on the moon. If you're trying to protect against the impacts that produced them, you do in fact have to be a long way down.
- azernik 7y ago
  (Nitpick: those impactors are also meteorites, just big ones; the numbers in the paper I linked numbers are based on probabilities over time of an impactor large enough to get through shielding.) Giant impacts are relatively rare - in the ~13 years of NASA's monitoring program, the largest impactor seen on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the moon left a 15m (inner diameter) crater [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.6458.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.6458.pdf], and most have been orders of magnitude smaller. Remember - the Moon has no active tectonics, no atmospheric weathering, and no water or other liquid evaporation/condensation cycle. The craters you see are an aggregate over billions of years, including some periods of much higher levels of random debris than currently (e.g. the Late Heavy Bombardment, which left most of the truly stupendous craters). In any given human lifetime spent on the Moon, you're unlikely to even be within visible distance of an impactor that can go through 2m of regolith.

mLuby 7y ago

Some plans suggest sealing an old lava tube for micrometeorite and radiation shielding and not having to build all the walls.