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People survive Antarctic winters so I can't see that there is a particularly big challenge. There is no atmosphere on the moon so heat loss to the sky is purel
by kwhitefoot 4y ago
People survive Antarctic winters so I can't see that there is a particularly big challenge. There is no atmosphere on the moon so heat loss to the sky is purely radiative whereas in Antarctica you have winds blowing that cool the habitats by conduction.
Solar panels should be able to provide the necessary energy which can be stored in piles of rock and insulation should be able to to prevent the loss.
The 'article' says that the lunar night is rife with problems but doesn't mention what they are. There is no weather after all.
- GlenTheMachine 4y agoMcMurdo uses diesel generators. Which require oxygen, which is free on earth and very very expensive on the moon
- rini17 4y agoAny permanent habitation should include a smelter to alleviate some of the cost of shipping metals from Earth. From it oxygen or CO2 will be "waste" byproducts, liquefacting and storing them should not be a problem. I can imagine that having large reserve of oxygen will be desired safety feature. Hydrocarbons will likely be in short supply on the moon but if there is, say, a zinc mined, it could be "burned" in zinc-air cells.
- seastarer 4y agoThe energy cost of extracting oxygen is higher than you'd get from burning it.
- lalaland1125 4y agoYou would extract oxygen during the day and burn it at night
- GlenTheMachine 4y agoThere's also the cost of the diesel fuel (or whatever fuel you burn) to consider. With no native hydrocarbons on the moon, extracting them would be impossible. So they would need to be launched from earth, at many tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram as an ongoing cost. The biggest challenge to the obvious solutions - either solar plus lots of batteries, or nuclear - would be to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then burn them during the night. The challenge there is storing the hydrogen. But if you do that, basically what you'd be doing is using hydrogen/oxygen as an energy storage mechanism, e.g. as a battery. You'd need to use solar during the day to crack the water.
- rini17 4y agoWhy store hydrogen when you can use the metals? I mentioned zinc as that's most mature technology, but almost all of them can be reacted with oxygen to get back energy.
- GlenTheMachine 4y agoBecause the content of metal in lunar soil is very very low.
- nine_k 4y agoNot really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil#Mineralogy_and_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil#Mineralogy_and_comp... 12% by mass is iron, with calcium, aluminum, magnesium at 7-8%. These could be considered ores worth mining on Earth. All four metals readily burn in oxygen, even though aluminum needs some help igniting.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoMcMurdo used to be nuclear powered, by PM-3A aka Nukey Poo. But diesel was cheaper. On the moon that equation probably reverses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program
- johnwalkr 4y agoThe lunar surface temperature is like -150C at night. And yeah, heat loss is radiative.. to a sink at roughly -273C. And night is 2 weeks long. Just use solar heaters and insulation? Well you have to fly that stuff there first, and also fly whatever equipment and people/robots to make the system. There are various studies to have stuff survive lunar night without a nuclear source, and it takes on the order of 10kg of stuff to keep a 1kg payload alive. And in turn that takes 100kg of spacecraft/fuel to fly it all there. That’s not including the rocket and its fuel to get to Earth orbit first.