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All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

458 points by cybermango 6mo ago

m463 6mo ago
we have similar problems with volcanic ash on earth
- jMyles 6mo ago
  I walked up to the flows on Fagradalsfjall when it was erupting a couple of years ago, and I found the cinereous, sulfurous air to be very medicinal and clearing. I'm not sure it'd have good for me for more than a few hours, but as it was, it was great. I occasionally wish I were able to just have a chamber with that air in it.
  - kzrdude 6mo ago
    There are some saunas on Iceland that expose you to earth gasses, might be exactly the kind of chamber you are after. I've visited one, and it was unfortunately cold for a sauna because that's naturally varying too.
- tim-tday 6mo ago
  Exactly, but the lack of a water cycle on the moon means that all the dust is sharp and always will be. It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin. It degrades rubber seals.
jjmarr 6mo ago
Have any of them developed cancer from the space asbestos yet?
- loloquwowndueo 6mo ago
  Only 4 are still alive, all in their 90s so that’d be a long time - even if some do have cancer at this stage it’s not likely to affect life expectancy I guess.
  - AngryData 6mo ago
    We also have to remember that those astronauts were some of the most physically fit individuals in a nation of hundreds of millions which may skew the expected medical outcomes. Especially if we assume they always had the best healthcare available, if from nothing else than doctors asking similiar qiestions about the effects of space travel.
    - wat10000 6mo ago
      The exposure was brief, too. Wikipedia says mesothelioma has been known to develop from exposures of "only" 1 month. That's a scary short time if it's in your home or workplace, but comfortably longer than an Apollo mission. Could be an issue for a future base, though.
      - bdamm 6mo ago
        It definitely puts a damper on my personal enthusiasm for visiting the moon hotel, or even encouraging researchers to live there.
    - altmanaltman 6mo ago
      I mean Neil Armstrong literally smoked and did not "believe" in excercise so they were absolutely not the most physically fittest people. They were just freaks in terms of enduring a lot of stress tests. Physical endurance is just one aspect they train for. Other aspects were much more valued like them being military flight pilots/smart enough to understand the systems/mentally strong enough to not break down etc. You were not selecting for absolute raw fitness for the apollo missions.
      - AngryData 6mo ago
        They didn't select for pure physical fitness but they were already selected for fitness as a pilot and then again when they were selected from the pilots to train as an astonaut. Its not like they just picked arbitrarily from the potential pool of candidates and gambled on getting better than average.
- porphyra 6mo ago
  Even with actual asbestos, the risk goes up a lot with duration and intensity of exposure. Probably, the risks of getting cancer from a brief exposure is fairly low, and combined with the ridiculously small sample size of only 12 people to ever set foot on the moon, it's natural that none of them got "moon cancer". That said, with asbesto, it's still possible to get cancer even from brief exposures: > Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1] [1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/asbestos/asbestos-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
  Part of what makes asbestos (and also fiberglass) dangerous, isn't just the sharpness but also the long shape which means that macrophages can't engulf them. Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.
  - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
    Sounds to me like the threat would be silicosis.
ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
[flagged]
- gunto 6mo ago
  [flagged]
OsrsNeedsf2P 6mo ago
They describe the dust on the moon as, > Fine like powder, but sharp like glass Sounds scary. But totally worth it!
- heckelson 6mo ago
  It's like Asbestos!
jiveturkey 6mo ago
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krunck 6mo ago
Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles seem like a necessity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars
- snthpy 6mo ago
  TIL
- tim-tday 6mo ago
  Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating station on Venus. At least there you’d have the correct pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It’s just also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.
  - MengerSponge 6mo ago
    Mars is so bad, y'all.
  - card_zero 6mo ago
    Since the perchlorate is generated by reaction with sunlight, it might be limited to a surface layer. Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
    - kzrdude 6mo ago
      Regolith is all the loose stuff, everything that's not bedrock, even if it might be quite deep.
    - vondur 6mo ago
      Rocket fuel for the taking?
  - lukan 6mo ago
BFV 6mo ago
That’s such a weirdly specific detail but also kinda fascinating. Imagine going to the Moon and the first thing you notice is “huh… smells like gunpowder.
- skywhopper 6mo ago
  I just had a filling replaced at the dentist yesterday and when he was grinding away at it to shape it, I would get a terrible whiff of something like gunpowder. It was quite disturbing. But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon dust.
- nottorp 6mo ago
  The weird part may be that everyone seems to know what gunpowder smells like...
labelbabyjunior 6mo ago
[flagged]
- ethagnawl 6mo ago
  > no PPE needed Says you ...
  - labelbabyjunior 6mo ago
    Apparently you've never had drywall work done, the level of risk these guys take in stride is shocking.
- smokedetector1 6mo ago
  This is a very unpleasant comment, consider deleting.
  - labelbabyjunior 6mo ago
    Try leaving your bubble sometime and stepping onto a construction site, you would be in awe.
tcp_handshaker 6mo ago
"The toxic side of the Moon" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768039
ortusdux 6mo ago
This is a big perk of the newer lunar rover design, wherein the suits stay outside the vehicle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Specifications_(2008_design) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec... There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1
corysama 6mo ago
I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said “astronauts report” the moon smells like spent gunpowder and outer space smell like… I think it was ozone. What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder! And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.
- Bender 6mo ago
  My UV sterilizing lights make my room smell like O3 Ozone and that smells nothing like spent gun-powder to me. The only other time I have smelled the same thing is when there has been mass lightening events in the sky. Were they talking about actual black powder or nitrocellulose? I've smelled black powder at the range when people bring out their antique rifles and that also does not smell like Ozone to me.
  - coffeebeqn 6mo ago
    Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smell
    - Bender 6mo ago
      Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smell Those are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its 34F outside right now.
      - echelon 6mo ago
        I don't think any of you should want to be smelling Ozone. Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The ozone species is even more oxidative. Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's also killing us. Ozone is worse. "Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth the squeeze.
hvs 6mo ago
If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars: https://www.acityonmars.com/ https://www.acityonmars.com/ It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/ https://www.smbc-comics.com/
- themafia 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable. Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.
- api 6mo ago
  This is on my reading list. I've read synopses of it, and I don't think it's going to change my mind a lot. I'm still long-term pro-space-exploration, but even before this book I'd come to the conclusion that this is a lot harder than naive nerds tend to think. I think it's worth doing and probably will be done eventually, but it's gonna take a while. I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself. In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. We don't know if 1/6 or 1/3 gravity is enough for us to reproduce and prosper, but we know 1g is. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. You could, once you get good at this, actually create hyper-habitable environments tuned to be ideal for human life. People aren't tracking in nasty asbestos-like regolith or perchlorates or anything else you don't want. Most reasonable near-mid term proposals for living on Mars or the Moon I've read about call for spending most time underground. Going there to do that seems pointless. Living in space itself could be much nicer. The interior of such a ring would look nothing like this very Hollywood "luxury hotel" thing, but this little short film gives you a sense of what the relationship to the external space environment might be like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPmgW21rwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPmgW21rwY Radiation is still an issue, but there's ideas for that that could work for a ring in hard space vacuum that don't work as well on a planet. One is to put a big superconductor around the ring and give it a magnetosphere. The whole habitat is a big electromagnet. Most cosmic rays and solar particles are charged. The power requirements are not as great as you'd think. For resources asteroids are probably better than planets. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. The delta-V requirements of sending stuff back to your space-city are literally at the scale of "throw it real hard." Their low mass also means you don't have to dig deep and the heavy elements didn't sink to the core. You're going to find gigantic amounts of stuff like gold, platinum, pure iridium, fissile materials, etc. Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of. Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod" around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some critical or massively valuable resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places. In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet. Generation ships to the stars would be a natural evolution of this. After doing this for a few hundred or a few thousand years, we'd get so good at it that the idea of a caravan of these mobile cities departing for Centauri or Tau Ceti becomes imaginable and not a total suicide mission. Compared to this I think going to Mars is a dead end. Even if we go there and survive and prosper, now we're just doing planetary civilization again. We're back to squabbling over dirt. The real evolutionary leap is doing something different. Fish didn't come on land to stay fish. But there's also an argument that there's no point in trying until we at least have a couple of key technologies: fusion, very good automated manufacturing, and very good robotics. Fusion is key for enabling scalable power and mobility. Automated manufacturing and very good robotics are probably key to self-sufficiency. Trying to do the "real space age" before the key technologies exist might be akin to, say, trying to start the EV revolution with lead-acid batteries or the PC revolution with vacuum tubes. While it's technically possible to try, it's just not going to "take."
lucasaug 6mo ago
When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade
Patrick_Devine 6mo ago
Isn't this why NASA is developing the Electrodynamic Dust Shield [1] system? [1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-successfully-repels-lunar-regolith-on-moon/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-success...
deleted 6mo ago
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tillinghast 6mo ago
Cue Cave Johnson: “The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill.”
mirekrusin 6mo ago
Sounds similar to asbestos.
mncharity 6mo ago
> "I think one of the most aggravating, restricting facets of lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to everything no matter what kind of material, whether it be skin, suit material, metal, no matter what it be and its restrictive, friction-like action to everything it gets on [...] the simple large-tolerance mechanical devices on the Rover began to show the effect of dust as the EVAs went on. By the middle or the end of the third EVA, simple things like bag locks and the lock which held the pallet on the Rover began not only to malfunction but to not function at all. They effectively froze. We tried to dust them and bang the dust off and clean them, and there was just no way. The effect of dust on mirrors, cameras, and checklists is phenomenal. You have to live with it but you're continually fighting the dust problem both outside and inside the spacecraft. Once you get inside the spacecraft, as much as you dust yourself, you start taking off the suits and you have dust on your hands and your face and you're walking in it. You can be as careful in cleaning up as you want to, but it just sort of inhabits every nook and cranny in the spacecraft and every pore in your skin [...]" Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 debrief[1] An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass, hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged packing peanuts. An old tech memo and paper.[3][4] [1] https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techdebrief.pdf https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techd... page "27-28" 258, 50 in pdf. Lots of other mentions of dust. [2] interactive microscope of regolith https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Assets/70181/index2.html?specimen=/node/153 https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset... [3] The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20050160460.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20... [4] IMPACT OF DUST ON LUNAR EXPLORATION https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S
alex_be 6mo ago
"In addition the Moon has no atmosphere and is constantly bombarded by radiation from the Sun that causes the soil to become electrostatically charged." - You can use a magnetic or electric field to push the soil away
consumer451 6mo ago
As a huge space nerd, I would like to point out that space, and other planetary bodies appear to really suck. It seems to be under-reported that the Earth is pretty nice.
- gcbirzan 6mo ago
  Sadly, it's populated.
  - consumer451 6mo ago
    My friend, misanthropy is giving last year energy. Don't get so down. In other under-reported news: until the Earth reaches 100% de-population, it can in-fact get worse. Therefore, it's currently not that bad! Let's take a moment to appreciate that we live on a populated planetary body. The Peter Thiel has not yet achieved its ultimate goal. Good times.
    - i_love_retros 6mo ago
      > My friend, misanthropy is giving last year energy. Don't get so down. Have you read the news lately?
      - aerhardt 6mo ago
        No - that’s my secret.
- yubblegum 6mo ago
  Our Earth is like a blue angel in the solar system.
youknownothing 6mo ago
To be fair, considering that there are minerals in the Moon that don't exist on Earth, it's normal that the human body experiments an allergic reaction to a set of substances that it hasn't ever been exposed to during thousands of years of evolution.
hellopineapple 6mo ago
Hourly cost doesn’t seems the right metrics, instead the cost should be tied to productivity or difficulty of problem solved
- bsza 6mo ago
  I’m guessing this comment was intended on a different post or on someone else’s comment.
nvader 6mo ago
Lunar dust is Kiki while earth dust is bouba.
- tasoeur 6mo ago
  I’m assuming your comment is a reference to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
  - nvader 6mo ago
    Correct, thanks for linking to context. Kiki/Bouba became something of a meme recently.
tyrowvgt 6mo ago
Unbelievable, billions spent on sending few to moon while millions are dying homeless here
- notepad0x90 6mo ago
  sounds like you're focusing on the wrong billions, the war on iran alone could provide housing to all homeless in the US. It's not for a lack of money people are homeless in the US (which is launching this). it's for a lack of political will, because voters don't want to provide free housing to homeless people. They're more concerned about being able to buy instead of rent a house (less apartments, more houses) or protect the value of their house ("no homeless people near me, and certainly an abundance of housing reduces prices for my house investment"). Hey, at least those issues won't be a problem, if homeless people can charter a flight to Mars, if these efforts pan out.
- kryptiskt 6mo ago
  Unbelievable, literally trillions upon trillions spent on all other kind of shit like warfare and utter corruption. And some people just can't get over that people fifty years ago spent a minuscule fraction of that to go to the moon.
alex1138 6mo ago
It wasn't just lunar dust, all(?) the crews also reported smelling burning in the tunnel (tunnel connecting CM and LM), might be something to do with the docking latches
deleted 6mo ago
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shevy-java 6mo ago
This sounds as if walking on the moon led to some symptoms. But if you know Chris Hadfield, he said "space has a rusty burn smell" even elsewhere. How can they conclude that moonwalking specifically led to what was described? The article has "The toxic side of the Moon", but IMO it would be more reasonable to assume that space in general is toxic, not "only" the moon. It also means that the space suits are not well-equipped - people in 50 years from now will shake their heads about that, how naive we may have been.
emsign 6mo ago
Moon dust is really nasty and actually a bigger problem for astronauts and equipment than radiation which can simply be avoided by settling in magma tunnels.
cineticdaffodil 6mo ago
Cave Johnson here..
elnatro 6mo ago
Couldn’t they just avoid touching the ground by building on top? Or just create a concrete floor?
OutOfHere 6mo ago
Terraforming Luna or Mars is a stupid idea due to their toxic dust. It would be a lot easier to just mine them and construct a rotating habitat in space. The space mission I want to see is one that brings out a container full of rocks from the planetary body back to Earth or to a space station for processing and construction.
cineticdaffodil 6mo ago
Can this dust reach escape velocity with a meteor impact? Could a iss be floating in the equivalent of dpace Sahara dust?
- dredmorbius 6mo ago
  Yes, but Space is Big. The density of dust of any description (lunar or other, including residual solar system dust, comet dust, asteroid dust, etc.) is low. Relative velocities can be quite high, however, and even very small particles (sand to ball-bearing sized) can inflict significant damage. Attenuation in low-Earth orbit (where the ISS is) from atmospheric drag is also probably fairly high, so that any dust captured in such an orbit (as opposed to passing through on a one-time or high-inclination orbit) would likely enter the atmosphere fairly quickly. That said, I've seen discussion elsewhere that lunar dust accelerated by any mechanism (impacts, or rocket fire) won't billow as dust does on Earth, but will launch on a ballistic trajectory. Whether that's suborbital, orbital, or (lunar) escape velocity depends on the initiating event. We've found numerous lunar and Martial fragments as Earth-impact meteorites, with various sources giving 200--400 known Martian fragments: <https://www.sciencealert.com/almost-200-fragments-of-mars-made-it-all-the-way-to-earth-but-how https://www.sciencealert.com/almost-200-fragments-of-mars-ma...> Lunar dust liberated by impacts is all but certainly a component of near-Earth space dust, but probably a small percentage based on a quick search. Most seems to be of comet or asteroid origin.
metalglot 6mo ago
Any moonbase will seriously run into this problem. Nightmare!
ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
Anyone expecting to colonize Mars, or even send humans there, within the next 1,000 years is going to be sorely disappointed. I told my neighbor: we could send some humans to Mars, but not expect to get them back! Even if Mars were pre-terraformed, even if Mars were a perfect idyllic copy of Earth and a Garden of Eden just inviting humans to go there and set up bases, we could not send crews to Mars. The final nail in this coffin was, for me, when I heard an ISS Expedition astronaut explain what NASA prohibits when they return from a long stretch on the Space Station. The astronauts are not permitted to jog or lift weights. They can't drive a vehicle or fly aircraft(!) They mustn't jump or twist their head around too fast. They must re-learn how to brush their teeth and how to drink fluids. They may feel dizzy, nauseous, or have trouble with spatial judgement. They are, essentially, helpless toddlers confined to their quarters. I mean, it is quite obvious by the way that they must drag these national heroes onto a gurney from the capsule after splash-down that their physiques are no longer normal. The astronauts experience a lot of muscle atrophy and unique procedures in microgravity. If an astronaut can't even jog, or pass a roadside sobriety test, or go to the bathroom for themselves after an ISS mission, how, after 6 months' travel in deep space, will they accomplish anything at a Mars base, even mere survival? Surely we could send up all supplies with autonomous vessels. Pre-stock water tanks and oxygen and air and have robots build a basic Mars-base there, before any astronaut arrives. But if the actual journey is practically incapacitating our actual human beings, the whole deal is off. So no, we'll never get to Mars in the way that Musk and NASA promise. We'll keep sending robots eager to find out more and explore the interesting parts. The robots can bring back all the samples they want. They'll send pictures and even audio and plenty of sensor data. But humans will be lucky if we get a stable colony on the Moon (I believe that Moon Bases have their own currently insurmountable obstacles.) I think that humankind should be really happy and satisfied that we've got orbital space stations with continuous habitation now.
- DreadY2K 6mo ago
  > how, after 6 months' travel in deep space, will they accomplish anything at a Mars base, even mere survival? I expect the answer is spin gravity. Have a long cable with a counterweight on the other end, spin it at some rate. We would need some studying about the exact impacts (how hard is it to learn to start/stop compensating for Coriolis forces?), but it'd be much easier than full weightlessness.
starkeeper 6mo ago
it would be easier if they just rolled around in hamster balls to keep the dust out!
burnt-resistor 6mo ago
So a risk somewhat similar to diatomaceous earth and asbestos. A risk that might need to be mitigated should Moon habitation/occupation make financial sense.

458 points by cybermango 6mo ago

m463 6mo ago

we have similar problems with volcanic ash on earth

jMyles 6mo ago
I walked up to the flows on Fagradalsfjall when it was erupting a couple of years ago, and I found the cinereous, sulfurous air to be very medicinal and clearing. I'm not sure it'd have good for me for more than a few hours, but as it was, it was great. I occasionally wish I were able to just have a chamber with that air in it.
- kzrdude 6mo ago
  There are some saunas on Iceland that expose you to earth gasses, might be exactly the kind of chamber you are after. I've visited one, and it was unfortunately cold for a sauna because that's naturally varying too.
tim-tday 6mo ago
Exactly, but the lack of a water cycle on the moon means that all the dust is sharp and always will be. It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin. It degrades rubber seals.

jjmarr 6mo ago

Have any of them developed cancer from the space asbestos yet?

loloquwowndueo 6mo ago
Only 4 are still alive, all in their 90s so that’d be a long time - even if some do have cancer at this stage it’s not likely to affect life expectancy I guess.
- AngryData 6mo ago
  We also have to remember that those astronauts were some of the most physically fit individuals in a nation of hundreds of millions which may skew the expected medical outcomes. Especially if we assume they always had the best healthcare available, if from nothing else than doctors asking similiar qiestions about the effects of space travel.
  - wat10000 6mo ago
    The exposure was brief, too. Wikipedia says mesothelioma has been known to develop from exposures of "only" 1 month. That's a scary short time if it's in your home or workplace, but comfortably longer than an Apollo mission. Could be an issue for a future base, though.
    - bdamm 6mo ago
      It definitely puts a damper on my personal enthusiasm for visiting the moon hotel, or even encouraging researchers to live there.
  - altmanaltman 6mo ago
    I mean Neil Armstrong literally smoked and did not "believe" in excercise so they were absolutely not the most physically fittest people. They were just freaks in terms of enduring a lot of stress tests. Physical endurance is just one aspect they train for. Other aspects were much more valued like them being military flight pilots/smart enough to understand the systems/mentally strong enough to not break down etc. You were not selecting for absolute raw fitness for the apollo missions.
    - AngryData 6mo ago
      They didn't select for pure physical fitness but they were already selected for fitness as a pilot and then again when they were selected from the pilots to train as an astonaut. Its not like they just picked arbitrarily from the potential pool of candidates and gambled on getting better than average.
porphyra 6mo ago
Even with actual asbestos, the risk goes up a lot with duration and intensity of exposure. Probably, the risks of getting cancer from a brief exposure is fairly low, and combined with the ridiculously small sample size of only 12 people to ever set foot on the moon, it's natural that none of them got "moon cancer". That said, with asbesto, it's still possible to get cancer even from brief exposures: > Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1] [1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/asbestos/asbestos-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
Part of what makes asbestos (and also fiberglass) dangerous, isn't just the sharpness but also the long shape which means that macrophages can't engulf them. Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.
- LorenPechtel 6mo ago
  Sounds to me like the threat would be silicosis.

ButlerianJihad 6mo ago

[flagged]

gunto 6mo ago
[flagged]

OsrsNeedsf2P 6mo ago

They describe the dust on the moon as, > Fine like powder, but sharp like glass Sounds scary. But totally worth it!

heckelson 6mo ago
It's like Asbestos!

jiveturkey 6mo ago

[flagged]

krunck 6mo ago

Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles seem like a necessity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars

snthpy 6mo ago
TIL
tim-tday 6mo ago
Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating station on Venus. At least there you’d have the correct pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It’s just also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.
- MengerSponge 6mo ago
  Mars is so bad, y'all.
- card_zero 6mo ago
  Since the perchlorate is generated by reaction with sunlight, it might be limited to a surface layer. Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
  - kzrdude 6mo ago
    Regolith is all the loose stuff, everything that's not bedrock, even if it might be quite deep.
  - vondur 6mo ago
    Rocket fuel for the taking?
- lukan 6mo ago

BFV 6mo ago

That’s such a weirdly specific detail but also kinda fascinating. Imagine going to the Moon and the first thing you notice is “huh… smells like gunpowder.

skywhopper 6mo ago
I just had a filling replaced at the dentist yesterday and when he was grinding away at it to shape it, I would get a terrible whiff of something like gunpowder. It was quite disturbing. But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon dust.
nottorp 6mo ago
The weird part may be that everyone seems to know what gunpowder smells like...

labelbabyjunior 6mo ago

[flagged]

ethagnawl 6mo ago
> no PPE needed Says you ...
- labelbabyjunior 6mo ago
  Apparently you've never had drywall work done, the level of risk these guys take in stride is shocking.
smokedetector1 6mo ago
This is a very unpleasant comment, consider deleting.
- labelbabyjunior 6mo ago
  Try leaving your bubble sometime and stepping onto a construction site, you would be in awe.

tcp_handshaker 6mo ago

"The toxic side of the Moon" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768039

ortusdux 6mo ago

This is a big perk of the newer lunar rover design, wherein the suits stay outside the vehicle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Specifications_(2008_design) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec... There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1

corysama 6mo ago

I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said “astronauts report” the moon smells like spent gunpowder and outer space smell like… I think it was ozone. What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder! And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.

Bender 6mo ago
My UV sterilizing lights make my room smell like O3 Ozone and that smells nothing like spent gun-powder to me. The only other time I have smelled the same thing is when there has been mass lightening events in the sky. Were they talking about actual black powder or nitrocellulose? I've smelled black powder at the range when people bring out their antique rifles and that also does not smell like Ozone to me.
- coffeebeqn 6mo ago
  Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smell
  - Bender 6mo ago
    Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smell Those are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its 34F outside right now.
    - echelon 6mo ago
      I don't think any of you should want to be smelling Ozone. Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The ozone species is even more oxidative. Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's also killing us. Ozone is worse. "Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth the squeeze.

hvs 6mo ago

If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars: https://www.acityonmars.com/ https://www.acityonmars.com/ It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/ https://www.smbc-comics.com/

themafia 6mo ago
[flagged]
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable. Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.
api 6mo ago
This is on my reading list. I've read synopses of it, and I don't think it's going to change my mind a lot. I'm still long-term pro-space-exploration, but even before this book I'd come to the conclusion that this is a lot harder than naive nerds tend to think. I think it's worth doing and probably will be done eventually, but it's gonna take a while. I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself. In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. We don't know if 1/6 or 1/3 gravity is enough for us to reproduce and prosper, but we know 1g is. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. You could, once you get good at this, actually create hyper-habitable environments tuned to be ideal for human life. People aren't tracking in nasty asbestos-like regolith or perchlorates or anything else you don't want. Most reasonable near-mid term proposals for living on Mars or the Moon I've read about call for spending most time underground. Going there to do that seems pointless. Living in space itself could be much nicer. The interior of such a ring would look nothing like this very Hollywood "luxury hotel" thing, but this little short film gives you a sense of what the relationship to the external space environment might be like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPmgW21rwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPmgW21rwY Radiation is still an issue, but there's ideas for that that could work for a ring in hard space vacuum that don't work as well on a planet. One is to put a big superconductor around the ring and give it a magnetosphere. The whole habitat is a big electromagnet. Most cosmic rays and solar particles are charged. The power requirements are not as great as you'd think. For resources asteroids are probably better than planets. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. The delta-V requirements of sending stuff back to your space-city are literally at the scale of "throw it real hard." Their low mass also means you don't have to dig deep and the heavy elements didn't sink to the core. You're going to find gigantic amounts of stuff like gold, platinum, pure iridium, fissile materials, etc. Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of. Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod" around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some critical or massively valuable resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places. In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet. Generation ships to the stars would be a natural evolution of this. After doing this for a few hundred or a few thousand years, we'd get so good at it that the idea of a caravan of these mobile cities departing for Centauri or Tau Ceti becomes imaginable and not a total suicide mission. Compared to this I think going to Mars is a dead end. Even if we go there and survive and prosper, now we're just doing planetary civilization again. We're back to squabbling over dirt. The real evolutionary leap is doing something different. Fish didn't come on land to stay fish. But there's also an argument that there's no point in trying until we at least have a couple of key technologies: fusion, very good automated manufacturing, and very good robotics. Fusion is key for enabling scalable power and mobility. Automated manufacturing and very good robotics are probably key to self-sufficiency. Trying to do the "real space age" before the key technologies exist might be akin to, say, trying to start the EV revolution with lead-acid batteries or the PC revolution with vacuum tubes. While it's technically possible to try, it's just not going to "take."

lucasaug 6mo ago

When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade

Patrick_Devine 6mo ago

Isn't this why NASA is developing the Electrodynamic Dust Shield [1] system? [1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-successfully-repels-lunar-regolith-on-moon/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-success...

deleted 6mo ago

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tillinghast 6mo ago

Cue Cave Johnson: “The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill.”

mirekrusin 6mo ago

Sounds similar to asbestos.

mncharity 6mo ago

> "I think one of the most aggravating, restricting facets of lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to everything no matter what kind of material, whether it be skin, suit material, metal, no matter what it be and its restrictive, friction-like action to everything it gets on [...] the simple large-tolerance mechanical devices on the Rover began to show the effect of dust as the EVAs went on. By the middle or the end of the third EVA, simple things like bag locks and the lock which held the pallet on the Rover began not only to malfunction but to not function at all. They effectively froze. We tried to dust them and bang the dust off and clean them, and there was just no way. The effect of dust on mirrors, cameras, and checklists is phenomenal. You have to live with it but you're continually fighting the dust problem both outside and inside the spacecraft. Once you get inside the spacecraft, as much as you dust yourself, you start taking off the suits and you have dust on your hands and your face and you're walking in it. You can be as careful in cleaning up as you want to, but it just sort of inhabits every nook and cranny in the spacecraft and every pore in your skin [...]" Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 debrief[1] An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass, hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged packing peanuts. An old tech memo and paper.[3][4] [1] https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techdebrief.pdf https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techd... page "27-28" 258, 50 in pdf. Lots of other mentions of dust. [2] interactive microscope of regolith https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Assets/70181/index2.html?specimen=/node/153 https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset... [3] The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20050160460.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20... [4] IMPACT OF DUST ON LUNAR EXPLORATION https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S

alex_be 6mo ago

"In addition the Moon has no atmosphere and is constantly bombarded by radiation from the Sun that causes the soil to become electrostatically charged." - You can use a magnetic or electric field to push the soil away

consumer451 6mo ago

As a huge space nerd, I would like to point out that space, and other planetary bodies appear to really suck. It seems to be under-reported that the Earth is pretty nice.

gcbirzan 6mo ago
Sadly, it's populated.
- consumer451 6mo ago
  My friend, misanthropy is giving last year energy. Don't get so down. In other under-reported news: until the Earth reaches 100% de-population, it can in-fact get worse. Therefore, it's currently not that bad! Let's take a moment to appreciate that we live on a populated planetary body. The Peter Thiel has not yet achieved its ultimate goal. Good times.
  - i_love_retros 6mo ago
    > My friend, misanthropy is giving last year energy. Don't get so down. Have you read the news lately?
    - aerhardt 6mo ago
      No - that’s my secret.
yubblegum 6mo ago
Our Earth is like a blue angel in the solar system.

youknownothing 6mo ago

To be fair, considering that there are minerals in the Moon that don't exist on Earth, it's normal that the human body experiments an allergic reaction to a set of substances that it hasn't ever been exposed to during thousands of years of evolution.

hellopineapple 6mo ago

Hourly cost doesn’t seems the right metrics, instead the cost should be tied to productivity or difficulty of problem solved

bsza 6mo ago
I’m guessing this comment was intended on a different post or on someone else’s comment.

nvader 6mo ago

Lunar dust is Kiki while earth dust is bouba.

tasoeur 6mo ago
I’m assuming your comment is a reference to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
- nvader 6mo ago
  Correct, thanks for linking to context. Kiki/Bouba became something of a meme recently.

tyrowvgt 6mo ago

Unbelievable, billions spent on sending few to moon while millions are dying homeless here

notepad0x90 6mo ago
sounds like you're focusing on the wrong billions, the war on iran alone could provide housing to all homeless in the US. It's not for a lack of money people are homeless in the US (which is launching this). it's for a lack of political will, because voters don't want to provide free housing to homeless people. They're more concerned about being able to buy instead of rent a house (less apartments, more houses) or protect the value of their house ("no homeless people near me, and certainly an abundance of housing reduces prices for my house investment"). Hey, at least those issues won't be a problem, if homeless people can charter a flight to Mars, if these efforts pan out.
kryptiskt 6mo ago
Unbelievable, literally trillions upon trillions spent on all other kind of shit like warfare and utter corruption. And some people just can't get over that people fifty years ago spent a minuscule fraction of that to go to the moon.

alex1138 6mo ago

It wasn't just lunar dust, all(?) the crews also reported smelling burning in the tunnel (tunnel connecting CM and LM), might be something to do with the docking latches

deleted 6mo ago

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shevy-java 6mo ago

This sounds as if walking on the moon led to some symptoms. But if you know Chris Hadfield, he said "space has a rusty burn smell" even elsewhere. How can they conclude that moonwalking specifically led to what was described? The article has "The toxic side of the Moon", but IMO it would be more reasonable to assume that space in general is toxic, not "only" the moon. It also means that the space suits are not well-equipped - people in 50 years from now will shake their heads about that, how naive we may have been.

emsign 6mo ago

Moon dust is really nasty and actually a bigger problem for astronauts and equipment than radiation which can simply be avoided by settling in magma tunnels.

cineticdaffodil 6mo ago

Cave Johnson here..

elnatro 6mo ago

Couldn’t they just avoid touching the ground by building on top? Or just create a concrete floor?

OutOfHere 6mo ago

Terraforming Luna or Mars is a stupid idea due to their toxic dust. It would be a lot easier to just mine them and construct a rotating habitat in space. The space mission I want to see is one that brings out a container full of rocks from the planetary body back to Earth or to a space station for processing and construction.

cineticdaffodil 6mo ago

Can this dust reach escape velocity with a meteor impact? Could a iss be floating in the equivalent of dpace Sahara dust?

dredmorbius 6mo ago
Yes, but Space is Big. The density of dust of any description (lunar or other, including residual solar system dust, comet dust, asteroid dust, etc.) is low. Relative velocities can be quite high, however, and even very small particles (sand to ball-bearing sized) can inflict significant damage. Attenuation in low-Earth orbit (where the ISS is) from atmospheric drag is also probably fairly high, so that any dust captured in such an orbit (as opposed to passing through on a one-time or high-inclination orbit) would likely enter the atmosphere fairly quickly. That said, I've seen discussion elsewhere that lunar dust accelerated by any mechanism (impacts, or rocket fire) won't billow as dust does on Earth, but will launch on a ballistic trajectory. Whether that's suborbital, orbital, or (lunar) escape velocity depends on the initiating event. We've found numerous lunar and Martial fragments as Earth-impact meteorites, with various sources giving 200--400 known Martian fragments: <https://www.sciencealert.com/almost-200-fragments-of-mars-made-it-all-the-way-to-earth-but-how https://www.sciencealert.com/almost-200-fragments-of-mars-ma...> Lunar dust liberated by impacts is all but certainly a component of near-Earth space dust, but probably a small percentage based on a quick search. Most seems to be of comet or asteroid origin.

metalglot 6mo ago

Any moonbase will seriously run into this problem. Nightmare!

ButlerianJihad 6mo ago

Anyone expecting to colonize Mars, or even send humans there, within the next 1,000 years is going to be sorely disappointed. I told my neighbor: we could send some humans to Mars, but not expect to get them back! Even if Mars were pre-terraformed, even if Mars were a perfect idyllic copy of Earth and a Garden of Eden just inviting humans to go there and set up bases, we could not send crews to Mars. The final nail in this coffin was, for me, when I heard an ISS Expedition astronaut explain what NASA prohibits when they return from a long stretch on the Space Station. The astronauts are not permitted to jog or lift weights. They can't drive a vehicle or fly aircraft(!) They mustn't jump or twist their head around too fast. They must re-learn how to brush their teeth and how to drink fluids. They may feel dizzy, nauseous, or have trouble with spatial judgement. They are, essentially, helpless toddlers confined to their quarters. I mean, it is quite obvious by the way that they must drag these national heroes onto a gurney from the capsule after splash-down that their physiques are no longer normal. The astronauts experience a lot of muscle atrophy and unique procedures in microgravity. If an astronaut can't even jog, or pass a roadside sobriety test, or go to the bathroom for themselves after an ISS mission, how, after 6 months' travel in deep space, will they accomplish anything at a Mars base, even mere survival? Surely we could send up all supplies with autonomous vessels. Pre-stock water tanks and oxygen and air and have robots build a basic Mars-base there, before any astronaut arrives. But if the actual journey is practically incapacitating our actual human beings, the whole deal is off. So no, we'll never get to Mars in the way that Musk and NASA promise. We'll keep sending robots eager to find out more and explore the interesting parts. The robots can bring back all the samples they want. They'll send pictures and even audio and plenty of sensor data. But humans will be lucky if we get a stable colony on the Moon (I believe that Moon Bases have their own currently insurmountable obstacles.) I think that humankind should be really happy and satisfied that we've got orbital space stations with continuous habitation now.

DreadY2K 6mo ago
> how, after 6 months' travel in deep space, will they accomplish anything at a Mars base, even mere survival? I expect the answer is spin gravity. Have a long cable with a counterweight on the other end, spin it at some rate. We would need some studying about the exact impacts (how hard is it to learn to start/stop compensating for Coriolis forces?), but it'd be much easier than full weightlessness.

starkeeper 6mo ago

it would be easier if they just rolled around in hamster balls to keep the dust out!

burnt-resistor 6mo ago

So a risk somewhat similar to diatomaceous earth and asbestos. A risk that might need to be mitigated should Moon habitation/occupation make financial sense.