Moon Landings, Bases & Exploration

By Martin K. Ettington

What is the history of plans to build a base on the Moon and what are all the issues involved?

Where should the base be built and what will be do once we have long term habitation on the Moon?

 

What are the latest plans for lunar rovers, communications, and other moon base systems?

My hope is that the reader will learn about all of the issues important to building a Moon Base to better understand what will be required.

 

You might even want to become a Moon Base resident!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Royal Hawaiian Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201927837

Martin K. Ettington

Martin’s is an Engineer who is  interested in Spirituality, the Paranormal, Longevity, and the Occult goes back to his childhood. He has had many paranormal experiences and has been a student of Eastern Philosophies and Meditation for 40 years. Seeking Enlightenment; he knows that we are already all Enlightened. We just have to realize this deeply. His books are expressions of his creativity to help others understand what he has internalized through study, experience, and membership in different societies. You can see all of his books on the homepage of http://mkettingtonbooks.com  

Book preview

Moon Landings

Bases & Exploration

A History & Current Plans

By Martin K. Ettington

All material contained herein is

Copyright © Martin K. Ettington 2021 all rights reserved.

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Published in English with permission.

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Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9864524-7-0

ePub ISBN: 979-8-2019278-3-7

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Written by Martin K. Ettington

Published by Royal Hawaiian Press

Cover art by Tyrone Roshantha

Publishing Assistance: Dorota Reszke

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For more works by this author, please visit:

http://www.royalhawaiianpress.com

http://mkettingtonbooks.com

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Version Number 1.00

Table of Contents

1.0 Introduction

2.0 Earth and Lunar Environments

2.1 The Moon Environment

2.2 The Discovery of Ice at the Lunar Poles

3.0 Legal Issues and Treaties on the Moon

4.0 Requirements for Building Moon Bases

5.0 Moon Bases in Science Fiction

5.1 From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne

5.2 The First Man in the Moon by H.G. Wells

5.3 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress By Robert Heinlein

5.4 The 2001 Movie Moon Base by Arthur C. Clarke

5.5 Artemis By Andy Weir

6.0 Early Moon Base Design Proposals

6.1 Project Horizon

6.2 Subsurface Moon bases

6.3 The LESA Moon Base

6.4 Underground Base Plan

7.0 The First Moon Landings

8.0 NASA’s Plans for Lunar Travel, Bases & More

8.2 The Deep Space Gateway

8.3 Modern Lunar Lander Concepts

8.4 SpaceX’s Starship Lunar Lander

8.5 Settling the South Pole

8.6 Far Side Bases

9.0 Types of Moon Bases

9.2 Printing Buildings

9.3 Underground Structures

10.0 Lunar Space Suits

11.0 Lunar Transportation

12.0 Lunar Power Production

13.0 Communications

14.0 Mining Water Ice

15.0 Growing Food on the Moon

16.0 Current Plans for NASA Moon Bases

17.0 Chinese and Russian Lunar Plans

17.1 Unmanned Lunar Lander Visits to the Farside

17.2 A Chinese and Russian Lunar Base

18.0 Additional Technologies Needed

19.0 Schedules for Construction

20.0 Atreus Countries, Companies, and Plans

20.1 Space Launch System

20.2 The Orion Capsule

20.3 Lunar Gateway Partners

24.0 Moon Base Cost Estimates

25.0 A Story of Building the Moon Base

25.1 Early Moon Base Construction

25.2 Main Shelter Construction

25.3 Finishing the Shelter

26.0 Types of People Needed

27.0 Reasons for a Moon Base

27.2 A Dry run for Visiting Mars

27.3 Exploitation of Lunar Resources

28.0 Moon Base Future Growth Plans

29.0 Future Moon Structures

30.0 Summary

31.0 Bibliography

32.0 Index

Other books by Martin K. Ettington

NASA’s plans to land on the Moon again have been in flux in the last few years. Russia is also no longer a partner as they were previously.

What is the history of plans to build a base on the Moon and what are all the issues involved?

Where should the base be built and what will be do once we have long term habitation on the Moon?

And what are the latest plans for lunar rovers, communications, and other moon base systems?

My hope is that the reader will learn about all of the issues important to building a Moon Base to better understand what will be required.

You might even want to become a Moon Base resident!

1.0 Introduction

This is an updated book about Moon bases and living on the Moon. I like to write about popular topics which interest me and the Moon is one of them.

Maybe it has to do with my growing up in the 1960s at the height of the Apollo Program. I remember walking to school at about seven years old and the kids in the group were all talking about the Mercury Astronauts and how cool they were. Then I followed all of the succeeding Gemini and Apollo missions. It was an incredible experience to watch the Apollo 11 landing and first Moonwalk at Boy Scout camp with us all gathered in the dining hall.

Later on I worked for Hewlett Packard at the NASA Human Spaceflight Center in Houston for a couple of years in the mid nineteen eighties. I also met many of the Astronauts including July Resnick who was killed on the Challenger Shuttle when it blew up at launch. Watching President Reagans’ speech at the Johnson Space Center as a memorial to them was also quite the experience. One of my friends who took me up in his Pitt Special acrobatic plane a couple of times later became an Astronaut on the MIR, Space Shuttle, and Space Station. I got my Pilots license at Laporte Airport, Texas where many of the off duty Astronauts flew acrobatic planes for fun.

I also applied to the Astronaut Corp but being a civilian and not having any degrees beyond my B.S. in Engineering Science filtered me out. Never the less, I’ve always been a fan of the space program. I still follow all the details I can to this day.

In the last couple of years I wrote a comprehensive guide to Space Colonies titled Designing and Building Space Colonies-A Blueprint for the Future. In that book I covered a lot of the issues about living in space and construction of space colonies.

With the birth of the Atreus Program and plans to land man on the Moon again in 2025 or later, I thought this would be a good time to go into the history of Moon landings and proposed Moon colonies and maybe make a few of my own suggestions too.

I hope you enjoy this journey into our near future.

2.0 Earth and Lunar Environments

The Moon and the Earth are very different environments. It is important to emphasize the differences in the living conditions of these two spheres to better understand what will have to be built into structures to live safely on the Moon.

2.1 The Moon Environment

Gravity

The Moon's mass is about 1/80th (1.2%) of the Earth's mass, so the Moon's gravity is much less than the Earth's gravity; specifically, the Moon's gravity is 1/6th (16.7%) of the Earth's gravity. Or, stated another way, the Moon's gravity is 5/6 (83.3%) LESS than the Earth's.

This means that you will weigh much less on the Moon but the inertia of objects in motion will remain the same. So you can lift a lot, but will still have trouble stopping a large object in motion.

Atmosphere

On Earth at sea level the atmospheric pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch. The Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere and is basically a vacuum. This means all structures will need to be airtight and have airlocks for going in and out. Of course you will need to wear a spacesuit on the surface on the Moon.

Radiation

The surface of the Moon is baldly exposed to cosmic rays and solar flares, and some of that radiation is very hard to stop with shielding. Furthermore, when cosmic rays hit the ground, they produce a dangerous spray of secondary particles right at your feet. All this radiation penetrating human flesh can damage DNA, boosting the risk of cancer and other maladies. Spacesuits and buildings need to be able to protect humans from this radioactive environment.

Of course the atmosphere on Earth protects us from these deadly rays.

Temperature

Daytime on one side of the Moon lasts about 13 and a half days, followed by 13 and a half nights of darkness. When sunlight hits the Moon's surface, the temperature can reach 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius). When the sun goes down, temperatures can dip to minus 280 F (minus 173 C)

Earth’s temperature varies from the extremes of 132 degree Fahrenheit to minus 126.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

These temperature extremes also mean that your spacesuit needs to be designed to withstand large temperature shifts.

Water

The Earth is a watery planet which is covered 71 percent by water in Oceans and lakes.

We used to think that there was no water on the Moon. Now we have satellites which show there should be water ice at the Poles, especially the South Pole. The question is can we mine it and purify it?

2.2 The Discovery of Ice at the Lunar Poles

Finding water ice on the moon is of great importance for building moon bases. This will provide oxygen and water for the base’s consumption and also hydrogen which can be used a rocket fuel for many rockets.

Ice at the moon’s poles might have come from ancient volcanoes. The eruptions may have produced several transient atmospheres

Schrödinger crater on the moon

Schrödinger crater (shown) lies near the moon’s South Pole. Ice might have arrived at both lunar poles as water vapor released by ancient volcanic eruptions.

Four billion years ago, lava spilled onto the moon’s crust, etching the man in the moon we see today. But the volcanoes may have also left a much colder legacy: ice.

Two billion years of volcanic eruptions on the moon may have led to the creation of many short-lived atmospheres, which contained water vapor, a new study suggests. That vapor could have been transported through the atmosphere before settling as ice at the poles, researchers report in the May Planetary Science Journal.

Since the existence of lunar ice was confirmed in 2009, scientists have debated the possible origins of water on the moon, which include asteroids, comets or electrically charged atoms carried by the solar wind Or, possibly, the water originated on the moon itself, as vapor belched by the rash of volcanic eruptions from 4 billion to 2 billion years ago.

It’s a really interesting question how those volatiles [such as water] got there, says Andrew Wilcoski, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. We still don’t really have a good handle on how much are there and where exactly they are.

Wilcoski and his colleagues decided to start by tackling volcanism’s viability as a lunar ice source. During the heyday of lunar volcanism, eruptions happened about once every 22,000 years. Assuming that H2O constituted about a third of volcano-spit gasses — based on samples of ancient lunar magma — the researchers calculate that the eruptions released upward of 20 quadrillion kilograms of water vapor in total, or the volume of approximately 25 Lake Superiors.

Some of this vapor would have been lost to space, as sunlight broke down water molecules or the solar wind blew the molecules off the moon. But at the frigid poles, some could have stuck to the surface as ice.

For that to happen, though, the rate at which the water vapor condensed into ice would have needed to surpass the rate at which the vapor escaped the moon. The team used a computer simulation to calculate and compare these rates. The simulation accounted for factors such as surface temperature, gas pressure and the loss of some vapor to mere frost.

About 40 percent of the total erupted water vapor could have accumulated as ice, with most of that ice at the poles, the team found. Over billions of years, some of that ice would have converted