The company called SOM Architects is famous for designing the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and designing such iconic buildings has become one of the company's characteristics. . Architects in the company's New York office have an even more astonishing job on their hands: drawings for SOM's first extraterrestrial mission. The company is working with the European Space Agency (ESA) and MIT to design a lunar base.
Lead designer Daniel Inocente showed off schematics and renderings of raised white pod-like buildings scattered across the lunar surface, connected by tubular walkways and surrounded by robots. , solar panels and astronauts, all revealed against a blue planet clearly visible in the sky.
Recently, the topic of sending humans back to the moon has become a hot topic. This is the first time since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s. In 2016, the head of the European Space Agency proposed the concept of a "lunar village" and intentionally described it very vaguely, encouraging private and public actors to collaborate on robotic and human exploration of the moon. In 2018, eight Chinese volunteers successfully lived in the "Yuegong-1" simulated lunar base for a year in order to test the life support system.
While the private industry has no immediate plans to send humans to the moon, SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets could significantly reduce the cost of related government programs. Just a few months ago, US Vice President Mike Pence pledged to send astronauts to the moon again within five years.
To put it simply, if humans want to live on the moon, experts must solve some problems. For example, to deal with the harsh environment, use the moon's own materials to build buildings, and master life-saving technologies, we also need to solve a fatal problem that we currently cannot solve at all - dust.
As real estate agents will tell you, the three most important factors in finding the right place to live on the moon are: location, location, location. SOM believes that the most suitable site is a piece of land on the edge of Shackleton Crater near the moon's south pole.
There is tangible evidence that the permanently shadowed area of ????the crater contains water left by ancient comets, which can be used for drinking, cooking, bathing, making concrete, and can also be decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen for use as rocket boosters. Push fuel.
No matter where they are built, however, space architects and engineers will be subject to constraints that traditional pioneers did not. The moon has almost no air, so habitats must be sealed and pressurized. Additionally, while most space rocks will burn up in Earth's atmosphere, the Moon's surface will continue to be bombarded by micrometeoroids, so structures must be strong enough to withstand their onslaught.
The gravity on the moon is about 1/6 of the earth's gravity. In this environment, larger buildings can be built, but the number of anchor points needs to be increased, and the weak gravity makes excavation difficult because it will bounce back when pushed downwards. Extreme temperatures require habitats with powerful heating and cooling systems and raw materials that can expand and contract extremely well.
Then there is radiation. The sun continuously emits high-speed protons and electrons, which is the solar wind. The Earth's magnetic field protects us from the solar wind, but the Moon has no magnetic field, so all the solar wind hits the lunar surface. Coronal mass ejections are even more dangerous. In this process, a large number of higher-energy protons and electrons are ejected into space. When the ejection is strong, it may reach several sieverts (sieverts are a unit of measurement of radiation exposure) on the lunar surface. If the ejection is not returned to Earth to receive a bone marrow transplant, people may die as a result. Even if these risks are tolerable, astronauts on the moon will still have to endure continuous exposure to galactic cosmic rays. The consequence is that astronauts will be exposed to the risk of cancer throughout their lives.
Innocente described the company's proposal in SOM's New York office to 3D print walls around the lunar habitat pod-shaped building to protect against deadly radiation.
If you live for a long time, you need a 3-meter-thick protective wall to resist galactic cosmic rays. It's simply not practical to transport several tons of concrete from Earth, so astronauts need to "source it locally," that is, use what's available there.
SOM’s idea is to use lunar soil to build walls, and the lunar soil lacks organic matter, so it is more appropriately called “regolith”. One construction method is to 3D print walls, which can be done by printing an entire wall where it stands, or by printing bricks that can be stacked and locked together. Some space architects have proposed using machine-controlled nozzles to deposit cement based on regolith in layers.
But what if the liquid used in the cement mix evaporates or freezes before the wall or brick is formed? European researchers working with architecture firm Foster Partners have explored adhesive fluids and injection methods in the hope of preventing this from happening. They printed a wall using a simulant of regolith, but that also meant contractors would need to transport liquid adhesive or special cement powder to the moon.
SOM prefers to use nozzles such as hot melt glue to squeeze out the molten regolith. Another method is sintering, which involves heating the regolith close to its melting point until it melts. In the European Space Agency's RegoLight project, researchers focused sunlight into a powerful beam that swept across the surface of a regolith simulant, burning out layers of bricks. The process is so slow and the test bricks are so fragile that many researchers believe the winning strategy will be microwave sintering, which uses a microwave oven or a beam to bind the dust. SOM is closely following the sintering research.
For relatively low habitat, it may be sufficient to simply pile regolith on top of a metal structure (leaving room for maintenance). Another more clever method is to place the habitation module in the moon's lava tubes, which are large hollow tubes through which lava once flowed.
Regolith can not only be used to protect buildings, but can also be used to pave launching pads and roads. Brent Sherwood, chairman of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' (AIAA) Space Architecture Technical Committee, proposed using a microwave oven to bake floor tiles. If the platforms where aircraft land and the roads where vehicles drive are paved with such bricks, less dust will be raised. On this kind of road, the terrain problems faced by the robot when walking are also easier to solve. "The idea is basically to transform the lunar surface into a predictable workplace like an Amazon warehouse," he said.
Lunar habitat habitation behind a fence made of lunar regolith What does the cabin look like? The designs being developed by SOM are based on proposals made by engineers over the past few decades, most of which are arched or cylindrical structures, but also buried and semi-submerged structures.
Space architects and engineers generally believe that the initial lunar habitat will resemble the International Space Station (ISS) cabin. Haym Benaroya, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at Rutgers University and author of "Building a Lunar Habitat: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlement" (Springer, 2018), said, "First-generation technology may not be as glamorous" compared to sci-fi renderings. The initial habitat will be some kind of pressure vessel, covered with regolith for radiation protection, in a sense, a tin can buried in the ground.
According to Sherwood, who has worked on Boeing's International Space Station habitation module, engineers already know how to structure, test, launch and repair such a module. "We've learned a lot from the space station," he said.
Eventually, we may move to inflatable capsules that can expand in size, but before that, we need to understand how to integrate them into a rigid structure , how to fold it so that it can be unfolded in the appropriate way. Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace has licensed NASA to use its patents to build the inflatable capsule, which was installed on the International Space Station for testing in 2016.
Currently the inflatable capsule is used only for storage, but Bigelow has been collecting data on how the inflatable capsule responds to temperature changes, radiation and impacts from space debris.
In collaboration with the European Space Agency, SOM chose a structure somewhere between a can and a balloon. The living module designed by SOM architects is approximately cylindrical in shape and is 9.5 meters high. The cabin has three floors, with a vertical core for the occupants to use when going up and down. Three inflatable sections are the same height as the living module, allowing for increased living space on all floors. There are 3 doors on the ground floor connecting adjacent cabins.
In designing the Burj Khalifa, SOM did not need to consider urine recirculation. The moon's first life support system will likely be an "open-loop" system similar to the Apollo program, supplying oxygen, food and water, and disposing of waste on-site. One calculation shows that each person needs 5 to 15 tons of consumption per year, mainly air, food and water.
But the first step is likely to be a material and chemical recycling system like the International Space Station. The space station collects urine, wastewater and condensation from astronauts' sweat and breath, filters it and converts it into drinking water. A molecular sieve facility (using silica crystals and alumina) is used to remove carbon dioxide from the air, while at the same time, oxygen is produced by electrolyzing water.
NASA’s next-generation life support project is studying some new methods, but key technical expert Molly Anderson said: “We are not trying to invent new chemical processes.” NASA mainly If you want to improve the efficiency of your existing system, you also want the hardware to be lighter, more reliable, and easier to maintain. In terms of new equipment, the NASA team is testing the following models: an oxygenating air compressor for spacesuit oxygen tanks, a pyrolysis system that uses heat to break down solid waste into useful elements, and a portable DNA sequencer for monitoring microorganisms on and inside water bodies.
Anderson said that in at least one aspect, life support on the moon is not as difficult as on the International Space Station, and that is the ability to shower and flush toilets in a gravity environment.
The next stage in lunar life support is a biological regeneration system, in which organisms in the habitat can provide food, purify air and water, and break down waste. The European Space Agency's Microecological Life Support Alternatives (MELiSSA) program conducted an experiment in which three mice lived with some algae for 6 months. Rats convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, and algae plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.
We can even use living things to build buildings. Lark of the European Space Agency has grown bricks from mycelium and plant matter. Luck also demonstrated that fungi could withstand weightlessness and radiation similar to those on the moon. This locally grown material may have the potential to replace regolith as a building material.
We may also need to build a hybrid system where some of the food is sourced from the earth. Even if scientists could genetically modify crops to produce all the necessary nutrients, astronauts would likely need a variety of foods to keep their guts healthy, and people wouldn't want to eat the same thing every day. Turning plants or algae into food also requires extensive processing. "We didn't send astronauts there to do farming," Anderson said.
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Sherwood echoed the need for food diversity, especially in hopes that the moon will attract space tourists. under the premise. “You can’t run a hotel until you can make a martini and make an egg roll,” he said. But we don’t know anything about cooking in low gravity.
In order for humans to live on the moon, SOM also needs to plan a robotic workforce. Sherwood said: "Surveying, regolith removal, construction, resource extraction, simple maintenance, human beings are not the best choice to do these things." SOM hopes that robots can build a habitable cabin before humans live in it, and perhaps also Build a food manufacturing pod and build regolith walls.
There is also a problem that is fatal to both humans and machines - dust.
Over billions of years, micrometeoroid impacts have ground the lunar surface into sharp, glassy shards of dust that lack air or water to smooth the edges. 10 to 20 percent by weight of the Moon's superficial rock debris contains particles less than 20 microns in diameter, similar to fine talc.
The solar wind makes these particles electrostatically charged, so they will float into the air and stick to everything. However, they are so small that humans cannot see them. During the Apollo program, just hours after astronauts walked on the lunar surface, dust began to cake on the bottoms of their boots, scuffing spacesuits, scratching lenses, damaging machinery, clogging air filters, and irritating the astronauts' eyes and noses. . May cause cancer if inhaled.
Getting to the moon is hard enough, staying on it will be even harder, but if engineers and architects can overcome these difficulties, we will have a world full of possibilities.
Author: Matthew Hutson