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So is it your first day on the lunar surface? Welcome to Clavius Base! I immediately got two tips. The first is: look at your head! You were expecting Dr. Evil’s moon lair, Austin Powers, you know? – with glass domes and color-coded uniforms?
Well, forget it. As you can see, it’s small and cramped here, with every surface cluttered with equipment or personal stuff where there’s room. By the way, this is where you can sign up for the EVA soccer team.
Every cubic meter of living space must be built, kept full of fresh air and protected from radiation. Yes, it’s a bit like the ISS. We are a space station located on the ground.
And the second tip: don’t worry about the smell of burning.
More information about the Moon:
This is lunar dust that oxidizes in the air – superfine grains that enter through locks and filters, no matter what we feel.
It is corrosive to death on seals and membranes and penetrates the pores of the skin. You get used to it.
Okay, here’s where you’ll probably spend most of your waking life: the health center.
The whole base is a kind of experiment; we don’t know how human bodies will respond to lunar gravity and therefore we are the lab rats that will provide the data. Hope you don’t mind the needles!
I see you have a red centrifuge badge – you’re in luck! I’m blue, as you can see; I have to spend a couple of hours a day rotated up to Earth’s gravity. Gray badgers don’t spin at all, so they get nothing more than the lunar gravity pulling on their bones.
But you red badgers gently spin at a third G, which is the same as Martian gravity. Partial gravity experiments can’t be done on Earth, if you think about it.
What’s behind that blue door …? Don’t worry, I’ll tell you later.
So here’s one of our airlocks and a window looking out. Black sky, the earth a kind of light brown color. And the shape you see on the horizon is a robotic miner, dredging the regolith for rare isotopes – fusion fuel for the Earth.
That angular creation similar to an oil rig is laying solar cell panels; most of our energy on the base comes from the sun
Whatever your role, you’ll be spending a lot of time out there – heck, you’ll soon go crazy if you don’t. We keep the equipment, which is still not smart enough to do it alone; we also play sports and explore.
I signed up for a trip to the south pole of the moon next year. Maybe you will come with me.
The view may not seem like much. This is the opposite side, of course, so during the lunar day there is only the Sun in the sky. But at night … wow, you get the deep space sky.
Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, said the Milky Way must be filled with little rocky worlds like this, and if we can learn to live here we can live anywhere. And wherever we go, people will have skies like that. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Okay, what we have here is the hydroponic bay. People spend a lot of their time here – there’s just something about green, growing things, I guess. Bonsai is a popular hobby.
And then there is the life support, the shops and the dorms, and now we’re back to the main loading bay where we started from. Not that big, is it? But you soon get used to it. And soon we may need more space.
Let’s go back to the infirmary and that blue door … Shh!
Listen. That sound, my friend, is something new to the Moon after four billion years, and something completely new to humanity. We are all quite proud. And it shows we’re here to stay. Yes, it’s a baby’s cry!
- This article first appeared in issue 287 of BBC Science Focus – find out how to register here
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