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To ask other readers questions about The Moon Colony , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Dec 16, Perry Whitford rated it liked it. Ineptly charming space adventure for young adults, written without a care in the world for plotting, quality of writing, or even making any sense. Julian Epworth and his plucky sister Joan find themselves in the Arctic then the Moon as they chase down a lunatic German scientist who plans to create a colony on Earth's satellite.

Herman Toplinsky is an outrageously cartoonish baddie, eight foot tall with horse teeth and a long red beard who likes to boast of his own greatness in the third person: I, Herman Toplinsky, the greatest man that ever lived, have said, and what I have said I have said. Joan mocks him, but he puts her in her place: Things are pretty nuts before they get to the Moon, but they get a whole lot crazier thereafter.

It turns out to be populated by competing species of pygmies, one of which ride huge crickets which eat people. Toplinsky gets in with the naughty ones, whose queen takes to riding on his neck. Julian is up against it, but fortunately he can design and make all manor of useful gadgets at a moment's notice and in bulk orders, so that's all right then - Toplinsky, pygmies, crickets and large three-eyed monsters beware!

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Viaje al centro de la Tierra. Jack London's Short Stories: The Call of the Wild and White Fang. The Call of the Wild. The Cruise of the Snark. Jerry of the Islands. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. But the far side is fully exposed, and thus should receive a somewhat greater proportion of the ion stream. Lunar lava tubes are a potential location for constructing a lunar base.

Any intact lava tube on the Moon could serve as a shelter from the severe environment of the lunar surface, with its frequent meteorite impacts, high-energy ultra-violet radiation and energetic particles, and extreme diurnal temperature variations. Lava tubes provide ideal positions for shelter because of their access to nearby resources. They also have proven themselves as a reliable structure, having withstood the test of time for billions of years. An underground colony would escape the extreme of temperature on the Moon's surface.


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One such lava tube was discovered in early There have been numerous proposals regarding habitat modules. The designs have evolved throughout the years as mankind's knowledge about the Moon has grown, and as the technological possibilities have changed. The proposed habitats range from the actual spacecraft landers or their used fuel tanks, to inflatable modules of various shapes. Some hazards of the lunar environment such as sharp temperature shifts, lack of atmosphere or magnetic field which means higher levels of radiation and micrometeoroids and long nights, were unknown early on.

Proposals have shifted as these hazards were recognized and taken into consideration. Some suggest building the lunar colony underground, which would give protection from radiation and micrometeoroids. This would also greatly reduce the risk of air leakage, as the colony would be fully sealed from the outside except for a few exits to the surface. The construction of an underground base would probably be more complex; one of the first machines from Earth might be a remote-controlled excavating machine.

Once created, some sort of hardening would be necessary to avoid collapse, possibly a spray-on concrete -like substance made from available materials. Inflatable self-sealing fabric habitats might then be put in place to retain air. Eventually an underground city can be constructed. Farms set up underground would need artificial sunlight.

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As an alternative to excavating, a lava tube could be covered and insulated, thus solving the problem of radiation exposure. An alternative solution is studied in Europe by students to excavate a habitat in the ice-filled craters of the moon. A possibly easier solution would be to build the lunar base on the surface, and cover the modules with lunar soil. The lunar soil is composed of a unique blend of silica and iron-containing compounds that may be fused into a glass-like solid using microwave energy.

A lunar base built on the surface would need to be protected by improved radiation and micrometeoroid shielding. Building the lunar base inside a deep crater would provide at least partial shielding against radiation and micrometeoroids. Artificial magnetic fields have been proposed [91] [92] as a means to provide radiation shielding for long range deep space crewed missions, and it might be possible to use similar technology on a lunar colony.

Will We Ever Be Able to Colonize the Moon?

Some regions on the Moon possess strong local magnetic fields that might partially mitigate exposure to charged solar and galactic particles. Overall, these habitats would require only ten percent of the structure mass to be transported from Earth, while using local lunar materials for the other 90 percent of the structure mass. Inside, a lightweight pressurized inflatable with the same dome shape would be the living environment for the first human Moon settlers.

In , The Moon Capital Competition offered a prize for a design of a lunar habitat intended to be an underground international commercial center capable of supporting a residential staff of 60 people and their families. The Moon Capital is intended to be self-sufficient with respect to food and other material required for life support. On January 31, , the ESA working with an independent architectural firm, tested a 3D-printed structure that could be constructed of lunar regolith for use as a Moon base. A nuclear fission reactor might fulfill most of a Moon base's power requirements.

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators could be used as backup and emergency power sources for solar powered colonies. The FSP system concept uses conventional low-temperature stainless steel , liquid metal-cooled reactor technology coupled with Stirling power conversion. Helium-3 mining could be used to provide a substitute for tritium for potential production of fusion power in the future. Solar energy is a possible source of power for a lunar base. Many of the raw materials needed for solar panel production can be extracted on site. However, the long lunar night hours or This might be solved by building several power plants, so that at least one of them is always in daylight.

The Moon Colony

Another possibility would be to build such a power plant where there is constant or near-constant sunlight, such as at the Malapert mountain near the lunar south pole, or on the rim of Peary crater near the north pole. Since lunar regolith contains structural metals like iron and aluminum, solar panels could be mounted high up on locally-built towers that might rotate to follow the sun.

A third possibility would be to leave the panels in orbit , and beam the power down as microwaves. The solar energy converters need not be silicon solar panels. It may be more advantageous to use the larger temperature difference between Sun and shade to run heat engine generators. Concentrated sunlight could also be relayed via mirrors and used in Stirling engines or solar trough generators, or it could be used directly for lighting, agriculture and process heat. The focused heat might also be employed in materials processing to extract various elements from lunar surface materials.

Fuel cells on the Space Shuttle have operated reliably for up to 17 Earth days at a time. Fuel cells produce water directly as a waste product. Current fuel cell technology is more advanced than the Shuttle's cells — PEM Proton Exchange Membrane cells produce considerably less heat though their waste heat would likely be useful during the lunar night and are lighter, not to mention the reduced mass of the smaller heat-dissipating radiators.

This makes PEMs more economical to launch from Earth than the shuttle's cells. PEMs have not yet been proven in space. Even if lunar colonies could provide themselves access to a near-continuous source of solar energy, they would still need to maintain fuel cells or an alternate energy storage system to sustain themselves during lunar eclipses and emergency situations.

Conventional rockets have been used for most lunar explorations to date. The construction workers, location finders, and other astronauts vital to building, would have been taken four at a time in NASA's Orion spacecraft. Proposed concepts of Earth-Moon transportation are Space elevators. Lunar colonists would need the ability to transport cargo and people to and from modules and spacecraft, and to carry out scientific study of a larger area of the lunar surface for long periods of time.

The Moon Colony by William Dixon Bell

Proposed concepts include a variety of vehicle designs, from small open rovers to large pressurized modules with lab equipment, and also a few flying or hopping vehicles. Rovers could be useful if the terrain is not too steep or hilly. The Soviet Union developed different rover concepts in the Lunokhod series and the L5 for possible use on future crewed missions to the Moon or Mars. These rover designs were all pressurized for longer sorties. If multiple bases were established on the lunar surface, they could be linked together by permanent railway systems. Both conventional and magnetic levitation Maglev systems have been proposed for the transport lines.

Mag-Lev systems are particularly attractive as there is no atmosphere on the surface to slow down the train , so the vehicles could achieve velocities comparable to aircraft on the Earth. One significant difference with lunar trains, however, is that the cars would need to be individually sealed and possess their own life support systems.

For difficult areas, a flying vehicle may be more suitable. Experience so far indicates that launching human beings into space is much more expensive than launching cargo. One way to get materials and products from the Moon to an interplanetary way station might be with a mass driver , a magnetically accelerated projectile launcher. Cargo would be picked up from orbit or an Earth-Moon Lagrangian point by a shuttle craft using ion propulsion , solar sails or other means and delivered to Earth orbit or other destinations such as near-Earth asteroids, Mars or other planets, perhaps using the Interplanetary Transport Network.

A lunar space elevator could transport people, raw materials and products to and from an orbital station at Lagrangian points L 1 or L 2. Chemical rockets would take a payload from Earth to the L 1 lunar Lagrange location. From there a tether would slowly lower the payload to a soft landing on the lunar surface. Other possibilities include a momentum exchange tether system. A cis-lunar transport system has been proposed using tethers to achieve momentum exchange.

For long term sustainability, a space colony should be close to self-sufficient. Mining and refining the Moon's materials on-site — for use both on the Moon and elsewhere in the Solar System — could provide an advantage over deliveries from Earth, as they can be launched into space at a much lower energy cost than from Earth. It is possible that large amounts of cargo would need to be launched into space for interplanetary exploration in the 21st century, and the lower cost of providing goods from the Moon might be attractive.

In the long term, the Moon will likely play an important role in supplying space-based construction facilities with raw materials. On Earth, the gas bubbles rise and burst, but in a zero gravity environment, that does not happen. The annealing process requires large amounts of energy, as a material is kept very hot for an extended period of time. This allows the molecular structure to realign. Exporting material to Earth in trade from the Moon is more problematic due to the cost of transportation, which would vary greatly if the Moon is industrially developed see "Launch costs" above.

One suggested trade commodity is helium-3 3 He which is carried by the solar wind and accumulated on the Moon's surface over billions of years, but occurs only rarely on Earth.