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Tom Kalbfus

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Registered: 2006-08-16

Posts: 4,401

Moon City - Your Vision

Here are two views of the Shackleton crater on the Moon's South Pole, a likely spot to build a lunar city.

Here is a potential Lunar base. So what do you think we could build here. I have some ideas. Perhaps we could ring the crater with Solar arrays, since this is the South Pole, all the solar panels will be upright, rather than laying flat on the ground, and we would spread each concentric ring so that the are not shadowing the ones on the inside. We would cover all 360 degrees around the crater, then build a dome over the crater, and use the electricity produce to provide artificial illumination from the ceiling, perhaps a holographic image of the Sun.

SpaceNut

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From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,017

Re: Moon City - Your Vision

We have had many a talk in going back to the moon such as in the Armstrong Lunar Outpost back in 2006 when NASA Exploration Roadmaps it as a step towards space and out of LEO before the Constellation Program. By 2020, NASA plans to establish a long-term human presence on the moon, potentially centered on an outpost to be built at the rim of the Shackleton crater near the lunar South Pole. Of course that was when we were looking towards The Vision and why are we going back to the moon where we were thinking that Engineers create SpaceNet--the supply chain Network of nodes could ensure delivery to moon on its way to making mars possible.

I still think that the moon is not a distraction but a way to get COTS going as we will need resupply just like we do with the ISS for any permanent moon base.

Tom Kalbfus

Banned

Registered: 2006-08-16

Posts: 4,401

Re: Moon City - Your Vision

We have had many a talk in going back to the moon such as in the Armstrong Lunar Outpost back in 2006 when NASA Exploration Roadmaps it as a step towards space and out of LEO before the Constellation Program. By 2020, NASA plans to establish a long-term human presence on the moon, potentially centered on an outpost to be built at the rim of the Shackleton crater near the lunar South Pole. Of course that was when we were looking towards The Vision and why are we going back to the moon where we were thinking that Engineers create SpaceNet--the supply chain Network of nodes could ensure delivery to moon on its way to making mars possible.

I still think that the moon is not a distraction but a way to get COTS going as we will need resupply just like we do with the ISS for any permanent moon base.

Because of its location, its probably inevitable that we'll end up there. The Shackleton crater has the advantage in that it has continuous access to Sunlight, and its only cold in the shadows, The Sun there is just as intense as it is anywhere else, since their is no atmosphere to filter it, You just need to stand up solar panels in their sides instead of laying them flat on the ground. The Moon is 3,476,000 m in diameter or 1,738,000 in radius. The crater is 21,000 meters in diameter, about 346,360,000 square meters of surface area To illuminate the whole surface of the crater, we would need 467.6 gigawatts of sunlight. Assuming that solar panels are 15% efficient we would need 3,117.3 billion square meters of Solar panels facing the Sun. a cross section of solar panels 22 km in diameter that is 10 meters high would be 220,000 square meters requiring an actual 691,150 of photovoltaic arrays. which would be 7.06 hundred millionths of the total surface area needed to collect that energy. We could built an larger array around that. and to prevent shadowing, it would have to be 0.0138 degrees from the South Pole. The circumference of the Moon is 10,920,200 meters. 0.0138 of a degree is 1/26,087th of a circle. So 10,920,200 / 26,087 = 418 meters. 10 meters below that would be about another 418 meters away, because of the curvature of the Moon's surface, each successive ring will be slightly closer to the previous ring that the previous ring was to the one before that. if the cross section of the first was 22,000 meters by 10 meters the cross section of the ring with a radius 418 meters wider would be 22,418 meters by 10 meters equaling 224,180 square meters about 1.019 times the surface area of the previous array. There is a bit of math involved in determining the radius of the circle around Shakleton crater, that I don't have time for right now. Suffice to say it is a very large circle with about 400 meters between each successive ring on average.

The area around the crater doesn't look flat however, the exterior sides of the crater have a slope, so we can place solar panels on that, and along the exteriors of surrounding craters and mountains as well until we get the required area of solar collecting surface to power the illumination under the dome above Shackleton crater.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2016-03-22 20:27:12)

Mars_B4_Moon

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Registered: 2006-03-23

Posts: 9,477

Re: Moon City - Your Vision

More Water Found on Moon, Locked in Tiny Glass Beads

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-water … s-334c5fde