Moon Tunnel Engineers Excited by Boring Lunar Colonies

As space agencies prepare to send humans back to the moon, the greatest engineers are racing to design a tunnel boring machine capable of digging underground settlements for the first inhabitants of the moon.

"Space is once again a passion for many people, it's about coming back to the moon, this time to stay," Iran-American expert Jamal Rostami told AFP during the World War II. This year's Tunnel Congress in Naples.

The administration of US President Donald Trump wants NASA to hand over humans to the Moon by 2024. The agency is also developing plans for a "Gateway" station intended to serve as a platform to astronauts traveling to the surface of the Moon.

Billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are among those who are fiercely fighting over military, civilian or commercial launches. Musk & # 39; s SpaceX is leading the race to build rockets ready to fly in time.

But the harsh conditions on the surface of the moon mean that, once there, humans must be protected from radiation and freezing structures that can maintain atmospheric pressure in a vacuum.

They also need protection against meteorite strikes.

"Imagine something the size of a fist, a rock reaching 10-12 kilometers per second, it can touch everything and destroy it immediately," said Rostami at a meeting south of the island. 39; Italy.

"Thus, any plan to create a habitat on the moon involves creating a trench, creating a structure and covering it with a kind of regolith, which is the floor of the moon.

"Our idea is to actually start underground, using a mechanism we already use on the earth, a tunnel boring machine, to create a continuous opening to create habitats or to link settlements together," he added. .

The image analysis of the lunar surface shows lava tubes capable of housing large cities underground, said Rostami, director of the Earth Mechanics Institute of the US Colorado School of Mines.

Streamlining

But getting something as vast as a tunnel boring machine will not be an easy task.

"Weight is a problem, it is quite expensive to transport a kilo of material from the earth to the moon, our machines weigh hundreds of tons of mass, so it is not feasible to take them as they are", did he declare.

"We need to convert the design, where all the components are optimized, weigh much less and work better."

Machines must also be fully automated and repairs reduced to a minimum, a particular challenge for tools heavily worn by rock and earth.

There is also the question of how to feed them.

With a machine four meters in diameter requiring about 2,000 kilowatts of energy, experts are wondering whether it is possible to use small nuclear power plants to power a lunar version, he said. declared.

Frozen treasure

According to the American United Launch Alliance, 1,000 people could live in space by 2050 – in orbit or on the moon – according to estimates, this initial space exploration will cost $ 2.7 trillion.

Despite some rumors that the first inhabitants of the space would have used mining tools such as lunar tunnel boring machines (LTBM) to dig for precious minerals, Rostami said their priority would be to extract some something more precious.

"We are not talking about gold.The first target is water.We know that there is water trapped at the lunar poles, where the temperature is as low as -190 degrees Celsius (-310 Fahrenheit) ".

"One of the ideas under discussion is to heat the room in a permanent shadow, to evaporate the water and capture it," said Rostami, who launched the world's first master and doctorate in space Colorado.

"Another idea is to exploit it, take it to an installation and let it unfreeze.The material extracted with water can then be used to print 3D buildings in the settlements" , did he declare.

One thing is certain: the future LTBM will first undergo rigorous pilot tests on Earth "because once deployed, that's all, it will be very difficult to make radical changes."

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© 2019 AFP