Colony on the Moon: Work for School

  Recently in science, we did a large group project about building a colony on the moon, and the problems this would require solving. My section that I was assigned was the health of moon colony in habitants. Here it is:

Max N

January 26, 2014

7 Stephano

Without oxygen, a human cannot survive for more than twenty minutes. This makes supplying oxygen to a moon colony a challenge that must be solved. That being said, this is not as hard as it seems. With heat and electricity, oxygen can be extracted from moon rock fairly easily. One could mine the rocks once the colony is running or use the rocks already mined while excavating space for the underground colony. A ventilation system could be installed to constantly move the air around the colony, so inhabitants could have oxygen and plants being grown could have the CO2 that residents make. This would provide the air that the people and the plants need.

Of the three major problems (food, water, and air), water is probably the most challenging. Assuming there is ice buried at the poles of the moon, a colony near the poles could just have to do a little mining and get the water they need. This water could also be used for a hydroponic farm, so there wouldn’t have to be tons of dirt shipped to the moon. If there isn’t water on the moon, hydrogen could be shipped from Earth and combined with oxygen made from the moon rock. Alternatively, if the colony is being built in a future where mining asteroids for water is common, a ship traveling from an asteroid to the moon wouldn’t have to fight against the Earth’s gravity like a ship from Earth would. This would supply the needed water for the inhabitants and the crops to drink.

Finally, people need to be fed. To start off, some amount of food could be shipped to the moon, but farms are necessary. The problem with growing plants is that usually one needs soil, a lot of it. Dirt, like anything else, is expensive to ship, and moon dirt is not fertile enough to grow plants. A solution to this is hydroponic farming. All plants need is water, pebbles to grow roots through, and nutrients (often dissolved in the water). This really work best if there is ice buried at the poles, but hydrogen is lighter, and therefore easier to ship, than dirt. Hydroponic farms would solve the farming issue, using little supplies and feeding moon colony residents.