Hey there. Welcome to Life Noggin.
The moon is our closest celestial neighbor. It’s fairly small, has a similar makeup
to Earth, and there’s water! It might sound like an ideal place to set up camp, but it’s
really not. So, why can’t we live on the moon?
In the last decade, there’s been a lot of hype about humans going back to the moon.
Japan’s space agency, JAXA, was planning to have a fully functioning moon-base in place
by 2020 but that plan fell through. NASA declared they’d have one built and fully staffed
by 2024 but their plans shifted to an orbiting lunar station, rather than a surface one.
Clearly, there’s a reason these ideas keep getting nixed.
Let’s start with some lunar basics. Days and nights are a lot different on the moon.
Daytime and nighttime last about 14 Earth days each. It can reach 250ºF during the
day and drop to -380ºF at night. In order to survive in this kind of environment, everything
from space-homes to space-cars to space-suits would need to be built to function in varying
extreme temperatures. And that’s just the start of it.
The moon has basically no atmosphere protecting it from the constant barrage of harmful UV
rays from the sun. These solar rays can do some serious damage to our fragile human bodies,
especially during solar storms when the moon’s surface can be hit with hundreds of rems of
radiation. If you’re struck by radiation levels like that without protection or treatment,
there’s a 50% chance you’ll die.
Gravity is another problem. The moon’s gravity is one-sixth that of Earth’s. Levels that
low drastically weaken your muscles and bones and even changes how your heart and nervous
system function.
The moon’s environment isn’t ideal for building either, which we’d obviously need
to do a lot of if we’re wanting to live up there. We’d need things like homes, power
generators, schools and hospitals. The moon’s surface is covered in a layer of something
called lunar regolith. This regolith is basically a mixture of ground up stone, minerals and
glass. Across the surface, depths vary from about 15 to 30 feet and it’s really hard
to dig through. Astronauts even had problems with regolith during the short Apollo missions,
when it built up in their spacesuits and equipment stiffening joints, freezing switches and disrupting
hydraulics.
People have argued that since regolith is partly made of oxygen, we could mine that
oxygen to create water, breathable air and rocket fuel but in order to do that, the regolith
would need to be heated to over 1,500ºF. And getting machines to the moon that could
heat up that regolith, as well as ones to construct buildings and generate energy, would
be tricky to say the least.
NASA’s upcoming rocket, the Space Launch System, will be the agency’s biggest rocket
to date but will still only have enough room for 4 astronauts… No extra room for things
like water processing machines or building materials that we’d need to live on the
moon. We’d need a much bigger rocket.
But put all these formalities aside and think about the cost of colonizing the moon! It’s
estimated that a small base for 10 people would cost about $10 billion. That’s half
of NASA’s annual budget! Then add in the costs of upkeep, food and supply delivery,
power generation, infrastructure creation, all those kinds of things. That would add
up pretty quickly!
Unless we can figure out how to bypass all these issues, we definitely shouldn’t be
living on the moon.
Would you try living on the moon? Let us know in the comments.
On the topic of space, my friend Natalie is a professional gemologist. She's making awesome
videos about gems, fossils, crystals, meteorites, and all kinds of gemstone related stuff. Natalie
makes two great videos a week and I highly recommend you subscribe. She just made a video
about if it rains diamonds on Saturn. Check it out.
As always, my name is Blocko. This has been Life Noggin. Don’t forget to keep on thinking.