I do a lot of thinking about space colonization, I love sci-fi and have a pretty strong science background.
Power
We could be within 10 years of break even fusion. But the facilities to take advantage of it are huge, and the cost of lifting one to the moon would make it pointless.
On the moon, you have a 28 day solar cycle. That makes solar power undesirable for running a human occupied facility because our battery technology sucks, the cost, size and weight of batteries to keep a colony running for 14 days is to big. There is an alaskan town with a multi-billion dollar battery storage facility that weighs millions of kg and takes up a warehouse the size of a football field, it can keep the town powered for less than a day in the event of grid failure. For mars, solar makes a fair amount of sense, the power/meter^2 is lower than earth due to distance, but some of that is made up for because the atmosphere is thinner and absorbs less energy on the way in.
We can put a simple self contained fission plant with a couple dozen megawatts of output in a semi trailer (including the power turbine and steam condenser. That would likely be the ideal base load power for a lunar colony. small enough to transport, easy to use, and can run for years without refueling. I would probably also supplement this with an array of solar reflectors that directly heat a furnace for materials processing.
Life support
Yes, we really can reuse 100% of water in a self contained facility. You will need condensers to remove water from the air that has been exhaled by living things and sewage treatment to recover waste water. Use of concrete as a major building material may be discouraged on the moon as it can be a major consumer of limited water resources through chemical action.
Like water, air can be recycled. Nitrogen generally has stable atmospheric concentrations, moving back and forth between the soil at a balanced rate due to organic processes. Oxygen can be replenished via plants converting CO2. Concrete tends to absorb oxygen over time by reacting with CO2, however its manufacture also releases oxygen (as CO2) and would approximately balance out over time. 40% of the lunar surface is oxygen, most of it in oxides with silicon, iron and aluminum. While local glass manufacture will not liberate oxygen, the processing of pure silicon would. As would the processing of iron and aluminum for the structural components of a colony.
Building Materials
An important part of starting a major off world colony is automated site preparation. It is simply infeasible with our current bulk lift capacity to transport raw materials for colony construction from earth. The surface of the moon can be processed locally to produce glass, iron, aluminum, oxygen, magnesium, titanium, etc. The design and construction of a small scale automated smelter capable of doing this is possible, though it is a non-trivial engineering and metallurgy problem. Iron can be purified magnetically, oxygen can be baked out at high temperatures, everything else would require chemical (difficult to make sustainable) or centrifugal (mechanically challenging and time consuming) processing.
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Topic: Space colonization[IRL] (Read 22832 times)