Location, location, location: NASA aims for the moon
Agency looks to build houses there by 2040
The moon is a magnet, and it is pulling us back.
Half a century ago, the astronauts of Apollo 17 spent three days on that pockmarked orb, whose gravitational pull tugs not just on our oceans but our imaginations. For 75 hours, the astronauts moonwalked in their spacesuits and rode in a lunar rover, with humanity watching on television sets 240,000 miles away. The Apollo program was shuttered after they splashed back down to the Pacific Ocean in December 1972, and since then, the moon has hung uncharted and empty, a siren in the sky.
NASA is now plotting a return. This time around, the stay will be long-term. To make it happen, NASA is going to build houses on the moon — ones that can be used not just by astronauts but ordinary civilians as well. They believe that by 2040, Americans will have their first subdivision in space. Living on Mars isn’t far behind. Some in the scientific community say NASA’s timeline is overly ambitious, particularly before a proven success with a new lunar landing. But, seven NASA scientists interviewed for this article all said that a 2040 goal for lunar structures is attainable if the agency can continue to hit their benchmarks.
The US space agency will blast a 3D printer up to the moon and then build structures, layer by additive layer, out of a specialized lunar concrete created from the rock chips, mineral fragments, and dust that sits on the top layer of the moon’s cratered surface and billows in poisonous clouds whenever disturbed — a moonshot of a plan made possible through new technology and partnerships with universities and private companies.
“We’re at a pivotal moment, and in some ways it feels like a dream sequence,” said Niki Werkheiser, NASA’s director of technology maturation. “In other ways, it feels like it was inevitable that we would get here.”
Werkheiser, whose family owned a small construction business when she was growing up in Franklin, Tennessee, guides the creation of new programs, machinery, and robotics for future space missions.
NASA is more open than ever before to partnering with academics and industry leaders, which has made the playing field much wider than it was in the days of the Apollo missions, Werkheiser said. “We’ve got all the right people together at the right time with a common goal, which is why I think we’ll get there,” she said. “Everyone is ready to take this step together, so if we get our core capabilities developed, there’s no reason it’s not possible.”
Among the many obstacles of taking up residence on the moon is the dust — fine powder so abrasive it can cut like glass. It swirls in noxious plumes and is toxic when inhaled.
But four years ago, Raymond Clinton Jr., deputy director of the science and technology office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, pulled out a whiteboard to sketch the idea of houses, roads, and landing pads. The dust is a problem, yes. But it could also be the solution.
If homes on Earth could be successfully 3D printed from soil made from the minerals found here, he thought, homes on the moon could be printed from the soil up there, where temperatures can swing up to 600 degrees and a vicious combination of radiation and micrometeorites pose a risk to both buildings and bodies.
“When we talk about a sustainable human presence, to me that means that you have a lunar settlement and you have people living and working on the moon continuously,” Clinton said. “What that could be is only up to the imagination of entrepreneurs.”
NASA has partnered with ICON, a construction technology company based in Austin, Texas, to reach its 2040 goal.
Traveling light is critical, he said, because every additional kilogram of weight carried on a rocket to the moon costs about $1,000,000. Carrying materials from Earth to build in space, Suermann said, is unsustainable. “And there’s no Home Depot up there. So you either have to know how to use what’s up there, or send everything you need.”