Why is exploring lava tubes on the Moon so important?
My belief is that in the future you will have to live on the Moon. There will be some settlements on the Moon – or as we call it, ‘Moon Village – maybe by 2035 or around that time frame. You will have to build some structures for people to live in, and it will take a tremendous amount of energy and resources to build something like that. But if you have a lava tube, you already have an environment that is shielded from radiation and many other things. You are getting an environment where you can already store stuff; you can live and work there.
Robots and humans will be working alongside each other on the Moon, and I believe that exploring lava tubes is very important for future settlements. From a scientific perspective it’s a very interesting environment that has been left alone for billions of years. For billions of years there has been no sunlight, for billions of years there has been no lunar dust. The lava tubes have been shielded from all those externalities, which is not the case here on Earth. This means it’s a very good potential site for science and to learn more about the universe.