Hundreds? Could be.
Thousands? I can see that happening, yes.
Tens of thousands? Perhaps.
Hundreds of thousands? I can see that as a very real possibility .
Millions? I could see that happening.
I'm struggling to see how this could be a reality. The resource requirements to sustain thousands of people on the moon would not be economical. A single failure could kill almost everybody.
It may be safer than places like the ISS and antarctic outposts. ISS is un-shielded and vulnerable with out-dated technology and aging equipment. More people means more redundancy. Arctic outposts can go weeks or months without any hope of support or rescue.
A moon base with a 3 day turnaround and dedicated return hardware would be pretty safe relatively speaking. The moon doesn't really DO much. The weather is 100% predictable since there is no atmosphere. Seismic activity is nil. Asteroid and debris impacts are much rarer than in LEO. In addition you have plenty of moon soil for burying inflatable structures.
You would absolutely NEED nuclear or hydrogen fuel cells since nights are 2 weeks long. Life support is easier than in orbit because you have a giant mass of moon to cool the air in your habitat instead of needing an ammonia based heat pump.
Economically speaking, if Starship performs as advertised at $20/kg to LEO, it is totally doable. They are talking about $2 million per launch. To put it into perspective, a chartered 747 costs about $30k per hour. A ten hour flight in a 747 costs about 1/6 of a Starship flight to orbit. When they say "Game Changer" they aren't just blowing smoke.
Good questions! A lot of these problems have already been solved in Submarines and spacecraft. All you really need is access to water which can be shipped or possibly even mined from the lunar surface.
In an environment that large, they would probably not use CO2 scrubbers except in emergencies. They could either isolate CO2 using cryogenics and dump it overboard or convert it into methane using the Sabatier process for use in Starship. Access to cryogenic temperatures would be available during the lunar night. Otherwise they would need a heat pump to dump enough heat into the ground. Alternatively there are experiments using an algae farm, however that would probably be a much later development.
Oxygen production is remarkably easy. With water, hydrolysis is perfectly acceptable even if it's terribly inefficient. You could even feed in water left over from the Sabatier process. For emergencies, there are chemical oxygen candles and liquid O2 storage.
As for why we would put people on the moon there are several reasons. Initially tourism would be the main driver. How much would you pay to go and spend a week on the moon? There are 56.1 million people who have more than a million dollars to their name. There are 2755 billionaires with friends and family who may want to put their footprints in regolith.
More practically, there are distinct industrial advantages to a 1/10 gravity pure vacuum environment. Experiments at the ISS have illuminated a few of these things like fiber optics, chemistry, and metallurgy. Lunar vacuum is better than most laboratory vacuum chambers. In addition there are tons of scientific reasons to go to the moon. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, botany, etc...
Finally, there is the Mars angle. While re-fueling in orbit using Starship is pretty awesome, being able to stage on the Moon would provide infrastructure for launches to interplanetary space. Using the Earth as a gravity assist we can launch from the Moon to anywhere in the solar system using bare fractions of the Delta-V used by Earth rockets. A self sustaining colony on the Moon would also be a great way to help man take the first steps to becoming an interplanetary species in a relatively reachable location.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] threadA moon base with a 3 day turnaround and dedicated return hardware would be pretty safe relatively speaking. The moon doesn't really DO much. The weather is 100% predictable since there is no atmosphere. Seismic activity is nil. Asteroid and debris impacts are much rarer than in LEO. In addition you have plenty of moon soil for burying inflatable structures.
You would absolutely NEED nuclear or hydrogen fuel cells since nights are 2 weeks long. Life support is easier than in orbit because you have a giant mass of moon to cool the air in your habitat instead of needing an ammonia based heat pump.
Economically speaking, if Starship performs as advertised at $20/kg to LEO, it is totally doable. They are talking about $2 million per launch. To put it into perspective, a chartered 747 costs about $30k per hour. A ten hour flight in a 747 costs about 1/6 of a Starship flight to orbit. When they say "Game Changer" they aren't just blowing smoke.
Also, there's just no reason to put people on the moon, why would somebody spend the money to do that?
In an environment that large, they would probably not use CO2 scrubbers except in emergencies. They could either isolate CO2 using cryogenics and dump it overboard or convert it into methane using the Sabatier process for use in Starship. Access to cryogenic temperatures would be available during the lunar night. Otherwise they would need a heat pump to dump enough heat into the ground. Alternatively there are experiments using an algae farm, however that would probably be a much later development.
Oxygen production is remarkably easy. With water, hydrolysis is perfectly acceptable even if it's terribly inefficient. You could even feed in water left over from the Sabatier process. For emergencies, there are chemical oxygen candles and liquid O2 storage.
As for why we would put people on the moon there are several reasons. Initially tourism would be the main driver. How much would you pay to go and spend a week on the moon? There are 56.1 million people who have more than a million dollars to their name. There are 2755 billionaires with friends and family who may want to put their footprints in regolith.
More practically, there are distinct industrial advantages to a 1/10 gravity pure vacuum environment. Experiments at the ISS have illuminated a few of these things like fiber optics, chemistry, and metallurgy. Lunar vacuum is better than most laboratory vacuum chambers. In addition there are tons of scientific reasons to go to the moon. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, botany, etc...
Finally, there is the Mars angle. While re-fueling in orbit using Starship is pretty awesome, being able to stage on the Moon would provide infrastructure for launches to interplanetary space. Using the Earth as a gravity assist we can launch from the Moon to anywhere in the solar system using bare fractions of the Delta-V used by Earth rockets. A self sustaining colony on the Moon would also be a great way to help man take the first steps to becoming an interplanetary species in a relatively reachable location.