An idea to explore lunar lava tubes

I’ve written before that Designing a practical lunar base is hard.  Having something easy to build while keeping astronauts safe from radiation and micrometeorites is a challenge.  One location for a base that is already safe from micrometeorites – and some radiation – would be in lunar lava tubes.  I was thinking about this one day, and I wondered how could we explore them?  They don’t seem to just open in the side of a cliff allowing us to just walk in.  The only way in seem to be these “skylights” where part of the roof has collapsed.  After some thought, I came up with this four-step plan on exploring a lunar lava tube.

Step 1

This would be a basic, solar powered rover, that would land a kilometer or so from a skylight.  It would then drive to within about twenty meters of the opening.  The last thing we want is to make the skylight bigger, so I want to be as careful as we can around these.  Attached to the rover would be a forty-meter cable with a set of lights and cameras on the end.  This would be fired into the skylight with a compressed gas canister.  The cameras would – hopefully – be able to give a view of the immediate area under the skylight.  There might even be LED “flares” that could be shot out to give a better illumination of the floor.  The main purposes of the mission would be to determine how thick the roof is, how deep it is to the floor, and if the floor is smoothish or just a jumble of rocks.

If the roof seems thick enough, and the cameras aren’t just hitting the wall, the rover could drive forward a meter or so at a time.  By taking more pictures, you could then build up a good 3D map of the area right under the skylight.

Hopefully, from the landing to the mapping could be done in less than two weeks.  That’s because as a solar powered rover, I don’t know if it would survive the lunar night.  I think some solar powered landers and rovers have, but if we don’t have to design for it to survive the night it would be cheaper. 

Step 2

This would use a bigger rover, powered by an RTG.  If the roof was thick enough, and you could pinpoint a landing, you could use just a lander, but a rover would make things easier.  It would again land a kilometer or so away, and drive to within ten or twenty meters of the edge.  It would then unroll a cable designed to reach the bottom of the lava tube, with some meters of slack.  At the end of the cable would be a base station.  This base station would use an airbag system like the Mars Pathfinder.  At the bottom of the skylight, the base station would deflate the airbags and unfold.  The communication and power would go up and down the cable, since you probably wouldn’t be able to communicate with Earth from the bottom.  And like Mars Pathfinder, this base station would have a rover, either wheeled if the bottom is smooth enough, or an insect like one if the floor is just a jumble of rocks.  The rover/walker would go out to explore, but would come back to plug back into the base station to recharge its batteries.  To do this, the base station may need a little robotic arm to reach out and plug the rover in.  

One option for this would be to have the base station with the cable land as a separate mission.  That way you’re not trying to fit it all on a rover that also has to fit on a rocket.  You could land the big RTG rover and have it spend a year or so doing various studies, and then you land the station and have the rover pick it up and take it to the skylight.

Step 3

Human exploration.  The main part of this step is an elevator.  I imagine you’d make some structure that would spread the weight out along the edge of the skylight, because you don’t want to make the skylight bigger.  This structure might even hang over the edge a few meters, depending on the walls and floor.  From the structure you could load astronauts and cargo into the elevator.  Set twenty or so meters back from the edge would be the power system to run the elevator’s winch.  I imagine you’d send two astronauts down while two remained to make sure the winch worked.  In case of an emergency, there would probably be a knotted rope type thing the astronauts could clip onto and climb out with. 

Assuming everything still works with the RTG rover from Step 2, that could be used as a communication system for the astronauts.  Or they could just bring larger, more capable rovers that could recharge off this RTG. 

Step 4

Building a base.  More missions would bring solar panels and battery packs, and maybe a small reactor.  These would be brought near the edge and the power cords lowered down.  The first outpost would be a prefab unit that would be lowered with the elevator and built.  The crew would spend most of their time down in the tube with as much work as possible on the surface down with robots. 

But to really build a colony would require better access to the tube.  This would be done either by finding an appropriate spot to tunnel out to the surface so you could just drive in, or by building a ramp at the skylight.  Both would probably require a lot of time and resources, but one future moon buggy will probably carry more people and cargo than can fit in the elevator.  And any burgeoning lunar base would have several.

***

We’re in the beginnings of a new era of lunar exploration.  Will something like this happen?  Only time will tell.

Short story – “You Can Do Better”

“You Can Do Better”

Heading back to her desk with a cup of tea, Carol stopped at Mike’s cubicle.  “What’s new?” she asked.

Mike typed for a few more seconds then saved his work.  Spinning his chair around to face her he replied, “Not much.  But as I drove in this morning I had an idea for a new holiday.”

Carol blew on her tea.  “Oh, for what?”

“Well, you know how annoying the lovey-dovey crap gets in the week before Valentine’s Day?”

“Annoying?”

“Well, maybe not for happy couples like you and Dave, but for most people the days leading up to Valentine’s Day are almost sickening.  So I was thinking of making a day for the opposite.  I figured February 21st could be, I don’t know, ‘You can do better’ Day.  Basically, after weeks of the lovey-dovey crap, there should be at least one week of commercials for divorce lawyers and stores could put out their ‘I no longer love you’ cards.”

Carol smiled.  “Are we a tad bitter about being single on Valentine’s Day?”

Mike shrugged.  “Hey, if all you happy couples can rub your joy in the faces of everyone else, why can’t we rub our misery back?”

***

Even when I was in a relationship I didn’t care for all the lovey-dovey crap around Valentine’s Day.  And I can’t be the only one who’d get a chuckle out of a “You can do better” Day. 

I first wrote this years ago on a now defunct website.  I came across it during some cleaning, and figured I should repost it.

Balloon thoughts

First off, I do not have special information on this matter.  I’m just a guy who overthinks things.  And these are just some of my thoughts on the whole BalloonGate, or whatever it’s being called.

I heard somewhere that the Pentagon reported that there was one such Chinese balloon during Obama’s time in office, three during Trump’s, and the one during Biden’s.  But if I had to bet, I’d say that for everything the Pentagon tells us, there’s a thousand things they don’t.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the military has detected dozens of these balloons or more in the past ten years or so.  They just never said anything because why alert the world to your stealth detection capabilities?  I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a long meeting where they went through each balloon detection and ranked the likelihood that China knew that we detected it.  Like, China probably knew we had detected three of the previous ones, but we said four just to cause them to go through their data wondering which was the other one.  I don’t know how this recent balloon story broke – if it really was first spotted by civilians – or if the story was leaked by the Pentagon just because it was becoming unrealistic that we weren’t talking about it.  If the later, it was probably chosen in advance because we probably already have the detection capability for whatever the next level of stealth China has. 

Another reason we haven’t said anything about these earlier, is because we were probably feeding these spy balloons bad intel.  If they knew that we knew the balloon was there, they might not believe some of the stuff they heard.  But if they’re pretty confident that we didn’t know it was there, then they’re more likely to believe what they learn.  Something to keep in mind is that spycraft makes three-dimensional chess look like checkers, and some of the loudest voices in BalloonGate probably can’t even play checkers.

Random Story – The power of a raised eyebrow

This is just an odd little story from my life.

I called this “The power of a raised eyebrow,” because I figured “That time I made a woman laugh hysterically for five minutes just by raising an eyebrow,” was a bit too long.

Back when I was in college, I was in a small club.  One time, we needed to make some money for some project, so we were going to have a bake sale.  A couple of our members had an apartment off campus, so a bunch of us showed up there one afternoon to bake four or five batches of cupcakes.  At one point during the evening, everyone else was in the living room looking at … something, and one woman and I were left in the kitchen.  I can’t remember what I was doing, but she was mixing up some batter by hand.  She did some furious mixing, and then stopped and panted a bit.  I gave her a confused look, and she replied, “You try beating something for five minutes.” That’s when I raised an eyebrow, and she laughed hysterically for five minutes, leaving the rest of the group wondering what we were doing.