The 2020s should be a new era for space exploration, with humans planning to return to the Moon by 2024, followed by the first Martian mission. The ultimate goal is to build human colonies
The first stop is the Earth satellite: the colonies on its surface would become a kind of staging post for future missions to Mars and other places in deep space. The most ambitious plan is that of SpaceX, which hopes to colonize the Red Planet by 2050. But even now, before these ideas become reality, scientists and engineers are trying to figure out what future lunar habitats and Martian ecosystems might look like.
According to Inverse, the sustainability of these space cities can be provided by rather unusual technologies, below are three of them.
mushroom architecture
The words “space colony” paint in our minds a picture of futuristic cities made up of modern buildings and streamlined structures. Even some of Blue Origin’s or SpaceX’s mock-ups of such cityscapes show that they appear to people to be made up of glass buildings and impressive steel structures. But in fact, future buildings on the Moon and Mars may be completely different.
NASA’s Myco-Architecture Project unveils a prototype technology that uses mushrooms to literally grow houses in space.
The idea is that future settlers would not carry all the building materials with them on space travel, but could create a compact habitat from mycelium, which is the vegetative body of fungi.
Once humans land on Mars, they can grow useful items and structures by adding water and allowing the fungus to grow.
Oxygen at the “transshipment point”
The lack of oxygen on the Moon will be a big problem for future colonists: an important resource will be needed not only for staying on the satellite, but also for refueling the oxygen tanks of interplanetary rockets.
To solve this problem, an installation was created that will allow the production of oxygen from lunar dust.
So far, in the prototype, a lunar dust simulator, regolith, is used for this. The process is as follows: the material is placed in a metal basket, adding an electrolyte – calcium chloride. After that, the mixture is heated to 950 °C, which, however, does not melt the material itself. Next, a current is passed through the mixture, as a result of which oxygen is released from the dust, and the salt is transferred to the anode.
The prototype of the installation is currently located in the Laboratory of the European Center for Space Research and Technology in the Netherlands.
Energy production off the earth
There is an idea that sunlight could become a sustainable renewable source of energy on other planets – especially in places where the sun always shines.
But such batteries can be inefficient where there is little or no sunlight. On the Moon, for example, this would quickly become a problem – the surface is in shadow for 14 days, so there will be no constant source of energy.
To solve this problem, NASA is developing a mobile nuclear reactor as part of the Kilopower project.
The reactor will be capable of generating 10 kW of electricity on a continuous basis and can operate for up to ten years. The agency demonstrated it in action in May 2018.
As new challenges emerge to get people into space and stay there, these three tools are likely to be just the beginning of a new era of space innovation.
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