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Self-Constructing, Deployable, Ready-To-Use Habitat for the Moon: a Cheap Challenge for a Lunar Base
Sector:
Language:
English
Abstract
Space: so far so expensive! If the Space Station has a 6-year
delay in respect to the initial schedule, Lunar Base will have a
15-year delay, if we continue to think in a conservative way.
We need a new approach for the missions' and manned
systems' design.
The ISU-IACSA (Italian Affiliate Campus for Space Architecture
of the International Space University) current activities are
focused on "self-constructing" and "self-shaping
habitat." The major cost of a space mission is essentially the
transfer "flights" from Earth to Space, and, in the case
of the Moon, all the steps to go there, space station's stops
included.
Many flights are necessary to build a Lunar base due to the
large number of elements by which it is composed; in particular,
the current NASA's Lunar Base configuration for 12 people is
based on 5 flights minimum and on a lot of time to be spent by the
astronauts once on the surface of Moon to assemble the base (in a
space suit).
The aim of the ISU-IACSA research is to design a new
construction technology able to reduce drastically the number of
flights and the human work in the pressurized suit.
A new design approach is under testing.
Beginning from the launch vehicle to the final assembly, the
Florentine research has an objective: to design a single-flight
mission and a ready-to-use habitat; that means to think at a
robotized construction technology able to be maneuvered from
control center on the Earth: we could think at a
"teleconstruction." In this case astronauts would arrive
on the Moon and could live in the habitat at the same time. Some
interesting solutions came out at University of Florence.
The paper will present the research's design philosophy and
some architectural/technological solutions.
In particular, will be presented two design projects: one based
on a 4.5 diameter cylinder and the second on a 16 meters in
diameter sphere, both using inflatable and self-constructing
technology