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by NitpickLawyer 27 days ago
> But pretty much everyone thinks Artemis is Starship HLS or bust.

Right now it seems like it's Axiom or bust, with their suits. The suits have missed a lot of milestones, and there's not much point in going to the Moon without suits. Latest NASA OIG report put them somewhere in the 2030s at best...
1 comments
hparadiz 27 days ago
Can always use the existing ISS suits modified for the moon.
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NitpickLawyer 27 days ago
Heh, I don't think so. The ISS suits have their own problems, are custom made for the ISS, are bulky AF, and "modified for the moon" might take longer than expected.
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philipwhiuk 27 days ago
The Moon is frankly a totally different environment. Lunar dust is notorious.

Also the ISS suits themselves are being replaced, by Axiom, because they are failing in near-fatal ways periodically.

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hparadiz 27 days ago
Been thinking about this quite a bit. I think every lunar airlock will end up with a wash station and will end up using basic water sprays to get the job done. Soil compactors can be used outside to compact the dust and prevent it from being an issue during moon walks as well. I think once a moon base is established most moon walks will be on-base where dust would have been dealt with in the first few years and then after that it's basically like walking on compacted soil so it won't be loose.

And if you're wondering why they might use water for this well... water will be abundant and basically every habitat will have a municipal water hookup. A moon base might quickly find itself with several hectares of water and no where to put it. Might even end up injecting it into the ground where the water will be able to maintain it's liquid state (moon crust quickly reaches room temperature only a few dozens of meters underground).

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standardly 27 days ago
We can turn the regolith into Lunarcrete too. It's moon concrete. Mars with nice sidewalks.

https://techport.nasa.gov/projects/118526

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hparadiz 27 days ago
Yup. That gets us to the stone age on the moon. I'm a big fan of bootstrapping the moon's industrial capacity straight to the industrial age. We need not only concrete production but also steel, water, etc. The faster we bootstrap all this stuff the faster the moon will feel like any other place you can go. I think there's gonna be hardware stores on the moon within the century.
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