The Chinese shared their plans for the arrangement of the moon

China discusses plans to build a lunar base

What will be the lunar base in Chinese, discussed the other day by Chinese scientists. Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan hosted the first conference on extraterrestrial construction, which was attended by more than 100 researchers from universities and research institutes.

Such conferences were repeatedly held in the USSR back in Soviet times. It is worth recalling one of the clearest examples – the lunar construction project called “Star”, proposed by Academician Vladimir Barmin in 1964.

The program provided for the launch to the Moon in an unmanned mode of the main modules of the lunar base, which could then be installed on wheeled chassis and form a whole mobile train powered by electricity produced by a nuclear reactor.

In April 2023, almost 60 years later, researchers from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan and the Harbin Institute of Technology presented their version.

It should be noted that Huazhong University has previously proposed a project for a lunar base, for example, a “moon pot” in the shape of an egg made of regolith printed using lasers on a 3D printer. Now they have proposed a variant – an analogue of the Lego children’s designer, which involved assembling modules from separately “blinded” bricks, which experts in lunar construction called a less risky method compared to printing the entire structure.

Harbin Institute of Technology presented two projects at once, which they called Clover (“Clover”) and Red Star (“Red Star”). “Clover” is an option for a more or less flat surface of the moon. The complex, outwardly resembling petals, consists of four modules, each of which can accommodate three or four colonists. The “Red Star” is a kind of lunar dwelling, but arranged in one of the lunar craters, which, with their walls, can additionally protect the pioneers from cosmic radiation and dust. “Red Star” can expand vertically, as if “drowning” in a crater, which will hide two additional floors.

Huazhong University team leader Ding Lingyun, quoted by China Science Daily, said that the first brick of lunar soil will be built directly on the moon during the Chang’e 8 mission in about five years. However, the chief designer of the Chinese lunar exploration project from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation cooled the dreamers a little, saying that construction on the site may not begin at all due to the huge difference between day and night temperatures on the moon, where at night the thermometer can drop to minus 200 degrees. In addition to the wide variation in temperatures, many other problems can arise during the construction of a lunar base, including lack of water, low gravity, frequent lunar earthquakes, and cosmic radiation. It turns out that our Vladimir Barmin was right when he proposed the option of delivering finished modules to the Moon?

It is clear that the projects mentioned above will not be implemented soon. The immediate plans of the PRC include the launch of the Chang’e-6 apparatus to collect samples from the far side of the Moon, Chang’e-7, which will have to land in 2024 near the South Pole to search for water ice, and Chang’e-8, which starts in 2028 to find out the possibility of using regolith for the construction of lunar houses.

MEANWHILE

Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, son of a famous designer Igor Barmin told MK, that it is theoretically possible to build a lunar base from regolith – however, the views on what its layer should be have recently changed: it used to be that it would be enough to fill the residential modules with a half-meter layer, and now many are inclined to increase the thickness up to a meter.

The original method of building the future lunar cosmodrome was also proposed by the staff of the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They suggested that before starting the construction of the lunar modules, they should first protect themselves from the aggressive effects of the abrasive, all-penetrating lunar dust. So that during landing the jet stream of the braking engines of the lander would not raise its clouds, the scientist suggested creating a cosmodrome on the Moon in the form of a dust-free monolithic platform measuring 100 by 100 meters. This would require a solar 3D printer that would melt the lunar regolith and lay it out in this form in an even layer on the selected site.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29013 dated April 18, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Luna park “made in china”