The Moon Society Forum

http://coewww.rutgers.edu/~benaroya/pub ... %20JAE.pdf

The pdf is 25 pages long. Whoever reads that whole thing first doesn't win a prize, sorry.

Anyhow, the first habitat, inflatables and hard modules complete with LSS, etc. will be landed on the Moon and pressurized with upported gases. Making habitat on the Moon will require several steps beforehand-1) materials and oxygen production, possibly nitrogen production too. That means we need mining equipment to shovel up regolith, furnaces and electrolysis cells and probably volatiles mining equipment to get hydrogen and nitrogen....but before any of this works we will need power so step zero must come first- 0) set up power supplies and storage systems.

Besides materials like metals and concrete, we will need production equipment like rolling mills, extruders, 3d laser or e-beam sintering devices, etc. Just welding up some plates of metal or casting concrete cylinders won't be enough unless we can make everything from the kitchen sink to the air purifiers. This is going to involve thousands of parts. An army of engineers and tons of detailed drawings down to 0.001 inch is called for.

My associates at the St. Louis chapter have conjured up rectangular iron modules about 10'x10'x100' since they think producing and assembling flat plates will be "easier" than making cylindrical modules. Of course, the arch is the strongest shape and pressure tanks are cylindrical with domed ends for a reason-their stronger that way. So I am going to take a neutral stand on this matter as I have with the conventional vs monorail debate until more hard data is available.

Yes, just make me the CEO of the Lunar Development Corp. and I will authorize the money to research everyone's ideas just to see what really works! lol

Contour Crafting is a method of 3D printing of buildings. No kidding. There are many good websites about it. Try this one: http://www.fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/build ... b02105.pdf

Certainly, it would be better than having spacesuited workers laying bricks!

But will a concrete or lunacrete dome, sphere or cylinder stand up to internal pressure?? How thick would the walls need to be??

Say we upport the robotic equipment and use local lunacrete to print up cylindrical modules on the Moon...this would be one way to "jumpstart" Moonbase construction and get the large number of modules we'd need for agriculture and human workers going.

http://www.moonsociety.org/images/chang ... _ratio.gif

Since the biomass area to human habitation area will be large we definitely we need a way to create lots of farm modules and contour crafting with concrete might be the answer. As the cement dries we will loose water into the vacuum. Either we have to sacrifice some water or we have to print up the modules in large inflatable chambers and recover the water.

We must wonder if it would be possible to use CC with sintered regolith too. We would want to make the concrete modules cylindrical with domed ends for strength. The iron rectangular modules proposed by some of the engineers at the Moon Society St. Louis chapter might still be useful for work areas with machines that set up vibrations that could lead to cracking of concrete modules. My philosophy is not to throw out anyone's ideas unless they just plain won't work and figure out where their ideas will fit in. The same goes for lunar RRs. While more conventional rails as endorsed by Eric might come first, monorails might come later.

more links about CC: http://craft.usc.edu/CC/Welcome_files/r ... S_Conf.pdf

http://craft.usc.edu/CC/Welcome_files/r ... -Paper.pdf

Since this method of contour crafting can robotically construct a building with plumbing, etc. could it not be used for making furnishings out of concrete also? We can 3D print small and moderate sized (several kg.) parts of plastic and metal. What about things somewhere between the size of aircraft parts and buildings like vehicles?

Perhaps CC on a smaller scale could be used to make large numbers of RR ties. Also, what about making the supports for mass driver coils, ways like those used in ship building to support metal plates when they are welded together, and smelting furnaces with outer walls of concrete lined with refractory bricks welded or brazed together?

Since CC was originally envisioned for making molds for large scale industry, could it be used to make large molds on the Moon for castinig large metal parts??