Challenges of Working on the Moon

Daniel and Kelly cover some of the many reasons why it's tough to work on the Moon. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
In nineteen sixty nine, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted
the American flag on the Moon while an estimated six
hundred and fifty million people tuned in. It was an
incredible moment, and frankly, when I watch videos on YouTube,
I still get a little choked up watching it. That said,
it turned out that getting the flag there and raising
it on the Moon was a real hassle, and it's

(00:26):
a pretty good illustration of the kinds of hassles that
we experience when we send humans to space. For starters,
there was this big political brew haha, which is a
great word really that hopefully I pronounced correctly over what
kind of flag or flags to put up there. So
some folks wanted to bring loads of tiny flags, one

(00:46):
for every nation currently recognized on Earth. But the US
Congress felt like if the US was footing the bill,
then it was an American flag that needed to go up,
and funding for the Apollo program appeared to be contingent
on this. Oh, it's a US flag that was planted
on each of the Apollo missions that made it to
the Moon. But the US had to be careful to

(01:07):
let everyone know that planting the flag was just a
symbolic gesture and was not their way of showing the
world that the Moon now belonged to the United States
because that would have broken recently established international law. All right,
so the politics was complicated. The next problem was how
to get the flag up there and how to make
it look good in space. The first problem for making

(01:29):
it look good was that there is no atmosphere on
the Moon, so if you hang the flag, it's just
gonna like sadly droop down and look super not majestic.
So they had to adjust a flag pole that one
telescope so that it wouldn't take up a lot of
space and they could just expand it out. And then
it also had to have a bar along the top
that would hold the flag up so that you could

(01:51):
see the stars and stripes better. It's really expensive to
send stuff to space, and it's really cramped inside of
the spacecraft, so they had to make it as light
as possible, and because space was limited inside the lunar lander,
they had to attach it to the outside of the
lunar lander. That meant that it was going to be
exposed to space when the lunar lander was coming down

(02:12):
to the Moon. And it was going to get super hot,
so they had to create this insulated container to make
sure that the flag wouldn't get sort of burned up
as it was entering the Moon. All right, So now
they've got it to the Moon, and even then there
were problems. So spacesuits are pressurized, and so it's not
like wearing a normal pair of gloves. It's like a
pair of gloves that sort of pushes against every movement

(02:34):
that you tried to make. So they had to make
the flag easy to get out and put up. But
once they got up there, the ground was more compact
than they thought it was going to be, so the
astronauts couldn't get the flag down as far as they wanted.
And because of that, and because they ended up putting
the flagpole maybe a little bit too close to the
lunar lander, when they took off to return, you know,

(02:56):
for their trip back to Earth, buzz Aldrin looked out
the window and saw that they had knocked over the
American flag. That appeared to have happened about half of
the time, because if you look at pictures now of
the Moon where those flagpoles should be, we see shadows
cast by flagpoles in areas where Apollo twelve, sixteen, and

(03:16):
seventeen put flags, So those three are probably still standing,
but the rest of the flagpoles probably have fallen over,
and the flag itself is probably a mess. The flags
were just run of the mill flags, which cost only
five dollars and fifty cents. And if you've seen a
flag that's been left out on a flagpole for years,

(03:37):
you've probably noticed that the sun's radiation has started to
make the colors fade. The flags on the Moon have
had about fifty years of exposure to solar radiation in
the vacuum of space, so there's probably not much red
or blue anymore. It's probably white. But also maybe the
flags have disintegrated by this point. Because the Moon has
temperature swings that go from over one hundred degrees celsius

(04:00):
to less than one hundred and fifty degrees celsius near
the equator as you go from day to night. That
stuff's really hard on equipment, so the flags are likely
disintegrated by now. Dennis Lakaruba, whose company sold the flag
to NASA, said I can't believe there would be anything left.
I gotta be honest with you. It's gonna be ashes cause, look,

(04:25):
the space environment is tough and we're planning on returning
to the Moon. The Artemis one mission orbited the Moon
without a crew in twenty twenty two. Artemis two is
expected to leave no sooner than September twenty twenty five,
and it will take a crew around the Moon without landing,
sort of like what we did with Apollo eight. Artemis

(04:45):
three is expected to happen no earlier than September twenty
twenty six, but this one's going to actually land humans,
including the first woman on the Moon, and they're heading
to the lunar South Pole. So on today's episode, we're
we're going to talk about the kinds of challenges we're
going to experience on the Moon as we move towards
setting up things like research stations, mining operations, and maybe

(05:09):
eventually permanent human habitats. Welcome to today's show. It's going
to be hard to work and live on the Moon.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
I'm Kelly Wiersmith. I'm a parasitologist. Daniel. What have you
been up to this week?

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Well, in addition to doing my research at serin I'm
also a professor, which means I teach, and this week
I've been preparing my new class for this fall, where
I'm talking about life in the universe, Does it exist?
Where is it? How can we find it? Basically, I'm
talking about aliens.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
Nice. That sounds awesome. So is it a lecture class
or a conversation? I bet that would be some really
awesome conversations.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
It's supposed to be a lecture, but I'm going to
make a kind of conversational and it's for non majors,
so we're talking like dance majors and artists and all
sorts of fun folks.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
Oh my gosh, that sounds like so much fun. Can
I take your class? Never mind, I don't want to
go back to school.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
I'll give you an A and I'll have about you. Kelly.
What's your week been like?

Speaker 1 (06:21):
So? I recently took over as vice president for the
American Society of Parasitologists. So I've been doing some like
organizational stuff that's not super exciting. But I also have
been studying the reproductive behaviors of male small mouth bass.
So one of my things that I do as an
ecologist is I work on questions related to managing fish populations.
And so we're working on some papers about bass reproduction.

(06:44):
So I've had my head underwater all week.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
So why small mouth and not large mouth bass or
medium mouth bass.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
There are no medium mouth bass, which is best friend
of mine. But I have done work on large mouth
bass too. That work involved making the fish vomits that
I could see what they were eating. That was a
way smelier job than this one, although this one involved wetsuits.
And I'm going to tell you there's two kinds of
people in the world, those who pee in their wetsuits

(07:10):
and those who lie about it. And riding in the
van with the crew every day was not always a
lovely experience. And the van was like twenty years old
because ecologists can't afford anything nice.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
Five minutes in and we're already talking about ar En.
Welcome to the podcast with a Biologist.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
My husband has a timer actually when Biologist started together,
and he keeps track of how long it takes for
us to start talking about poop, which we're gonna do
on today's episode at some point.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
I bet, which we're gonna do absolutely except it's going
to be poop in space and anyway, Welcome to the
podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, in which we talk
about poop in space and poop on Earth and everything
out there in the universe. We like to explore the deepest,
darkest questions about how everything works, including tiny little particles

(07:58):
and fruit bats and everything in between.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Fruit bats are awesome.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
So in the intro, Kelly, you told us about how
terrible it's going to be to live on the Moon,
all the challenges, how hard even was to get an
American flag to fly on the Moon. And my first
question is like, well, why are we even thinking about it?
Why is NASA planning to go back to the moon.
Why are people talking about building a particle collider on
the moon. Why does Jeff Bezos want to go to

(08:26):
the moon. Why don't we just stay home?

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Oh my gosh, there's so many different answers to that question.
One of the big answers, like, the reason we went
to the Moon in the first place is probably prestige. So,
you know, humanity seems to have decided that being able
to get to a place like the Moon and keep
people alive is a great way to show how amazing
your economy is, how amazing your scientists are and to
just get the whole world sort of impressed with you,

(08:49):
and so that's probably part of why we're going back.
But there's also a bunch of small companies who are
hoping to make some profits off of the Moon. So
there's already people who are sending as of loved ones
to the Moon, which is a bit of a controversial thing.
There are people who don't feel like we should be
littering the moon with the ashes of humans, but there's

(09:10):
a company that's working on doing that already.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
And is that a nice thing to do for somebody?
Or you like, I'm ejecting you from the planet because
I didn't like you in life, So.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
I think it's supposed to be a nice thing. I
think Jean Roddenberry, the guy who did Star Trek, was
the first person, or was one of the first people
to have his ashes sent to space. They haven't made
it to the moon, but you know, I think it
would be great if you could go to the Moon
in life, But it's much cheaper and easier to send
a small quantity of your ashes to space.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Are you thinking, Gene Roddenberry literally went where no man
had gone before.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Well, I mean he was with a shuttle crew surrounded
by men and maybe some women at that point in
the shuttle program, and then I think he came back.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
To you know, speaking of Urine. That's how I always
interpreted the Star Trek thing. To go where no man
has gone before always made me think of like I'm
peeing where nobody has ever peed before.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
You know, as a biologist, my brain actually never went
with Aeron. I'm surprised.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Oh well, I'll just ruined Star Trek for you.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
No, that's okay, I'm still good with Star Trek. It'll
be fine.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
So tell me, is this desire to go to the
moon do you see it as like a natural extension
of you know, colonialism and exploration five hundred years ago
when the Spanish were sending out their ships, they also
wanted to like claim New Spain for the king and
you know, find resources and gold and exploit people. Is
this like a natural extension of it or is it

(10:35):
like a difference in kind?

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Oh my gosh, so that could be a whole episode
on its own. There's a book that just came out
called Ground Control by Savannah I forget her last name,
But that's enough information for you to find that book,
and she tackles that question head on. I think it's complicated.
So one thing that's nice is that when you go
to the Moon, for example, there's already international law saying

(10:59):
you can't you know, America can't land plant a flag
and say the Moon belongs to us. But there is
a lot of ambiguity and international law about what you
can do with the resources once you're there. So could
Blue Origin, for example, extract water from the Moon and
create a gas station on the Moon by splitting it
into hydrogen oxygen, which is propellant for rockets, and then
sell that back to people. The US interpretation of international

(11:22):
law is that the answer is yes. But I think
there's a lot of other countries who would disagree. Or
I think China and Russia would disagree until they were
able to do the same thing, and then they would agree,
but they don't want to be the second country to
be able to do that. So it's complex. So there's
no people, so at least you don't have the problems
with dispossession in GENOCIDEA.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
It could be aliens. There could be aliens.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
On the moon.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
We didn't know until we went, you know, and the
same is true with Mars. Right, Lanning people on Mars
is complicated for that reason.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
Right, Yeah, I think microbes on Mars are way more
likely than microbes on the Moon, and that I think
does make it complicx. But there are folks who argue
that the US, for example, being able to get to
the Moon before everyone else is sort of like we
benefited from colonization and from you know, exploiting various peoples
and that's how we got this far ahead. And now

(12:15):
we're going to be the first ones to get the
resources and we're not going to share it with people,
and that's like colonization sort of continuing to benefit the colonizers.
It's complicated. I think international law fixes some of these problems,
but I'd like to see more clarity to make sure
that everybody benefits from space a little bit more clearly.
But let's get back to the science.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Well, I have a very like twelve year old opinion
on this, which is it excites me to hear about
people going to the Moon in Mars and beyond because
I want to know what's out there, right, and I
feel like eventually we have to explore the universe, and
eventually has to start somewhere, and they should probably start
with the moon because it's the closest thing and that's
a baby step. And so I like hearing about like

(12:57):
concrete progress towards our eventual future as a galactic species.
You know, a big reader of science fiction, and so
it feels like if you can't even get to the moon,
you're not going to get anywhere. So that's my like,
you know, as a twelve year old view of going
to the moon.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
Amen.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
No, I totally agree with you. So my husband and
I wrote a book called The City on Mars, and
it's all about space settlements. And the reason we took
this project on initially was because we're both sci fhi
nerds who love the idea of humans living in space.
We just want to see it done right. And it's
kind of complicated and those complications. We're not going to
talk too much about the legal complications or the ethical
complications today, more of the like challenges that the lunar

(13:35):
environment poses when you're trying to work just do something
like plant a flag on the moon. Even something that
simple is complicated.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Even peeing on the moon is going to be hard.
So we were curious what folks out there thought about
life on the moon. Is it going to be a rosy,
relaxed retirement home where people can live out their cushy
lives or is it going to be brutish and short
and difficult. So I asked our listeners to comment on
the question what is the biggest challenge for living on

(14:04):
the Moon. If you'd like to participate for future episodes,
please write to us to questions at Danielankelly dot org
and will happily add your voice to the choir. So
think about it for a minute. What do you think
is the biggest challenge for living on the Moon. Here's
what a bunch of our listeners thought. I'd say it's
some combination of food and water having to be replenished,

(14:24):
most likely from Earth. Also bone loss due to low gravity.
I think radiation is going to be the main one
that we'd have to pay attention to, and living deep
underground doesn't seem like the most glamorous way to be
exploring a new body.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
I would say probably the cost of keeping supplies.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
And yeah, I would say cost.

Speaker 4 (14:45):
There are so many ridiculous challenges facing humans on the Moon,
and almost every one of them is a single point
failure like radiation, exposure, or access to food and water.
So it's tough to choose, but I'm going with supplying oxygen.

Speaker 5 (15:00):
I guess that would be the lack of any life
supporting ecosystem. Radiation is going to be a big problem.

Speaker 6 (15:08):
But also I hear there's really difficult dust, which is
kind of like asbestos, I think, very dangerous to inhale
and also just damages everything. I can't see it being
a huge problem humans living on the Moon. We've already
got the International Space Station a few hundred years, few
trillion dollars, and some clever engineers.

Speaker 5 (15:29):
I guess they would have to find a source of
water on the Moon because bringing it from Earth would
be incredibly heavy, and trying to recycle it from PSDD
on the space station just doesn't seem as if it
would be enough.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
Well, top of mind is what to do with all
the cheese realistically? Actually how to deal with all of dust,
since I'm not aware of any room bus that can
handle it really well.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
I think the.

Speaker 7 (15:59):
Biggest challenge our humans living on the Moon will be
I think.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
The dust over there, because it's charged, it gets everywhere.

Speaker 6 (16:07):
Mental health and growing food is the biggest obstacles to
long term survivability on the Moon.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
Well, there's temperature variations because there's no atmosphere. That sun
is going to heat up the surface really quickly and
make it really warm, and then it's going to cool
off doing night breathing, not floating away, lack of resources
to farm water, all that stuff. I think without the atmosphere,

(16:33):
meteors are going to come in and just ping the
surface of the Moon there, which is why it is
already so pock marked.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
I probably guess the fact that you don't have all
the things you have on Earth would be the biggest
problem living on the Moon, like oxygen, water, radiation shielding,
that's my guest.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
I think the hardest thing would be defined the nearest box.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
It's a level way away.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Surviving the radiation environment. So it's going to force them underground.

Speaker 7 (16:54):
The right the aditional water, it's probably going to be
the regulars. The moon soil, it is just corrosive sticks
to everything. It's probably going to cripple every mission that
goes up there for an extended period of time.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
So nobody mentioned the thing I expected, which is, you
know the issue of being lactose intolerant and living on
a ball of cheese.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
If the moon were made of cheese, that would solve
a lot of our food problems that we're going to
have on the moon. Although how old is the moon, Daniel.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
Oh, the moon is billions of years old, so it's
going to be very Gorgonzola.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
All right, that would really narrow the pool of folks
who would want to go to the Moon. I'm guessing
that would be a whole different set of problems.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
It's going to be a sharp cheese for sure. So
tell me what you thought about these answers. Really, it
seems like our listeners are kind of aware of a
lot of difficulties for living on the moon.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, I was impressed. Actually, it seems like they've got
a lot of facts about the moon. Honestly, they had
a lot more knowledge about the Moon that I had
before I started this book about the settling Space. So
I was impressed a lot of the problems that they mentioned.
We're going to be going over today and we could
have a whole show called the Moon kind of Sucks
that could have like five or six different seasons. But

(18:08):
we're going to just pick a couple of Kelly's favorite
moon problems. But before we get into my first problem,
what did you think about the listener answers?

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Yeah, I thought they were great. I love that people
really think about the problems of living on the Moon,
and I hope it means that they really appreciate how
cushy and wonderful life is here on Earth. No radiation issues,
we got nice weather, food is easy to grow. Man,
life here is great. So you may be anti Moon,
I hope that means you're also pro Earth.

Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah, I mean Earth is where you find all the
interesting parasites and wasps like that might not work for
most people, but man, the idea of moving to a
place where there's zero chance that I could, like find
a wasp species that hasn't been identified by science yet,
I'd be pretty bummed out about that.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
I'm not sure most people include wasps on the pro
list for Earth, but you know, everybody's got their own thing.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
I study the ones that are like too small to sting,
but I've helped describe two new was species, you know,
new to science. But but anyway, I hate yellow jackets.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
All right, So tell us what is the number one
big pain in the butt for living on the Moon.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
Well, I don't know that you can necessarily pick the
biggest problem. But the problem that was complained about a
lot by the astronauts and that seems particularly like a
pain in the rear and to me is regolith. So
regolith is the name for like the dirt that covers
the surface of the Moon. So on Earth, when you've
got dirt, we have wind and rain and these things

(19:33):
sort of roll our pebbles and they become nice and
smooth because of that. On the Moon, not only do
you have no wind and no water because it's in
the vacuum of space, but it just keeps getting hammered
by stuff from space, which kind of keeps shattering, and
then the heat like fuses things together again, and then
the temperature swings come and they shatter things into pieces,

(19:54):
and so it becomes super tiny and super sharp. So
it's like having all of these little like glass knives
on the surface. Astronaut John Jung referred to them as
tiny razor blades and was really worried about breathing them in,
which is a totally legit concern because on Earth we
have a disease called stone grinder's disease, where people were

(20:15):
like grinding stone and breathing in the tiny little sharp pieces,
it gets stuck in their lungs and causes scars and
it's hard to breathe. And so we're going to really
have to worry about like where this regolith goes and
make sure it's not in our habitats.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
So you're saying this kind of weird word regolyth, Right,
this is a funny thing, And I guess it just
means like the dusty little bits on the outside of
a planet, right, because Earth also has regolith, right, This
what we call soil here on Earth, I think geologists
technically call regolith. It's like any sort of like dusty
little bits on the outside of a planet. And I

(20:50):
think that's kind of interesting that like planets have like
rock and then on their edges they're kind of like
covered in fine detail. I think that's sort of fascinating,
and it was interesting to learn more about like where
that comes from, Like why do we have regolith anyway?
You know, why isn't the Moon just like a big rock?
And why isn't the Earth just like a big rock?
You said, like Earth has water and wind, And I

(21:12):
think you're right, that's like a real source of the regolith.
Like on Earth, why do we have soil, right, because
we have weathering processes, But on the Moon we don't,
right as you said, And the regolith actually comes from
like those asteroid impacts. It's it's really fascinating that this
is like shards of collisions, you know, Yeah, real tactile
physical debris from a collision, and that's all there is.

(21:35):
The Only way to make regolith on the Moon is
to have this like destructive process that creates shrapnel basically, right,
it's all shrapnel, super tiny shrapnel.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah. I mean the destructive process I think also includes
the like changing of temperatures and the expanding and the shrinking.
But so I think regolith means something like blanket of
dirt or something like that. I was talking about geologists
the other day and I was like, what's the difference
between regolith and soil and dirt? And he just went

(22:07):
ugh and change the subject.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
That's one of those like meteor, meteorite, asteroid. Like the
words are always a mess, right because everything is historical,
and they're like, oh, we used to call it this
and then we discovered that doesn't make any sense. But
we try to shoehorn this thing back in the names
always nonsense.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
Yeah, yeah, nature doesn't care that humans would really like
to categorize things exactly. But I think that a lot
of geologists would say that on Earth we have dirt
and soil, and that like that definition wraps up the
fact that there's microbes in there and so it's like
a living thing. And regolith I've only ever heard it
referred to as like places where we think it's just

(22:45):
dead dirt that's jagged and awful.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
So you would say Earth doesn't have regolith.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
I this is the first time I've heard the word
regolith applied to the Earth. Okay, but I'm not a geologist,
so I'm not gonna like bet any money on. But
that's my understanding.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Geologists write in and tell us how wrong we are. Yes,
but the important point is that the surface of the
Moon is very different from the surface of the Earth.
Right Earth, we have this nice cushy soil because of
microbes and water and wind and the moon whatever, those
little bits are are very very different and very very painful.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
Yeah, and they mess up equipment. Like astronauts would complain that,
you know, they'd have these things on their wrists that
would tell them like what they were supposed to be
working on when and if they got dirt on it
and they rubbed it off, it would scratch the surface
and then they couldn't read it anymore. And so if
you can imagine, like you know, people talk about wanting
to process tons and tons of this regolith so that
they can extract for example, there's a little bit of

(23:41):
water in there, maybe you'd want to extract. That would
be a real pain. There's helium three that people talk
about extracting. That's a whole different show on why I
think that's a bad idea. But the idea is, if
you're processing all of this stuff, your equipment is going
to be constantly like rubbing against this sharp, abrasive stuff,
and it's going to wear down. So that's going to
make it tough, and stuff clings so it's electrically charged,

(24:02):
and it would cling to space suits. So space suits
are supposed to be white so that you don't overheat. Daniel,
maybe you can explain the physics of why that works.
But they would like a lot of them fell over
because it's like low gravity is fun but still hard
to move in, and so they'd fall over and they'd
like sort of turtle around for a while trying to
get back up. They'd stand up just coated in regulith.
And so now they're gray and they're like absorbing more

(24:24):
heat and it's electrically charged. Why is it electrically charged,
physicist friend.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, it's really fascinating that it's electrically charged. And one
reason basically is that the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere,
So the environment just above the surface is very, very
different on the Moon than it is on Earth. You know. So,
like we talked about the Moon being impacted by asteroids
and creating this regolith, the Earth is also impacted by asteroids,
but you know, we have an atmosphere which is like
a big cushy blanket that absorbs all of those and

(24:53):
turns them into nice streaks in the sky. And so
that's why we don't have the same kind of debris,
and the same thing affects the charge of the surface.
So the Moon is actually electrically charged, but one side
is positive and the other side is negative. It's really weird.
So one side, the side that's facing the Sun, those
photons make it all the way down to the surface

(25:14):
and they kick electrons off the surface. This is just
called like the photoelectric effect. Electrons and material will absorb
photons and get kicked out, so photons make the sun
side of the Moon be positively charged because they're kicking
off the electrons. But there's also this plasma sheath that
surrounds the Moon, and the interaction of that sheath with

(25:35):
like the solar wind, all the particles coming off the
Moon push electrons to the back side of the Moon
where they stick. So the backside of the Moon is
covered in extra electrons and the front side, the solar side,
doesn't have enough electrons. So the whole Moon is electrically charged,
including this recolith. But it's different on either side. It's
really weird.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
Is it going to be harder to operate equipment on
one of those sides? Would it be like more likely
to short because of this electrical charge? Or is electrical
charge in either direction equally bad.

Speaker 2 (26:05):
Electrical charge is equally bad in other direction for static electricity,
like the stuff will cling to you, but it does
change how you might take advantage of this charge. There
are folks who are trying to make levitating gliders like
drones that can fly in the moon using electrostatic repulsion
because you can't have like a helicopter on the Moon
there's no atmosphere. But if the surface is like negatively charged,

(26:27):
you could make a negatively charged glider that floats above
the surface, and that'd be a lot nicer than like
rolling across all this regolith. There's actually folks who are
building this technology.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Okay, all right, two questions. I've never heard of this,
all right, So first is there really enough charge to
levitate and move an item an object? And then two
does that charge get used up when you pass over it?
Probably not right, Yeah, So there.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
Are folks who are doing this on Earth. They have
a special chamber they've been testing this stuff with, and
you can't levitate a whole lot like so far, they
were able to levitate a one killer gram flyer about
a centimeter above a moon like surface using like fifty
kilovolt source. So you know, these are like macroscopic quantities.
This is not like a wasp or something. You know,
a kilogram is like a squirrel, So you can basically

(27:13):
fly a squirrel across the surface of the Moon. And no,
it doesn't use it up like it can be static.
You could have something hovering essentially infinitely long using electrostatic repulsion. Right,
it's stable the way like the Moon's orbit is stable,
or on the Earth you could hover stably without expending
any energy over an electrically char surface.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
I think that our mascot should be a squirrel hovering
in a little spacesuit.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
It's so cute. But is it peeing in that space shoot?
Is really the question.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
It either is or it's lying about it.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
There's so many ecologists who are going to be writing
me telling me, they're like, we actually don't be in
our wetsuits. You're you're sullying our good name. But anyway,
all right, so this reguleth you could write on it.
That would be sweet, But that wasn't helpful to the
astronauts when they were walking around, and a bunch of them,
like John Young was reporting that, you know, he went
out there the first day, got covered in dust, and

(28:10):
then when he was trying to put his spacesuit back
on the next day, like the dust had gotten into
all of the seals, and so he was having trouble
getting like the helmet ring fastened well enough so he
could make sure that he wasn't going to get exposed
to the vacuum of space, and on Apollo fourteen, al
Bean and Pete Conrad actually got like so much dust
on their spacesuit that when the lunar lander like went

(28:31):
back up and went to dock with the main spacecraft
that was going to take them back to Earth, the pilot,
who was Dick Gordon, was like, no, y'all, ain't bringing
that junk into my spacecraft. You have to get naked
and so before and so what they said naked in
the biography and I don't know, presumably that means down
to their skivvies, but anyway, they had to take off

(28:52):
their clothes before they were allowed to get back in
because Dick Gordon did not want to be breathing in
these tiny razor blades, which totally makes sense to me.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, and it's fascinating. You were talking earlier about how
this makes the astronauts' suit go from white to gray,
which is a big issue in regulating their temperature. I
think a lot of people misunderstand sort of how temperature
works in space. They imagine space is cold, and so
we probably need like a big blanket, right, But there's
something surprising about space, which is is actually harder in
space to cool down than it is here on Earth.

(29:23):
Right here on Earth, the way you cool down is
that there's air. Wind comes by and steals your heat. Right,
you're losing heat to the air around you. You heat
up the air around you, and then wind comes by
and blows that away. You got to do it again
and again. So that's why a blanket is useful, or
a jacket or whatever. But there's no air on the
Moon for you to lose your heat too. The only
way to lose your heat is to radiate it away

(29:44):
to glow. Everything out there in the universe that has
a temperature is glowing. Like if you put on infra
red goggles and look at your friend, you would see
them glowing. They're giving off photons, and out in space,
that's the only way to give off energy. So it's
important to regulate your temperature. Like electronics on the space
station can overheat because it's harder to lose that energy
to cool down in space. So it's really important if

(30:06):
you're going to reflect the energy back, if you're going
to stay white, to not be covered in regolith.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, the Soviets sent a rover on the Moon. They
think that it got too close to like a crater,
and it knocked a little bit of regolith on. I
believe partly it covered one of their solar panels. But
the bigger problem was that there was a little heating
unit inside and with that little bit of insulation from
the regolith, the whole thing overheated and then it wouldn't
work anymore. And so yeah, radiating your heat off in

(30:32):
space is a big problem.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
All right. So the Moon is covered in death dust,
which you don't want on you and you don't want
to breathe and really really wants to stick to you.
Is there anything good we can say about this death dust?
They're positive about regulith.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
There is, But you know what, let's keep the listeners
on their toes and we'll take a break and then
we'll get back to that. Okay, So before the break,

(31:12):
Daniel wanted to know if there's anything good about the
regolith other than its ability to levitate very cute squirrels
wearing space suits on the lunar surface.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
You know, I'm pro universe. I don't want to just
be down in the moon. I'm always looking for, you know,
the bright side of the moon.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
Basically, Yeah, well, I have a friend who says that
I'm relentlessly pessimistic about space. So it's good that I
have you as a foil.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
To it, right, I'll try to be your yang.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
Yeah that's excellent. But okay, so let's talk about some benefits.
So you can pile and you don't want the regolith
in your habitat, but the regolith being on your habitat
has some benefits. So when I first started thinking about
habitats in space, I had imagined these like glass domed
habitats where you're like looking out at the star. But

(32:00):
as I was looking at proposals for actual habitats in space,
almost all of them included being buried under meters of
this regolith. And I know, right, so, sad, Wait.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
What's the point of being in space if you're just underground?
I mean, you could live underground here on Earth.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
You were supposed to be the optimistic one, Daniel.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
I guess even if you're on the moon. If you're underground,
you know you're on the moon, you feel closer to
the cosmos or something something like.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
And they'll probably be like portholes you can look out
of every once in a while, and the space walks
would still be cool. So one of the nice things
about having that regolith is that, as we mentioned already,
the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere like you have on Earth,
so the radiation in space hits the surface, and we
don't really understand this radiation very well. So the fifty

(32:51):
years of data that we have from astronauts orbiting the Earth,
all of those astronauts were orbiting within the magnetic field
that are our planet creates, and that shuttles a bunch
of the space radiation to the poles where you get
the auroras, which are beautiful, and then a lot of
the rest of the radiation that gets through gets sort
of stopped by our atmosphere. So we don't get hit

(33:12):
by a lot of the space radiation, and neither do
our astronauts. So most of the data that we have
comes from the twenty four men who went to the
Moon for like two weeks, not a lot of data.
There's reason to suspect that this radiation causes cancer, but
it's different than the kind of radiation we get on Earth.
And when you provided us comments on the book, one

(33:33):
of the things that was interesting was I thought that
we knew that galactic cosmic radiation came from stars and
other galaxies exploding and then sort of like the shrapnel
is heading towards us. But you said, we're not actually
sure where that comes from. Can you tell us more?

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yeah, it's really fascinating. You know. One way we can
learn about what's going on in the universe is just
picking up the messages that come to Earth. And mostly
that's photons, Like we see distinct galaxies because they send
us light, and we see other stars because they send
us light. But there are other kind of messengers. We
can also get messengers from distant galaxies and from other
parts of the galaxy and from other parts of the

(34:10):
Solar System that are little particles, you know, like protons
and electrons and sometimes even like iron nuclei. And it
turns out space is filled with this stuff, and a
lot of it's a mystery. Like some of it, we understand,
a lot of the radiation that's in our Solar System
comes from the Sun, and stars don't have to explode
to send us little bits of stuff, Like the Sun
is pumping out solar wind. This is part of what

(34:33):
contributes to the plasma sheath around the Moon. It's not
just generating photons, but it's shooting out electrons and protons
and all sorts of massive particles are coming out of
the Sun. So if you're out there in the Solar system,
you're going to be exposed to this stuff very high speed,
like tens of kilometers per second for these tiny little bullets.
So definitely probably bad for you. But that's just our Sun.

(34:55):
And you know, we don't even really understand our Sun
very well. We have models of the solar radiation and
a lot of them don't really agree in detail with
what we see coming from the Sun because we don't
understand the physics of what's happening inside the Sun. And
then as you look at higher and higher energy particles,
like particles going faster and faster, a lot of these
are generated outside of our Solar system. They come to
us from nearby stars, or from the center of the galaxy,

(35:18):
or from other galaxies. But the very highest energy ones
that are super crazy, like where a single particle has
as much energy as like a Major League baseball, these
things we don't understand at all, Like there's nothing in
the universe we know about that's capable of creating particles
at that speed. But we see them and they hit
the Earth and we know they're out there, So there's

(35:40):
a lot of mystery about what out there is pumping
out really weird particles. We call them cosmic rays when
they hit the Earth and create showers when they're in space.
They're an important source of radiation that can kill people. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah, if you get hit with what is it called
a solar flare where you get a bunch of stuff
from the Sun all at once, they could kill you
pretty quick. As far as I understand, we don't understand
what like slow chronic doses over the course of a
life will do in terms of cancer or cognitive declines
or anything like that.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
And we haven't studied because it's basically unethical. It's like,
you know, put somebody in a particle beam, see what happens. Well,
we know it's going to be bad, we just don't
know how bad or how quickly.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
Right, Well, Brookhaven National Lab recently got a thing that
can simulate galactic cosmic radiation, so we're getting some data
on like what it does to rodents. But there's all
kinds of reasons that rodents are different than humans. Like
I think if radioactive particle stops in you, it releases
a lot more energy than it would if it just
passed through you. So rodents, the fact that they're small,

(36:41):
you'd expect the particles to be less likely to stop
in them than they would if they went through a human.
That's just one of many reasons why rats are not humans.
So it makes these things complicated, so we don't understand
it well. So if you were sending me out there,
I would want to be shielded from it so that
I just wouldn't know what was happening at all.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
So what's the best way to shield ourselves from all
this crazy death bullets from space?

Speaker 1 (37:04):
The most common proposal right now, because it would require
the least energy and would probably be easiest with the
materials at hand, is to just take regolith and pile
meters of it on top of the habitat, so the
radiation hits the regolith and stops before it gets to
your habitat. And like everything about space is complicated, so
if it hits the habitat, you have to worry about
like this thing called spallation, which I'm sure Daniel you

(37:26):
know all about, but I'll try to explain it. So,
like where a radioactive particle hits something and then breaks
into a bunch of new kinds of particles. So you
essentially get sprayed with like a shower of new radioactive stuff,
which in some cases can be worse than the stuff
that was heading towards your habitat in the first place.
So you don't want it to get to your habitat
at all. Is that reasonable, Daniel?

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah, yeah, that's really reasonable. And you know, here's the
chance for me to be the optimistic. It sounds to
me like death dust can save us from the death particles, right,
so like two deaths make life. It's like a negative
one squeared or something.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
No, that that counts as a good outcome on the moon.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
That's good. That's good, all right, So we can use
the regulator we pilot on top of our habitat. It
can protect us from this cosmic radiation. And there's lots
of it already there, it's easy to access. That sounds
great except the fact that it's going to ruin our
cosmic view from our moon living room.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
Right, But it's also it's going to help you with
some more stuff. So the moon, especially near the equator,
has intense temperature swings. So at the equator you go
from negative one hundred and thirty degrees celsius to one
hundred and twenty degrees celsius during the day. That is
bad for humans, but that's also bad for equipment. So
like you get a lot of equipment that expands and
contracts as it goes from hot to cold and overtime.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Why are there such extreme swings on the Moon? I mean,
the Moon is about the same distance from the Sun
as the Earth is Why are the extreme so severe
on the moon?

Speaker 1 (38:49):
Because the Moon lacks an atmosphere to buffer those temperature changes,
and so when you're in the cold, you are in
the cold. There's no sunlight to keep you warm, and
there's no heat that was absorbed and maintained to be
slowly released at night by the atmosphere. Does that sound
is that? Is that right?

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's just another reason why
it's nice to have an atmosphere because it buffers you
from this stuff. As you said, it holds in a
lot of heat that absorbs during the day. The Moon
actually has a tiny little atmosphere, like people say it
has no atmosphere, and technically that's true because what they
call it is an exosphere. There are some particles floating
above the moon. It's not like zero pure vacuum, but

(39:29):
it's not enough for the particles to actually like hit
each other or ever bounce, so they call it an
exosphere instead of an atmosphere. To have an atmosphere, you
have to have enough density the particles are like interacting
with each other. So there certainly are some particles around
the moon, but not enough to provide really any temperature buffer. So, yeah,
the temperature swings are pretty extreme. And as you were saying,

(39:50):
that's gonna be pretty bad fear equipment, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
Yeah, was that our first well, actually moment, I wonder
if we should track those. Yeah, it's fun to have
someone else knows something about it and can can add
some more knowledge than what you had. So yeah, these
temperature extremes bad on equipment, and also those like low
temperatures are just bad period. So I was reading the

(40:13):
Resources series, like this series about resources in space and
how you can use them and what's up there by a.
Bidescu and Zacne and Zacney pointed out in one of
his chapters that when temperatures get cold enough, you reach
this point for some metals called the ductile to brittle transition.
So often when you've got a metal, like if something

(40:33):
hard hits it, it just kind of dense and bends in,
but it still maintains its overall structure.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
Is that what ductile means. It's like bendy and soft.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
Yes, I hadn't actually thought about that, but yes, that
is what ductile means. Okay, So then otherwise it's brittle,
so it's more like a rock, like if you hit it,
it's more like lid acrack and kind of fall apart.
And one of the ideas for why the Titanic sank,
even though it was this great engineering marvel, is because
it was cold enough that the metal it was made
have had hit its ductile to brittle transition. So when

(41:03):
it hit the iceberg, instead of kind of like just
denting in a little bit, which they were hoping that
the metal hull would do whenever it hit a hard object,
instead it just kind of like cracked.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Oh, so it went from like aluminum foil to glass.

Speaker 1 (41:15):
Basically, they should have had more lifeboats. That's the real thing.
That was the real problem. They didn't have enough life
boats for the people on the ship.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
But well, really they needed bigger doors, so you could
fit two people on those doors. I mean, that's really
the problem with the Titanic.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
That was the problem for Rose and Jack. That's true.
I don't know if that would have helped everybody, but
it would would have saved one of them.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
Every little bit helps Kelly, every little bit.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
All be honest, it looked like there was enough room
for both of them on there to me.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
All Right, we're not going to answer that question on
today's episode. Okay, but you're saying that stuff on the Moon,
if it gets really really cold, is going to be
dangerously brittle, and it's just going to break more easily
rather than like bending if it gets bumped.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
Yeah, it might depend on the materials that you're using,
So you're just gonna have to be careful about this
kind of stuff. So it's just it's got extra layers
of complication relative to doing things like mining and construction
on Earth. So there's going to be that extra layer
of complication. And so if you've got regolith, it's going
to buffer these temperature swings and so you're not going
to get as cold or as hot, which is going
to be good for the humans. It's going to be

(42:09):
good for the equipment, and it's going to be good
for your heating and cooling bills, which is going to
be important because it's going to be hard to generate
power in space.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
All right. So living on the surface of the moon
pretty terrible. But living under the surface of the Moon
protects us from not having an atmosphere and the swings
in temperature and lets us turn the terrible death dust
into something positive. But that doesn't mean that living on
the Moon is still going to be easy. Let's take
a break and when we come back, we'll talk about
how to pay for and how to power it all.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
All right, So, speaking of your electric bills, is the
power in space going to come from? So On Earth,
as of twenty twenty two, sixty percent of our electricity
comes from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels come from prehistoric
animals and plants that have been buried underground for a
really long time. Geologists are probably going to be really upset,

(43:17):
but that's all I'm going to say on this matter.
And so unless the Moon has some huge surprises in
store for us, we're not going to be using fossil
fuels on the Moon.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
You're saying there's almost no chance that there's a bunch
of dead aliens buried in the Moon that turn into
convenient fossil fuels for us.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
I'm saying it's unlikely and we shouldn't bank on it.
We should have another plan ready, all right.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
If you're going to send your kids to the Moon,
you should probably not bank on dead alien dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yeah, no, agreed, agreed, all right.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
But that's not the only way to get power, right,
So what about some other ways to get power in
the moon.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
So some other renewable methods that we use on Earth
are also out of the picture. So there's no flowing water,
so there's no you're not gonna have any dams, there'll
be no hydropower. Wind power requires wind. With only an
exosphere and not an atmosphere, you don't have enough wind.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
You got solar wind, but that's not enough to generate
any energy either.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not going to work. And geothermal
energy requires heat drawn from deep underground, and the Moon
is geolologically pretty quiet. We said silent, and we had
someone in our book correct us and say, well it's
it's quiet, it's not silent. There's still some stuff going on. So, Okay,
it's a quiet moon, not silent. So if I were

(44:29):
sending my kids to the moon, which I would never do,
I would hope that they had some nuclear power. And
nuclear power is something that a lot of folks are
not super comfortable with for a variety of reasons. Concerns
about using the products for making nuclear weapons, concerns about
what happens with the waste when it's gone, concerns about
what happens if a nuclear power plant like explodes. And

(44:51):
I could go off on a long tangent about why
I think nuclear power might be better than things like
coal power, but I'm going to contain myself slightly, and
I'll know that not everybody has problems with the nuclear power.
For example, France's electrical grid is about seventy percent nuclear,
so and they're not glowing too green over there. But
it's a different question entirely when you're launching those nuclear

(45:13):
materials into space, because those nuclear materials that you're gonna
need if your rocket explodes on the way up to space, now,
maybe that nuclear stuff has been spread all over the
area where the explosion happens. So for example, all.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
Right, hold on, because I think there's an assumption here, right,
You're saying we can't do fossil fuels in the Moon
because there are no fossil fuels in the Moon. Now
you're talking about nuclear power on the Moon, and I
think you're assuming that we can't find fuel for nuclear
power on the moon. We still have to bring it
with us. And for fossil fuels, that's obviously absurd. You
can't bring enough fossil fuel because it's not energy dense enough.
But uranium, for example, very very energy dense, tiny amount

(45:51):
of it can power things forever. I love the story
for example that like these days, when they build nuclear
power submarines, they don't even think about refueling. They just
build in the lifetime of fuel. It never refuels, like yeah, boom,
it's done. That's pretty awesome. It's just like a real
demonstration of the incredible energy density of uranium. But is
there no uranium to be found on the Moon? Why

(46:13):
do we have to launch it from the Earth.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah, that's a great question. There is plenty of material
on the Moon to run nuclear power plants. It's just
going to be really difficult to extract. So it's in
sort of like low concentrations in various areas, so you'd probably,
for example, have to process a bunch of regoliths to
extract the nuclear fuel from it. And so if we're
going to have people living on the Moon for a
very long time, I think eventually we would want to

(46:36):
figure out how to extract those materials to refuel or
start nuclear power plants. But initially, if you want to
get space research station or mining operation or habitat off
the ground, you're gonna want to bring the nuclear power
plant with you just to get things moving.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
And so you're saying it's dangerous to launch a rocket
with uranium or plutonium in it, because sometimes rockets go boom.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
Yes, and you can be careful about how you pack it.
But so, for example, we have these radio isotope heater units,
and so this is not really using radioactive materials to
generate energy, but just to generate heat so that on
those cold space nights, the equipment doesn't like just freeze up,
and you use stuff like plutonium, americium and polonium. Did

(47:24):
I say that right? Americium?

Speaker 2 (47:26):
I've never known how to pronounce that, and I've always
been terrified that I would be asked to on a podcast,
and so now you're living my nightmare.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
All right, Well, set us letters if I got it wrong,
and let us know how I should have said it right.
And so these things they undergo radioactive decay, and when
that happens, they release heat, and the heat helps sort
of buffer the swing into super cold temperatures when robots
are working on the Moon in shadowed areas. But the

(47:54):
Soviets launched the lunkat Moon rovers and they had planned
on powering one of them with polonium two ten. And
in nineteen sixty nine, the rocket that was bringing the
rover up exploded and it spread polonium over various parts
of the USSR bad, right, yes, bad, not good, And

(48:15):
then you can scale up. So the next more sort
of complicated way to use radioactivity to power things is
called a radio isotope thermoelectric generator. So essentially you just
sort of add a thermo couple to get a little
bit of energy out of all the stuff that's happening.
So you still get some heat and you get a
little bit of power, but like for two kilograms of plutonium,

(48:37):
you get enough power to run a laptop. So this
is not like a super great way to get energy.
It's not going to be enough to run like a
whole research station. So what we're gonna need are many
nuclear fission reactors. This is where you're like actually making
a fission reaction happen. You sort of can control how
much power you can make the reaction happen faster or
slower to sort of modulate the amount of heat that

(48:58):
you get. And we have some experience with these. So
the US in nineteen sixty five sent up a satellite
we called SNAP ten A and it had a nuclear reactor.
After forty three days, it kind of like stopped working
and so it's still orbiting the Earth somewhere. But the
Soviets were way more comfortable with this technology. They launched

(49:20):
over thirty and when they were done with these satellites,
they used the rest of the fuel to push them
up into like a graveyard orbit. So there's a bunch
of nuclear reactors, like over thirty of them probably still
orbiting the Earth. But one of them didn't make it
to the graveyard orbit. Cosmos nine fifty four accidentally descended
back to Earth and it ended up falling over and

(49:42):
breaking up over Canada and spreading nuclear material over a
large swath of Canada, so you need to be careful
with this stuff.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
But it's sort of amazing that they can make nuclear
reactors that's small. People imagine nuclear reactors. They're thinking like
three mile island. These like huge concrete domes like are
really massive. Operation. Remember that they've made these things small
enough to have like for them on an aircraft carrier
or a couple them on a submarine. So you know
when it's really important for like the military, scientists and

(50:11):
engineers are really good at making things tiny, and so
space can also benefit from this, right, like launching these reactors,
they really can be pretty small. But you're right, they
still have to have radioactive materials in them, and so
it's still dangerous to send these things up. But you
know the US has done this also, right, Like some
of our rovers on Mars are nuclear powered.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
I don't think they're fission reactors, but the two simpler
versions that we talked about initially, those have been sent
in rover. Yeah, that's right by the US, but we
haven't sent nuclear fission reactors past the orbits around the Earth.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
I think we're going to need you if we're going
to have research stations and habitats and folks are working
on it. So in twenty fifteen, this group created the
Killo power reactor using Sterling technology yeh or krusty advertise
emphasize the y at the end. These authors are awesome.
They always make sure that the acronyms of their projects

(51:06):
match up with something in the Simpsons. So they also
have the demonstration using flat top fissions, which is dough
I think was the name of the beer in the Simpsons,
and the fission reactor Integrated Nuclear Kinetics Code or FRINK,
which I think was the scientist and anyway, so what's
actually important is they were able to make a little

(51:29):
reactor that could probably power something like thirty US households,
and they're working on scaling this up and making it
portable so that it could go to the moon on Mars.
So this is a technology that people are working on
and we're just going to have to figure out safe
ways to make sure that even if a rocket does explode,
god forbid, that we've like clad the materials well enough
so that they would not be likely to break up

(51:50):
and scatter over land or something like that.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
All right, So nuclear power from a physics perspective totally
works on the Moon and is a good source of energy,
and we have plenty of fuel here on Earth. The
challenge is just getting the fuel from here to the
Moon without killing everybody on the planet or causing.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Cancer, and making sure we can run these reactors in
the space environment, which is a complicated place to work.
And then you have to make sure that you set
it up far enough away from everybody so that you're
not hitting them with doses of radiation. And so it's
this nice, reliable method that actually hasn't been proven in
space yet in the way you would need to set
up a habitat. But another kind of power generating technique

(52:29):
that we have a lot more experience with is solar.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
We're talking about all the sunshine we're getting on the
Moon and how difficult it is because he's everything up.
Why don't we just use solar power that cover the
Moon in solar panels.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
So what's the problem, Well, solar on the Moon has
some of the same problems that we have with solar
on Earth, which is that when it's nighttime, you don't
get the solar power. And on Earth we solve that
problem with batteries, but on the Moon. That one night
on the Moon is equivalent in time to two weeks
on Earth. And so the battery packs that you would

(53:00):
need are going to measure in the thousands of tons probably,
and I'm not actually sure we have the battery technology
ready to keep a habitat going for two weeks through
a lunar night.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Wait, so you're saying a lunar night is two Earth
week long, Like, if you're on the Moon, you see
the sun for two weeks and then you don't see
the sun for two weeks. Yes, doesn't that depend on
where you are on the Moon or something.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
Yeah, Yeah, I should have said at the equator. That's
important and we're going to get to that eventually. Thank
you for helping with my setup. Yeah. And these solar panels, like,
you can't just go to lows and pick up solar panels.
These are solar panels that are going to have to
be able to survive those massive temperature swings in this
super harsh environment. So it's going to be sort of
harder to make these, and they're going to need to

(53:44):
be able to survive meteorite strikes. That horrible regolith when
you go to brush it off after it sticks, that's
going to mess them up also, So it's going to
be complicated, but there's an area where it's going to
be less complicated. So if you go to the poles.
The poles on the Moon are nice because the Earth
is more tilted than the Moon is. The Moon has
a lesser tilt. So if you're at certain parts on

(54:06):
the Moon, you're getting perpetually grazed by the sunlight. So
you're not getting hit by it straight on, but you're
getting sort of grazed off the side. And if you're
up on a rim, for example, where some of the
craters are, then much more of the time you will
be getting at least some sunlight. And so these areas
are known as the peaks of eternal light, but they
should probably be more like the peaks of pretty much

(54:28):
eternal lights. I think there's there's a spot where you
can get like ninety percent of the time there's solar power,
so that helps a lot with these battery problems.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
But this is underlying issue that you're talking about, which
is batteries or I guess equivalently transmission, and that's that
like solar power, you have the power when the sun
is shining on the panel, and you don't have one,
it's not shining on the panel, and so you need
power regularly. But I guess my question is like, yeah,
I guess you could use batteries, like use solar panels
to charge at batteries and then draw off the batteries.

(55:00):
Why not just like have a ring of solar panels
around the equator. Some of them are always going to
get sunlight, some of them are going to be in
the darkness, and then just you know, have wires. Basically,
why not just transmit the energy from the bright side
of the moon to wherever you are.

Speaker 1 (55:13):
Yeah, that is another option that could totally work. It's complicated,
and I think you want to do things as simple
as you can initially, and most of the proposals that
I've seen involve going to the craters first, rather than
creating this system of solar panels orbiting the Moon that
transmit power down. But that is totally another option.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
Yeah, yeah, well I was thinking even just on the surface.
But ye, power transmission is tricky, right, you generate power
on the other side of the Moon, you got to
get it here. You're going to lose a lot of
that energy and then you've got to maintain this like
moon size structure. There are some people who are talking
about building a particle collider around the equator of the Moon,

(55:52):
because hey, why not we always want one more particle collider,
bro And that's one of the challenges is powering it
and maintaining that whole thing. A moon size structure is
not a small thing to keep running.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
And what's the benefit of having it on the Moon?
Does the lower gravity help or something.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
No gravity doesn't affect particle colliders at all because particles
are so small they have basically no gravity. It's just
hard to find space on Earth for such a large device.
You need a lot of people to sign off, and
you're running a tunnel under their backyards. And there aren't
so many objections on the Moon. So it's not like
a practical or a great idea. It's just sort of
like something people talk about sometimes got anyway. So you're

(56:31):
talking about solar panels on the Moon, and you're saying
difficult because you can't just use like generic solar panels.
They're also going to get like destroyed by radiation and
by recolith So do we have any kind of solar
panels that will actually work and like last for more
than five seconds on the Moon.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
Well, we have attached solar panels to rovers on the
Moon and Mars and they've powered our rovers for a while,
so we have figured out how to make this work.
And one of the other nice things about being at
the poles is that rather than having these massive temperature swings,
it's always just really cold. So at the poles, like
for example, at uh there's this ridge between the Shackleton

(57:10):
and the de Gerlache. Oh my gosh, go ahead, everybody
right in and tell me how I totally killed the
name of that crater, because I'm sure I destroyed it.
But it has like average summer temperatures around negative seventy
degrees celsius, which is about like ten degrees colder than
the average Antarctica temperature. But at least it's not swinging
as much, so at least you just your plan for

(57:32):
the cold. You insulate, you heat, and at least you're
not dealing with the extremes. But the peaks are only
about one one hundred billionth of the lunar surface, which
is like two tennis courts. You can like spread it
out a little bit. If you're willing to like bring
longer poles and lift your solar panels up a little

(57:53):
bit higher. You'll get sunlight more of the time that way.
But it's not a lot of land, less than two
tennis courts. So when you hear about the fact that
China and the US both want to go to the
poles because this area is great. Also, this is one
of the only places you can find ice, there's a
lot of geopolitical things to worry about in terms of

(58:13):
whether there's going to be a scramble for these particularly
great spots. So we got to three of the problems.
Getting that water and using that water is going to
be a real pain. Lack of an atmosphere, temperature, swings, radiation.
That regolith is not good for growing things in like
as you can imagine, roots are going to have trouble

(58:34):
growing in tiny razor blades. There's also not enough carbon
or like nitrogen and phosphorus. In fact, I think the
most concentrated sources of carbon, and this will bring us
full circle. One of the most concentrated sources of carbon
on the Moon are the ninety six bags of feces
in vomit left behind by the Apollo astronauts' base poo

(58:56):
base poo. But technically that stuff still belongs to so
you are not allowed to start growing your veggies. In
Neil Armstrong's long lost bowel movements, I'm sorry lest.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
You kick off an international incident over space poo. Wow,
that's right, all right. So there's lots of reasons why
living on the Moon is going to be difficult. There
sounds like there's some potential engineering solutions in some of
these cases, but it's definitely not a place where people
can look forward to retiring very soon. But tell us
a big picture. Are we excited about going to the moon?

Speaker 1 (59:27):
I am excited about going to the Moon? I mean, like, yes,
these are big problems, but they're exciting problems to solve,
and I think the Moon is going to be a
great place where we can learn the stuff that we
need to settle frankly better places like Mars. So we
can't figure out how bad is it that the Moon
doesn't have the same gravity as the Earth, because Mars
also doesn't have as much gravity as the Earth, how
bad is that radiation? It does burying yourself in regulus

(59:50):
solve all of the radiation problems, like it is a
great close, kind of easy to get to, place to
go to learn a lot of the stuff that we're
going to need to know if we want to live
and work in space. More So, I'm excited. I'm glad
we're going back. I hope it doesn't kick off any
geopolitical incidents, but I'm excited. Are you excited?

Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
I am excited. I think in the history of humanity,
we've solved lots of problems, from like how do we
get over that mountain? To how do we build something
that floats over that ocean? And where do we find
food on the journey? And all sorts of stuff, and
people have died and it's been painful, but we've always
figured it out, and because there always have been people
who just want to go and want to know and
want to see it and are willing to risk their

(01:00:33):
lives and to die to help push the envelope forward.
And so I'm excited that there are people out there
willing to do it. I personally don't want to go
to the moon or ever leave the surface of the Earth,
but I'm very grateful for those explorers among us, and
we're going to help us take the first steps to
being a galactic civilization one day.

Speaker 1 (01:00:51):
I love it all right, Daniel. This has been so
much fun, and thank you so much to the listeners
for tuning in. Feel free to email us at questions
at Daniel and dot org to tell us about all
the words we mispronounce and to give us your thoughts
on the episodes or other topics you might want to
hear us talk about.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
I have a great week everyone.

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