lunar regolith, you know the soil of the moon, is the
moon's most predictable and abundant resource. it's other
primary resource useful for harvest is,wait for it..... solar
energy.
i've been reading about moon colonization for so many
years.
my conclusion is the first attempts at preparing
the moon
for any useful puspose will be accomplished through
remote controlled and autonomous sets of robots that we
deliver to the moon.
what will those robots do, use lunar soil and use solar
power.
solar power is being developed on earth. arguably, early
solar paneling on the moon will be based on earth
manufacturing and shipped to the moon. but maybe not.
my suggestion is that the major area of engineering yet to
be built is how to use lunar soil to do any of the things we
will want robots to do on the first moon projects.
the crowdsourcing site allows people to post their
engineering project proposals, and the reward if enough
people subscribe to the proporsal, is they purchase the
amount of simulated lunar soil provided from a bevy of
existing providers on earth. simulated lunar soil isn't
cheap, and experimenting with it , is necesssary to
provide the first few 'killer applications' that robots on the
moon with deploy.
alot of peopel think it's a simple affair and that nasa and
others have already researched this. wrong.
#1 any reearch on conventional dwellings for human beings
is useless. humans won't be on the moon for decades after
the robots are on the moon. the robots don't need human
habitable dwellings.
#2 turning soil into roads. it is not necessarily the case
that roads or landing pads will be especially useful to the
future robots we send to the moon.
THERE ARE AND INFINITE amount of possibilities for the
next killer app for lunar soil. i think a crowdsourcing site
which fosters communication and comparison of ideas, as
well as rewarding the 'best' with funding is a great way of
finding out that killer app and bringing down the cost of
lunar simulated soil at the same time for those whod would
like to experiment.
the big complexity in this research is that the methods of
using the soil must also be conducted in near lunar
conditions. the problem is ---you cannot repilicate low G
for very long on earth, and you cannot replicate vaccum
conditions very cheaply. but people can try and that is the
challenge to figure out......
perhaps we will see simulated lunar soil experimention on
the ISS one day?