[X] My Assistant

[gndonald]

I have a 1979 coffee-table book called "The Space Travellers Handbook", inside are several pictures of an inflatable lunar shelter being tested.

Yesterday I finally found out what it was. It turned out to be a Goodyear Design called STEM (Warning 143MB file), and was designed to fit on panniers around the LM descent stage and would allow two men to stay on the moon for 8 days.

Hopefully NASA will consider looking back through its old plans and dust this one-off, as I (as an amateur) can see nothing wrong with the concept (at least at this point.)

[dvandorn]

The early plans for manned lunar habitats (places where people could live for periods ranging from two weeks, to months, to years) didn't really take into account the radiation hazard. For one thing, the radiation environment on the lunar surface wasn't very well understood, and the risks weren't clearly seen.

In later habitation planning, one of the first large tools to be delivered to any site was going to be a small bulldozer. Every lunar hab module designed after the first landings (that I ever saw, anyway) involved digging a trench, laying the hab module into it, and covering the whole thing over with a minimum of a meter of soil. I think one of the things that tended to derail serious talk of building lunar bases was the conundrum that you first had to fly bulldozers to the Moon...

-the other Doug