[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]

What I'd *really* like to do, in re lunar habitats, is find a non-collapsed lava tube somewhere. (They really ought to be there -- the rilles are pretty much all lava tubes whose roofs collapsed aeons ago. To me, that implies there are lava tubes up to a kilometer across that are empty but still intact and roofed over.)

I'd seal off the lava tube and pump it full of air. At that point, your "habitat" could be (initially) as simple as a collection of pup tents and air mattresses on the floor of the pressurized "cave."

Of course, I'd also seal and reinforce the interior walls, roof and floor of the lava tube before installing end walls and airlocks and pressurizing it. You just can't tell how long it would take for air to seep through the megaregolith of the upper lunar crust, making it nearly impossible to keep your habitat full of air.

I guess the real issue would be how smooth the interior of an intact lunar lava tube really is -- if it's rough and twisty, it'll be harder to cover with a sealant (or fill with a snug inflatable structure).

Now, of course, with a big enough lava tube, you could then construct multi-storey buildings and such. But what I *really* want to do is have a large pressurized space to move around in, within the 1/6-G gravity field.

Oh, yeah -- and I want a pair of strap-on wings...

-the other Doug