A vision of a future Moon settlement assembled from semi-buried inflatable habitats.
Sited beside the lunar poles in regions of near-perpetual solar illumination, mirrors positioned above each habitat would reflect sunlight into greenhouses within the doughnut-shaped habitats.
Inflatable structures specialist Pneumocell in Austria performed a system study of an inflatable lunar habitat, based on prefabricated ultralight structures.
Once inflated, these habitats would be buried under 4-5 m of lunar regolith for radiation and micrometeorite protection.
Above each habitat, a truss holding a mirror membrane would be erected, designed to rotate to follow the Sun through the sky.
Sunlight from the mirror would be directed down through an artificial crater, from which another cone-shaped mirror reflects it into the surrounding greenhouse.
The study was supported through the Discovery element of ESA’s Basic Activities.
It came about after Pneumocell submitted their idea to the Agency’s Open Space Innovation Platform, OSIP, seeking out promising ideas for space research from all possible sources.
The goal of this study was to develop a design for a lunar habitat in the close vicinity of one of the lunar poles and to demonstrate the feasibility of the suggested design in view of the available resources.
The habitat would operate self-sufficiently in the long term by producing and recycling its own oxygen and food inside large greenhouses and almost exclusively by using solar irradiation power.
The proposed concept features a combination of:
- Prefabricated ultra-light inflatable structures.
- Covering the inflated structure with a 4 -5 meters thick layer of local loose regolith for efficient protection from extreme temperature, meteorites and cosmic radiation.
- The use of mirrors that move towards the sun and bring visible sunlight into the greenhouses.
You can read the Executive Summary here.
