China Is Looking Into Building a Moon Base in Lunar Crater

Amaze Lab

NASA has been planning a Moon base for awhile, hoping to get human feet back on the lunar surface by 2030 in search of a new building site. Now China, a country which recently completed the construction of its own space station currently orbiting our planet, might build one as well and they have an interesting concept.

Transcript

00:00 NASA has been planning a moon base for a while, hoping to get human feed back on the lunar

00:07 surface by 2030 in search of a new building site.

00:10 Now China, a country which recently completed the construction of its own space station

00:14 currently orbiting the planet, might build one as well, and they have an interesting

00:18 concept.

00:19 The Chinese space program has been looking at lunar craters as potential building sites

00:23 for a future lunar colony.

00:25 One of the largest issues with building and living on the moon is the constant bombardment

00:29 from cosmic radiation.

00:30 One way to prevent exposure to this is to build robust structures that can block radiation,

00:35 but that means launching and sending a lot more building materials to the moon.

00:39 Another way would be to use current lunar structures like craters, some of which are

00:42 actually lava tubes, which can be hundreds of feet in diameter, to block that radiation

00:46 naturally.

00:47 And there's benefits to building in the dark recesses of these craters as well, more constant

00:52 temperatures.

00:53 On the moon, in the sun, temperatures can reach upwards of 260 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:57 Conversely in the shade, that flips, dropping to minus 280 Fahrenheit.

01:02 Those temperature swings make finding building materials difficult, meaning building in the

01:06 darkness of a crater would alleviate the high-end swings, and building underground would also

01:10 provide an added layer of protection against any of these.

01:14 [Music]

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