The problem with the Moon is the 28 Earth day day/night cycle. It takes the Moon from blistering heat (~250F) to bone-chilling cold (-200F) so anything on the surface has both a cooling problem and a heating problem.

There's no atmosphere so the only way to get rid of heat is to irradiate it away into space or pump it away and do the same thing. Likewise, heating is a big problem and an energy waster as you're irradiating away heat.

Going underground just avoids the heating problem, the cooling problem and the radiation problem. It also avoids the issue of meteor impacts on the surface. Those craters came from somewhere.

Excavation is expensive but it depends on what you're working with. Is it loose? is it hard rock? I don't think we have good knowledge of the geology of the Moon because we'd have to go there and start drilling cores to find out. The presence of ancient lava probably means we'd be dealing with some hard stones too like basalt or granite. But that's just a guess.

Lava tubes, if sufficiently large, just solve so many of these problems.

It's just easier to collect power and produce the light you want to grow somethin gunderground.

> There's absolutely no reason to do anything above ground on the Moon

Is there a reason to do anything below ground? We already aren't doing anything above ground.

Yes, but it requires said imaginary window.

Underground just requires LEDs and solar panels. Both of which we can make quite cheaply.

Living on the moon works, because we can send supplies frequently like we do with the ISS. Meanwhile mars is so far away that anyone who goes there signs up for a suicide mission.

Every single mars mission proposed by musk relies on a pyramid scheme where every round of launches sends more and more people until one day self sufficiency is achieved and the first guy sent to mars will have a chance of returning to earth.

Here's a fun youtube video on just how much it'd take to survive on plant life alone. [1]

Spoilers: Can't be done without a huge amount of vegetation. Algae, on the other hand, can work, but it still takes a boat load of algae for just 1 person.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWRkzvcb9FQ

This sounds very off. Dried rice is 400 kcal per 100g. That is 500g of uncooked rice per day or 180kg of uncooked rice. What you are counting as "food" is the cooking water being absorbed into it.

Those humans are also producing CO2 so it will have some self-sustainability. The 5% CO2 of human breath is a lot more than the ~0.04% in the atmosphere.

I have no idea how to calculate the steady state or what the losses would be.

How hard would it be to find and de-orbit a carbonaceous asteroid or two?

This is not correct. Most plants get their N from nitrates or ammonia salts, and only some plants (mostly leguminous ones) use a direct symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria to produce these from atmospheric N2. Most of the N in natural ecosystems comes from decay of proteins (from vegetable or animal origin), and in agriculture of course it is added as fertilizer.

Plant roots don’t need gravity to draw water! Plants use evaporation and the tensile strength of water (yes, really!) to draw water up against gravity.

I’m sure they have considered this and/or doing it already but you’d only need a small centrifuge to simulate gravity for an experiment.

Perhaps a thick shell of water suffices. In the order of meters, perhaps one to four meters. Perhaps combine it with lead, in the order of centimeters, perhaps ten centimeters, then one meter of water would suffice.

There will never, ever be such atmosphere on Moon as its on Earth. Too low gravity for example, solar winds would scrub it pretty fast even if you would somehow create it 100% with a snap of fingers.

Its nice dreaming about options but this aint realistic.

Those radiation liking mushrooms could be an interesting test for the next batch of plants to the moon. :)

This is what the test covered in the article is set to discover.

Easily, assuming you have solar panels that could survive the temperatures of the lunar night.

There doesn't seem to be any single food that is alone nutritionally complete, but potatoes are certainly one of the closest... many people seem to do well with just potatoes for a month or two. A few supplements (B12, etc.) would likely allow potatoes to work long term.

you still haven't properly implemented nachos.

Why do you think so?

Fortune tellers tell you what you want to hear; Musk tells you what he wants to hear, then pays people to make it happen.

The results may be a day late and a dollar short (adjusting for inflation since 1939 or whenever), but Musk did actually get people to build spaceships, and his worldwide competitors there are floundering.

Doesn’t seem like this is updated when a goal is reached?

For example:

> 10,000 Teslas a Week [Link] 2,615 days since Elon Musk promised producton of 10,000 units a week by the end of 2018. (8/2/2017) "What people should absolutely have zero concern about, and I mean zero, is that Tesla will achieve a 10,000 unit production week by the end of next year." Elon Musk, quoted by Giovanni Bruno in The Street

They are producing now around 2 million cars a year which is four times 10K a week.

———————————

> Teslas Are Boats [Link] 1,703 days since Elon Musk advised consumers that Teslas can safely function as a boat for short periods of time. (1/31/2020) "A Tesla works as a boat for short periods of time, as an electric car has no air intake or exhaust to block & battery/motor/electronics are water-sealed." Elon Musk in a Tweet

I mean, yes? Everytime there is a flood people are astonished about this. This videos from 5 days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CEUq8PUAPWk

You could nail him on a technicality in that it is a submarines, but come on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBwmAMNI9qk

———————————

> Super Fast Starlink [Link] 1,315 days since Elon Musk promised Starlink customers their speed would double by the end of 2021. (2/22/2021) "Speed will double to ~300Mb/s & latency will drop to ~20ms later this year" Elon Musk in a Tweet

Some customers are hitting that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1fh303p/live_in_t...

He also baked in an out for himself. Now, if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency, he can say that she prevented from totally doing the thing he said he was going to do.

I find it interesting that he thinks being nuked every two years is a benefit to being so far from an out of control Earth. I’ve seen BSG and know nukes can fly in space.

I'm not saying 5 successful unmanned missions are impossible in 2 years, but I think Elon may have slightly underestimated the difficulty of the task. There is a lot of stuff left to develop still and very little time to do it.

Elon is not great at estimating how long tasks will take. He originally promised that full self driving would be complete by 2018.

And you have to at least double any Musk time estimate.

Well, then there’s the beaming back to Earth. Maybe that’s easy…I wasn’t sure. Thx for the snark, tho.

...and there have been a few satellites in lunar orbit, and even a private/commercial orbiter (capstone) recently https://www.advancedspace.com/missions/capstone/