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.

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.

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.

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.

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

you still haven't properly implemented nachos.

Why do you think so?

Yes, but it requires said imaginary window.

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

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.

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

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?

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'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/