Email Me Daynotes Gang

A Day in the Known Sea Ever wonder what it might be like to actually live on the Moon? I have. Well, one of the early design goals of the Conestoga Project is a vision of what we hope to achieve. Here, then, is a glimpse of what that vision might be like - with a day in the Known Sea, Mare Cognitum, in the southern hemisphere of the Earth-facing side of the Moon. NOTE: All names, except where obvious, are selected at random and not intended to resemble any real persons, living, dead, undead, or imaginary.

Morning.

The lights in our sleeping compartment come up slowly, from about 10% to 50% - not bright enough to be jarring, but bright enough to prevent easy sleep. Light rock music plays through the speakers by my head. The instant my eyes open, I'm rolling left to look at the bulkhead displays. No red lights, no yellow... I already knew that, of course, from the music; if the computer had registered anything outside the predefined ranges, the music would have been "The Willian Tell Overture" at full volume, and the lights would have instantly come up to 100%. Still, it's never a bad idea to check.

As I reach full conciousness, my wife and I begin a practiced dance of preparing for the day in a very limited space; brushing teeth in a "bathroom" the size of a smallish kitchen pantry, dressing in the bedroom - a spacious three meters by two. The music fades at the end of the morning wake-up music and a soft, mellow voice delivers the morning news.

"Good morning. Local sunrise is in 3 days, 14 hours, and 12 minutes. Internal pressure is within 3% of nominal, oxygen content is 19.2%, humidity is 32%, temperature is 37 degrees. 71 emails have arrived for Matt, 73 emails have arrived for Keri. 27 emails have arrived in the general account." I grunted at that last bit of news; more research requests. What fun.

News and morning routine complete, we head out into the common area. Breakfast is a social affair; all six adults sitting around the large table, making plans for the day. Breakfast isn't much to talk about; we've been here long enough for the farm to start producing some food, but not enough to stop eating prepackaged instant oatmeal and granola. No matter how fond you are of either one, after six months they're really getting old. The one bright spot this morning is the precious handful of strawberries handed out by Rachel. They're among the first mature fruit from the farm, and there are enough for each of us to have one.

This morning, I go for oatmeal; the packet comes from a small cupboard, and I add a precise amount of hot water from the tiny sink. It's not quite the same as boiling water and making oatmeal properly, but it uses a lot less water. I sit down next to Frank, Rachel's husband, and glance around the assembled group.

Along with Keri and I, Frank and Rachel, our other two adults are Steve and Mary. Frank and I will be working outside all day, working on our permanent home. Steve and Rachel are planning to spend the day in the farm, trying a new crop of tomatoes and working with the livestock. Keri is going to spend the day finishing some web designs for Earthside clients, and Mary has some work to do on the experiments we're running for Earthside universities.

After breakfast, I head from the common area to the cramped computer lab, where I check on my email - mostly list mail and other non-critical stuff, just like on Earth - before heading outside. From the computer lab, I exit into the workshop; at the other end of that space is the airlock, where Frank and I suit up to head outside.

Our pressure suits are an adaptation of the science fiction "skinsuit" idea. Instead of porous material that allows sweat to escape, our suits are made from a flexible neoprene-like material, similar to a diver's wetsuit. The material has hundreds of small capillaries embedded in it; methyl alcohol flows through them, around to the back, and through the expansion manifold of our air systems. The expansion of the gas from the 2000 atmosphere storage tanks to the 1 atmosphere helmets results in a lot of cooling; in addition to the heating provided by the alcohol heat exchangers, there are band heaters there to prevent frost from forming. The air is as dry as possible, but there's always a little moisture.

The problem is that there's a fair amount of oxygen available on the Moon, locked up in the regolith and rock. Water, on the other hand, is a precious resource - too precious to waste on something like cooling.

To protect the cooling system and suit mechanics, we pull jumpsuits made from fiberglass cloth and kevlar on over our suits. There's silver and gold mylar fused to the material to help keep from picking up more heat, and heavy insulation in the boots, seat, and gloves. This makes things a little clumsier - it's like trying to do everything while wearing oven mitts - but that's better than picking up a rock that's several hundred degrees above or below freezing bare-handed.

Once we're outside, I tell the house computer to turn up the outside lights and focus them on the rock of the ringwall around our crater. We've been working on tunnelling into the ringwall for four of the six months we've been here, and we're making rapid progress now that we've worked out the best way to do things. Our main tools are a drill system on our rover, and something that looks like a huge moly bolt.

The small rover is about the size of a forklift, battery powered and with a number of attachments on the front. Frank settles into the operator's seat and checks the power levels. "Looks OK" he assures me. "Plenty of power, and the computer's OK." The drill is pneumatic, similar to an Earthside mining drill; the bit is one meter long, two centimeters in diameter, and closely resembles a normal carbide masonry bit. It's powered by an air-pressure turbine that's capable of over 4500 rpm.

Air is released from one of two pressure tanks on the back of the rover. The air powers the turbine, then flows back to another tank - which starts out completely empty - racked with the full tank. The drill, left alone, would gradually lose power as the pressure equalizes between the two tanks. To avoid that, an electric compressor pump continuously pumps the air from the return tank, compresses it, and returns it to the supply tank. With the pressure supply valve wide open and the return tank flat empty, the drill can also generate over 2000 pounds of pressure as torque on the bit. Not much rock can withstand that; the carbide of the bit might not even manage it. In this brittle rock, it might as well be a heated knife in butter.

The drill is controlled by a computer; the computer regulates the pressure supplied to the drill turbine and the speed with which the drill is advanced, according to a complex equation the variables of which are the measured speed of the drill (and therefore "hardness" of the rock), the temperature of the bit, and the measured pressure difference between the supply and return tanks. Frank drills holes in the rock by essentially placing a laser spot on the rock and telling the computer to go. If the bit gets too hot, the computer backs off automatically. This rock is an excellent insulator, but it's had billions of years to cool. Heat does build up, but it's rarely a problem.

Frank drives the rover into the entrance of the chambers we've already dug; it starts with a 3 meter diameter tunnel that extends into the rock for two and a half meters, then spreads out into a chamber a full ten meters in diameter. The initial tunnel will eventually be our main airlock, and this chamber will be the "green room", for suiting up or stripping off our suits.

From the back of the chamber there are two tunnels running back into the rock. The one on the left is also three meters in diameter, and leads back one meter into another completed chamber; this chamber is three meters high and 20 meters long. The second chamber we'd completed, this will be used as a workshop of all kinds, electrical, mechanical, whatever. Anything that can fit through the airlock can fit into the work area.

Frank rumbles down the right-hand tunnel, which is only two meters in width and about two and a half meters high. This tunnel leads to what will be the living quarters. The first chamber is about two meters down from the green room; we finished it last week. It's a storage area, and it's just another tunnel, about three times as wide as the tunnel diameter but only just as high.

About half a meter back from the end of the storage tunnel is the living room, which we're hoping to finish today. We made it a circular area, about ten meters in diameter, sloping rapidly into a flattened dome ceiling. Less than a third of a meter from the wall, the ceiling is two meters high; at the center of the room, the ceiling is just over three meters.

We set up the work lights to illuminate this room; Frank's going to drill the holes for the last bit of the room's volume, then we'll start on the finishing and finer work. Eventually, there will be five tunnels other tunnels leading out from here; one to the farm, one to a communal kitchen area, and one to each of our family areas, which will contain both bedrooms and offices. Right now though, those only exist in the CAD maps we'd drawn up after completing our survey. We hope to have the rough layout of our home completed by the anniversary of landing, and so far we figure we're slightly ahead of schedule.

I start hauling some of the debris of earlier operations out into the crater while Frank starts drilling. It takes about three minutes to finish each one-meter hole, and Frank has to drill about 30 holes before we start the next step.

Frank is going to drill the holes in a rough square, two meters on a side. After marking each corner, Frank drills a hole through the center, and through the center of the line forming each side of his square. He's now marked out four squares, one meter on a side, all meeting at one corner. The next four holes go into the centers of each of the four squares. Twelve more complete a grid pattern; Frank's now created a pattern of 25 holes, forming a grid on the wall two meters across. Each hole is half a meter from it's neighbors. The computer now displays for him a map of the area he's just drilled; the hardest regions, where the drill went the most slowly, are marked out in areas of red; the softest areas are green. He drills a few more holes in the hardest areas, usually about five or six; once he's done with that, he moves on to the next area (if possible) while I move in for the next step. Working this way, with Frank's drill in continuous use, we've removed nearly all of the roughly 420 cubic meters of rock for this room in a little over two weeks of 12 hour days. Fortunately, although the days are long the work isn't all that heavy; we trade off days at the drill, which is mostly watching a computer screen and pushing buttons, while the rest of the work is made much easier by the lighter gravity here.

I have a smaller version of Frank's drill, with a shoulder stock and 30 cm bit; I'll only use it if I run into a problem, though. The main tool is like nothing I'd ever seen on Earth.

On Earth, most miners would be breaking out the dynamite right about now, and from conversations I'd had with other colonists, some of them were using the same thing. We'd thought about it, and we did have some along for the real tight spots, but as much as possible we didn't use it. Instead, I had a threaded carbide steel rod, one and a half centimeters in diameter. Right now, the entire rod is covered by what appears to be a smooth, seamed covering. Total, the rod is about one-quarter of a millimeter short of the two-centimeter diameter of Frank's borings.

Starting with the center holes, I carefully slide the rod as far as I can into one of the holes. Once I've got it in, I connect the end of the rod to a small air turbine, and use my drill to make a series of mounting holes in the floor. Backing off as far as I can, I gently turn the valve to feed air to the turbine.

As the threaded rod turns within it's covering, the gaps between the segments of the covering rod widen. As the rod turns, the surface-side ends of the covering pieces thread their way down towards the end of the rod. The other end of each piece, however, is fixed. The result is that the covering pieces fold out, expanding their diameter. Each piece is three centimeters long, which means the maximum expansion of the rod is about five centimeters. The hole they're in is two centimeters in diameter.

This creates pressure.

As the cylinders around the rod slowly transform themselves into disks, the rod slows to a stop when the expansion of the disks meets the rock. Very slowly, I feed more pressure into the turbine. As the pressure increases, I can visualize the stresses in the fairly brittle material of the surrounding rock. The stress build until...

It's always a surprise. The rock reaches the breaking point, and cracks between the holes Frank drilled. The first ones are always the hardest, and make gunshot-like sounds transmitted to me through the rock of the floor. As soon as I hear it, I cut the pressure and start backing the rod back down. One by one, I move through all the central holes, then start working my way out. As more and more cracks form, flakes of the rock start forming, littering the floor of the cavern; with the last, outermost set of holes, large chunks fall to the floor. When I'm done, the surface of the rock is spider-webbed with hairline cracks, and several pits and wide cracks are in evidence. From here, it's pretty easy; I use my shoulder drill anywhere that looks to still be solid, and elsewhere use a standard pick to break up the now-shattered rock and spill it out onto the floor. I gather the largest pieces into a large wheelbarrow, and by the time I've gotten most of the rubble out, Frank is finishing the second set. We both work on this set of holes, Frank setting the rock-breaker and me operating the turbine; when we're done with these, it'll be time to start finishing and smoothing the rough edges. We have a variety of tools for that job, from the shoulder drill, to picks, to a jackhammer-like machine mounted on a tripod. That takes the rest of the day, aside from a break back to the house for lunch and a change of air bottles.

Deep inside the rock like this, we can't communicate directly with the house by radio. Instead, we have a relay bolted to the wall by the entrance to the living room, and a cable is strung along the wall from there to the entrance, where it's connected to another relay to the outside world. While we work, we talk to each other, to the others inside, and with the house computer, listening to and composing email, playing music, even surfing web sites which the computer reads to us. The computer also monitors us, watching suit status, body temperatures, and other critical factors like pulse rate, blood-oxygen levels, and blood pressure through sensors in our suits.

The process of suiting up is relatively easy; coming inside, though, takes a lot longer. As soon as the airlock is pressurized, we use powerful vacuum cleaners to get as much of the rock dust and regolith as possible off our suits. It's impossible to get it all, but the regolith is a major irritant, about like having sinus problems on Earth; we keep it out of the living quarters as much as possible. Inside the tiny green room, we shed our overalls and put them in sealed lockers; the lockers have to be sealed before we open the door into the rest of the house. Our actual skinsuits stay on for lunch; without the outer layer, and without our helmets, there isn't any regolith on the suits to cause problems. Besides, taking them off and putting them on is a lengthy process; by design, they cling tightly to every part of the body, and although it makes for a relaxed and comfortable fit in vacuum, under pressure it makes it almost impossible to easily pull off. Unless we're coming in for a while, like at the end of the day, the skinsuits stay on.

Lunch is baked potatoes (well, nuked potatoes) with cheese and greens from the farm. High in carbohydrates to compensate for the work we're doing in the tunnels.

Despite my hurry to get back to work, I take the time after lunch to check on the farm; Steve and Rachel have been working there all morning, and I'd like to see how they're doing.

The farm is different from the rest of the house; while the living quarters are one module, the common area and storage are a second, and the workshop, green room, and airlock are the third, the farm is one whole module of open space. "Open" is a relative term, of course; it's jammed with racks of hydroponic plants, trays of light lunar soil Rachel's experimenting with, and cages. We don't have large livestock, of course, but we do have rabbits, a few chickens, and a couple of sheep and pigs. The livestock currently eat most of our produce, but production is increasing, and of course once we complete our permanent home we'll have plenty of space to increase it even more.

A tank of water runs down each side wall. Eventually, if we find a way to increase our water supply, Steve hopes to grow fish; there're thousands of fertilized cod eggs, plus shrimp, crab, lobster and dozens of other marine species in cold storage. Right now, though, the tanks are our reservoir and part of the recycling system. From Rachel I discover that they've managed to create arable, if somewhat poor, soil by mixing large amounts of compost with processed regolith. I can't resist stealing a ripe cherry tomato from the proof of their success before heading back outside.

With the rough-in of the living room finished, Frank and I start laying out the locations of power and data lines, atmosphere vents, and lights. While I use the portable drill and other tools to cut shallow trenches in the walls and ceiling for them, Frank use a large grinder mounted on the rover to smooth down rough edges. It's possible, with plenty of practice, to smooth down the rock to something approaching marble; we're not that picky, however, and instead aim for a texture about like that of rough-plastered walls.

It's ironic, really; there're thousands of cubic meters of rock we could safely hollow out, for a series of caverns larger than the biggest Earth mansion. With the tools we have, it's relatively easy to excavate the rock, too. Our biggest problem is that we have no way to make new cable or wiring, new light bulbs, anything made from heavy metals, or water. So although we could make the rooms much larger, they'd be dim and poorly lit to conserve light bulbs and fixtures; better psychologically to go with smaller rooms that can be well-lit from one fixture. Which leads to problems with claustrophobia...

Our compromise is that we'll have this larger room as the main living area, which Steve and Rachel want to plant with trees around the edges and grass for a carpet. We'll use five light fixtures with the high ceiling to create a large, airy space - and the rest of the house, with the exception of the farm, will be much smaller in comparison. The farm will be the largest cavern of all; Steve and Rachel want a large circular crater with a five-meter domed ceiling. They'll create Steve's pond at the bottom of the crater and plant around it, all the way up to the walls and up racks from there, and irrigate by pumping water up and letting it flow back to the pond. That room will be large enough we may blast part of it out; we learned from the living room that these circular-domed rooms, while very efficient in space and volume, are a major pain to excavate.

After several hours, we've managed to get a first-pass done with the grinder, and I have most of the trenches dug out; the rover goes back outside to be plugged into the main house batteries for a recharge, although the hand tools mostly stay in the tunnels. Who's going to steal them here?

Dinner is a rare luxury; Steve and Rachel are keeping the livestock populations steady for the time being, which means that when the rabbits breed, an equal number of adults are available for meat. Roast rabbit, green salad (possibly with a tomato or two each) and reconstituted apple juice - better than anything the best five-start restaraunt on Earth can produce, trust me. The conversation is a mix of status updates on what we're all working on, and news of the Moon colonies in general; Frank's heard from his brother, in a ten-family colony over in Mare Imbrium, who says they've found a meteorite of almost pure nickel and iron, and one of the older colonies farther south than us are reportedly going to attempt an expedition to the Pole in search of water ice. If they find it, we'll have to see what we can trade for it; water's the one thing we don't have any way to produce. If they don't, then maybe in a few months we'll have the resources to try it ourselves.

The other news of interest is in the area of communications; right now, we relay everything through Earth. So if we want to talk to somebody over on the other side of the mare, less than 300 km away, we have a six-second delay between question and answer - because we transmit to Earth, Earth transmits back to the other colony, and the reply follows the same path.

There are two new developments, though; one of the new colony ships, reportedly headed for Mare Imbrium, is planning to drop a full communications satellite at the Lagrange point between Earth and Moon. It won't be completely stable, but it'll be better than trying to maintain a long-term lunar orbit, and it should be visible to all of the colonies all the time. No word on what they want in return, but whatever it is, we'll probably pay it; the convenience would be worth a lot. The second possiblity is a plan to have the colonies all build relays on the nearest high point; we're close to the eastern edge of the mare, so we'd place ours on a peak in the surrounding mountain range. That would give a massive horizon, hopefully large enough to overlap on other relays; there are enough colonies now that we should be able to achieve a pretty fair coverage over Earthside. That would be more expensive than the relay satellite, but it would offer even greater convenience and communications capability; instead of one node for all traffic, one relay would only have to handle a small portion of the traffic.

After dinner, we're all exhausted; there's email to write and send, books to read online, even recorded movies in the entertainment library, but most of us are too tired. Time to just head for bed, and rest up for our next day on the Moon.