Space Colonization Part 02: The Moon Colony

The moon village

As many of you already know ESA or European Spase Agency has already in the making a plan, a plan to colonize our Moon. A permanent moon base or as Johann-Dietrich Wörner calls it a moon village, is going to be a combination of power of many spacefaring nations robotic or human. This village is not going to be science based only but business (mining) and maybe even tourism based.

History

It's been almost 50 years since Armstrong's small step and later the end of the Apollo program. We have not send any manned missions since then but we did map the place by the use of various satellites. Nowadays we know about the surface of the moon what needs to be known to try this next move on conquering space. 

General info about the moon

Moon is tidally locked to earth which means we can only see the one side from the surface of the earth(that makes the poles of the moon have about 90%-95% sunlight all day long). Tidally locked moon happened because of the gravitational center that it shares with the earth, the moon is very close to earth and gravity slowed its axis rotation so much that we can now only see one side.

Why the moon?

Most of you already know about our plans to send people to Mars, that what you might not know is our technological problems on the matter. Our spacecrafts are not fuel sufficient and our tech on protecting our explorers from the abyssal hazards of space is not good enough yet. So a moon base is the big player in solving both these problems. Let's take a good look on how it is going to be of service to us. First of all a moon base can be the main factory of producing stellar space crafts that can be quiet heavy (it is very costly to send from earth to orbit heavy cargo). Moons supply in materials is just great to unable us create what we need (composition of the moon later in the article). More over producing food since we will have an infinite amount of sunlight by building to the poles is going to be easy. Green food production is going to help us with the production of oxygen and supply the deeper space missions. 

What is moon made of?

The largest portion of the Moon is the mantle. This is the layer between the crust (the part we see) and the inner core. The lunar mantle is believed to consist of olivine, orthopyroxene, and clinopyroxene. The composition of the mantle is similar to that of the Earth, but the Moon may contain a higher percentage of iron.Scientists have samples of the lunar crust and take measurements of properties of the Moon's surface. The crust consists of 43% oxygen, 20% silicon, 19% magnesium, 10% iron, 3% calcium, 3% aluminum, and trace amounts of other elements including 0.42% chromium, 0.18% titanium, 0.12% manganese, and smaller amounts of uranium, thorium, potassium, hydrogen and other elements. These elements form a concrete-like coating called regolith. Two types of Moon rocks have been collected from the regolith: mafic plutonic and maria basalt.Both are types of igneous rocks, which formed from cooling lava. 

The image is about the soil only and not deeper composition.

In conclusion

The mission is going to begin in the near future, the new frontier looks dangerous, hazardous and by all means exiting. We will make it to the moon and i hope i will have the economic capability to go myself.

Source links:

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-moon-made-of-604005

https://moon.nasa.gov/about.cfm

https://futurism.com/esas-plan-for-a-moon-village-is-slowly-starting-to-come-together/

http://blogs.esa.int/janwoerner/2016/11/23/moon-village/

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Space Colonization Part 01: https://steemit.com/science/@diasdr/space-colonization-part-01-general-idea-and-why