Movies and television have made us familiar with the trope of the tiny community maintaining a level of technological civilization by scavenging and repairing their various devices, even repurposing parts of other technologies. However, while such efforts can create visually striking sets, it is highly questionable whether such measures could actually succeed in practice, particularly over the long term.
No matter how carefully one conserves and stretches one’s resources, eventually all machinery fails. And the more sophisticated one’s equipment, the more difficult it is to repair when one’s supply of spare parts runs out. A village blacksmith might well be able to handcraft replacement parts for a steam engine, but fabricating a replacement circuit board for a robotic delivery system is far more difficult.
As the diablovirus pandemic progressed and manufacturing and transportation systems began to unravel, the lunar settlements were faced with the question of how well they could sustain themselves in the absence of replacement parts from Earth. On a world where even the most basic sustenance required sophisticated technological systems, there wasn’t the option of falling back to a lower level of technology.
Even a decade earlier, such a situation probably would have left the lunar pioneers with little choice but to put their systems on standby and return to Earth. However, in the years leading up to the Expulsions, there had been an increasing emphasis on reducing the dependence upon expensive spacelift out of Earth’s deep gravity well in favor of the utilization of lunar and asteroidal materials. This included a shift to supplying the largest settlements with the tools to produce the tools rather than shipping a continual stream of spare parts “uphill.”
However, there were still limits to how much could be produced locally, particularly in relation to “surge capacity,” the ability to replace a large number of damaged pieces of equipment in a relatively short time. And with the Sun entering a period of increased flare activity, there was every reason to be concerned about EMP effects on vital electronics, particularly as related to solar panels and communications equipment that were necessarily located on the surface, where they could not be shielded with lunar regolith.
—- Kennard Redmond, Memoirs of an Engineer on the High Frontier. Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2055.