Month: October 2020

In the earliest days of lunar exploration, the astronauts brought all their consumables with them. Food came in the form of dehydrated meals which could be reconstituted by injecting them with water, a byproduct of their spacecraft’s fuel cells. Although these meals were a substantial improvement over the earliest space foods, which the Mercury astronauts squirted into their mouths from packets resembling tubes of toothpaste, they still left much to be desired in terms of palatability. Furthermore, the necessity of lifting every gram of mass out of Earth’s deep gravity well made it less and less practical the longer missions became.

By the time of the Phase B prep mission for the Venus Flyby, it was obvious that there was simply no way to carry a year’s worth of food with the spacecraft. Because the Phase B mission was still in Earth orbit, albeit much higher altitude than the Phase A mission, it would be possible to resupply them via automated spacecraft. However, to do so for the actual Venus Flyby would require the automated spacecraft to be launched into solar orbits that would intercept Aphrodite. While this was feasible, there was the risk that a launch failure would result in the astronauts facing starvation.

As a result, it was decided to have the Phase B astronauts run tests on the possibility of growing at least some of their own food. Much to the scientists’ surprise, it turned out that plants actually handled microgravity better than the astronauts who were raising them. Several species of edibles actually flourished in the Ishtar spacecraft, to the point they ended up supplying a reasonable amount of the astronauts’ diet near the end of the mission.

When the American moonbase was set up, the planners knew from the beginning that long-term occupation would require not only a closed-cycle environmental system, but also in-situ resource utilization, including using lunar materials to grow a substantial amount of the astronauts’ food. Given the constraints on pressurized volume and on astronaut time, even these early lunar farms were designed to maximize the yield per unit volume and relied heavily on automation, including but not limited to automatic drip irrigation.

As processors, chipsets and software improved, the robots involved in agriculture became steadily more capable. However, the complexities of dealing with living things are such that fully autonomous operation was almost never possible, requiring at least some level of teleoperation.

—- O. Jespersen, Agricultural Robotics and the Space Race, Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2028.

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.