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moon dust

SPACE: A Moon Dust Economy

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lunar ceramics

How do you start a colony on the moon? Can you ship everything the colonists need from Earth? That’s how NASA handled brief excursions to the lunar surface in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but astronauts couldn’t haul that much with them — certainly not enough to sustain themselves over the long term. Technology has improved since then, but most plans for a sustainable lunar base assume that its residents will use local resources, rather than hauling everything from Earth. So that’s why the European Space Agency (ESA) created a whole bunch of fake moon dust (fake “regolith” in … Read more

SPACE: Don’t Snort the Moon Dust

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Moon Dust - NASA

In space, they say, no one can hear you sneeze. But Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt was doing a lot of that inside the Challenger command module when he visited the moon in 1972. One day, after a lunar walk, Schmitt accidentally breathed in some of the abundant moon dust that he and his commander had tracked back in to the Challenger living quarters. For a full day, Schmitt suffered from what he described as “lunar hay fever.” His eyes watered, his throat throbbed, and he broke into a sneezing fit. No, Schmitt wasn’t allergic to the moon. NASA scientists … Read more