AS permanent residency on the Moon becomes increasingly feasible, engineers are looking to overcome one of the celestial body’s biggest challenges.
Agencies like Nasa are eyeing future lunar excursions, with the even more ambitious goal of maintaining a continuous human presence on the Moon.
Before any of this can occur, researchers must address the issue of lunar nights.
The Odysseus lander – the first U.S. spacecraft on the moon in five decades – met a grim end earlier this year after its solar panels failed to power the robot back to life.
And the darkness will be all the more punishing when humans spend extended periods of time on the Moon.
The Moon’s day-night cycle is roughly 14 Earth days long, consisting of 14 days followed by 14 nights.
Two Earth weeks of darkness would weigh heavily on astronauts’ circadian rhythms, the 24-hour biological cycles that impact appetite and alertness.
The nights are also accompanied by a dramatic drop in temperature, plummeting to around -208°F (-133°C) and dropping even lower inside craters.
Now Honeybee Robotics, a space tech company, has proposed a solution in the form of huge, solar-powered streetlights.
They would stand at 330 feet tall, dwarfing the Statue of Liberty.
The company showcased its lofty goals in a promotional video uploaded to YouTube last week.
Honeybee is best known as the child of a powerful family. It was acquired in 2022 by Blue Origin, the aerospace company headed by Microsoft founder Jeff Bezos.
Their latest project is dubbed Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution – LUNARSABER for short.
In addition to Bezos’ blessing, the company has secured funded from the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
It is one of 14 projects selected for DARPA’s 10-Year Lunar Architecture Capability Study, which aims to gather information about energy and communications infrastructure on the Moon.
The towering lamps are designed to be sustainable, as they must make do with limited resources in space.
They will store solar energy during the day and ignite the Moon’s face once constant darkness falls.
Engineers have struggled to decide how to erect structures on the Moon, as it has proven difficult to lug building materials into space.
However, each lamppost is designed to rise out of its own base, effectively building itself.
This means a spacecraft would only have to transport the base onto the moon – no construction needed.
The base of each tower would also contain power adapters to charge spacecrafts or other infrastructure.
And the aspirations don’t stop there. Honeybee envisions a network of streetlights across the lunar surface that could form the Moon’s first power grid.
“If we are able to provide power, communications, and thermal management as the base necessities, it minimizes the cost it would take to set up a base on the Moon,” principal investigator Vishnu Sanigepalli explained.
The company hopes to clear a path for a permanent human presence on the Earth‘s only natural satellite.
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