Design a base on the Moon. The basic concept of this years Space Station Design Workshop sounds quite simple, but actually doing this is everything but easy. Doing it in only one week is just impossible, but team BLUE was up for the challenge. Beating the RED team soon became the first item of our to-do list.

And quite some base we’ve made. You have to know, a spacecraft is a complicated thing. Putting humans on it doesn’t make it any easier, neither does building it some 400 000 km away.

This is the final result. The LORETTA base is located at Shackleton 2, on a crater rim close to the lunar South Pole, where it receives sunlight almost all year long. For uninterrupted communication with Earth, we’ve put a relay antenna on the Malapert mountain range, some 150 km from Shackleton. By 2025, we have a permanent international crew of six on 180-days missions. As the future tourist brochure states, our station not only sets new standards for crew comfort, but also provides the starting point for exploration of the lunar surface, technology demonstrations for Mars and beyond, and offers enormous possibilities for innovative research.

 

A base like this doesn’t just work all by itself. To keep our dear astronauts alive and kicking, we need systems. All kinds of systems. Electrical power systems, thermal control systems, environmental control and life support systems, communication systems, but also a decent structure and protection from galactic radiation and solar flares. What we also want to know is how and when we’re going to launch all this hardware to the surface of the Moon, and last but not least how we are going to assemble the various modules of our lunar base. As you might imagine, even in 1/6 of Earth gravity, astronauts alone are not going to lift our modules off the Moon lander. We need robots for that. And big ones at that. As robotics and mobility was part of my tasks in the team, here are some more details:

For construction work, but also for exploration, science and just to keep our crew busy, I selected three main types of robots we will send to the Moon. The first bot is the big one, the heavy lifter called ATHLETE. Based on NASA prototypes, it is a giant but amazingly lightweight and flexible machine that is able to handle a huge range of terrain conditions. We are primarily using it to transport our base modules from the lander to the base site, to construct our radiation shield made up of lunar soil and to impress the other team. A lot of cool movies are hidden out there on the world wide web, and this is surely one of them:

Next to this heavy lifter, we also need an astronaut rover and a flexible small robot platform that has a workload consisting of automatic base inspection, upkeeping and maintenance, precision work and scientific research with a range of up to 50 km away from the Shackleton 2 site.

The LORETTA concept has at the end won the competition with a small margin. Because of the very different locations (on the poles vs. on the equator) of the BLUE and the RED bases, some systems were hardly comparable and basically, both designs were well thought-through. All that comes at a price though, not only in euros, but most of all in lack of sleep.

It was really an intense week. Meeting thirty people literally coming from all over the world, discussing, imagining, designing, laughing and partying together day and night. It was an amazing experience, a hands-on space systems engineering adventure, an exercise in cryptic acronyms, an Earth-based test of human endurance, and most of all, it was great, great fun. A big thank you to the SSDW staff and the workshop sponsors. Looking at the Moon will never be the same again.