Maybe in your lifetime, people will live on the Moon and then Mars

By Debra Kamin

The Moon is a magnet, and it is pulling us back. Half a century ago, the astronauts of Apollo 17 spent three days on that pockmarked orb. For 75 hours, the astronauts moonwalked in their spacesuits and rode in a lunar rover, with humanity watching on television sets 240,000 miles away. The Apollo programme was shuttered after they splashed back down to the Pacific Ocean in December 1972, and since then, the Moon has hung, uncharted and empty, a siren in the sky.

Nasa is now plotting a return. This time around, the stay will be long-term. To make it happen, Nasa is going to build houses on the moon — ones that can be used not just by astronauts but ordinary civilians as well. They believe that by 2040, Americans will have their first subdivision in space. Living on Mars isn’t far behind. Some in the scientific community say Nasa’s timeline is overly ambitious, particularly before a proven success with a new lunar landing. But all seven Nasa scientists interviewed for this article said that a 2040 goal for lunar structures is attainable if the agency can continue to hit their benchmarks.
 

The US space agency will blast a 3D printer up to the moon and then build structures, layer by additive layer, out of a specialised lunar concrete created from the rock chips, mineral fragments and dust that sits on the top layer of the moon’s cratered surface and billows in poisonous clouds whenever disturbed — a moonshot of a plan made possible through new technology and partnerships with universities and private companies.
 

Niki Werkheiser, NASA’s director of technology maturation, said: “It feels like it was inevitable that we would get here”. Werkheiser guides the creation of new programmes, machinery and robotics for future space missions. Nasa is more open than ever before to partnering with academics and industry leaders, which has made the playing field much wider than it was in the days of the Apollo missions, Werkheiser said.
 

Turning a problem into a solution
 

Among the many obstacles of taking up residence on the moon is the dust — fine powder so abrasive it can cut like glass. It swirls in noxious plumes and is toxic when inhaled. But four years ago, Raymond Clinton Jr, deputy director of the science and technology office at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, pulled out a whiteboard to sketch the idea of houses, roads and landing pads. The dust is a problem, yes. But it could also be the solution.
 

If homes on earth could be successfully 3D printed from soil made from the minerals found here, he thought, homes on the moon could be printed from the soil up there, where temperatures can swing up to 600 degrees and a vicious combination of radiation and micrometeorites pose a risk to both buildings and bodies. Nasa is calling its return to the moon Artemis, named after the twin sister of Apollo. Last November, Artemis I, the first of five planned moon missions, blasted off from Kennedy Space Center with only robots on board, circled the moon and returned safely to earth. Artemis II, which will carry four human crew members, including the first woman and the first Black person in history, on a 10-day flight around the same path, is scheduled for November 2024. That mission will be followed up one year later by Artemis III, when humans will land on the lunar surface. Two more crewed missions are planned before the end of the decade. Clinton, 71, said he knows that average Americans may not be living on the moon during his lifetime, but for those just a few decades younger than him, it’s a real possibility. “I wish I would be around to see it,” he said.
 

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