Our camp is made up of four aerodynamic buildings. Three of those buildings will have bedrooms, with an air regulation system below. On top of the main building, there will be a greenhouse and the kitchen will be located on the ground floor with an ice mine underneath. The kitchen will have a gravity dome, so that astronauts can cook. Our camp will also have a seed bank outside to store and study seeds brought from Earth.

Shackleton crater

We chose the Shackleton crater, because this crater contains water ice. If we extract and heat it, we make water. Because we will be living in a crater, we will be protected against meteorites, lunar and space debris.

We plan to use moon rocks, carbonized hydrogen ice, silicon, aluminium and iron. It has to be a streamlined structure so that if some strong winds come, it won’t collapse: a dome on top and a cylinder on the bottom. We will use aluminium for the structural layer. To build it we will take a 3D printer to melt the material and shape it. We will use carbonized hydrogen ice as the main resource for our air conditioning system.

The Shackleton crater has ice underground. When we heat it up, we turn it into water. We should also take some water reserves in case something happens. We could also “recycle” the water.

We bring the seeds from the Earth and make a chamber to produce food from them. With ultraviolet rays, we can make the plants grow. We put in soil and seeds, and turn on the dome to make the plants grow.

We will use solar panels located on Mare Oriental and Jsaev Crater and to produce energy and store it in fuel cells. The solar panels will be connected to our camp by roads where robots will pass and bring us the fuel cells full charged.

On the moon, the soil has oxygen. We will heat the regolith, filter it and store the water. We will also bring some oxygen reserves from Earth.

For protection against meteors and space debris, we will take advantage of our location in the crater. In addition to that, we will have a dome protecting us from radiation.

An astronaut who was going to live in our colony, would first have to get used to the rules of the colony as well as understand how its management and maintenance works. During this phase, he or she would accompany the several resident astronauts during the day, learning how to extract water, doing research, as well as maintaining the greenhouse and other infrastructure of the colony.