Academic Secondary School Gliwice-Silesia Poland 15 years old, 14 years old 11 / 2 English Moon
Our project consists of two stages:
1) Transporting construction workers, materials and tools to the building site on the Moon. Humans are necessary to operate machines and supervise specialized robots in their work. They will live inside the spaceship on which they arrived, as the base is not going to be inhabitable yet at that moment. Once the base is properly enclosed, they will also take special care of the first plants of its inner ecosystem. The crew is going to rotate every 6 months and its size is going to be proportional to the work planned for the corresponding time period.
2) As soon as the base is safe to live inside, 6 astronauts will be there at all times to sustain it and conduct research. Half of the team is going to get switched with other employees waiting on the Earth every 3 months. Additional resources like water and equipment will also get delivered along with the new crew members.
We would like to build our base in the northern part of the Moon, close to the Challis crater.
All of the materials will be brought from the Earth. Part of the work may be done by robots powered by artificial intelligence.
The materials which make up the station stop the cosmic radiation from entering in dangerous doses. Also glass cannot be used because it is not durable enough to resist the difference of pressures of the artificial atmosphere inside the base and the nearly vacuum conditions outside.
Our Moon Camp project aims to conduct research about the Moon and find gradually better solutions for inhabiting it. With the population growing, some day we will eventually be forced to move to other planets and that research is the only way to find comfortable solutions for people’s lives outside the Earth.
Water will be transported to the station along with crew members in large volumes and kept in a tank. To minimize its loss, it is going to be recycled to a great extent by filtering and by collecting excess moisture from the air. Furthermore, ice deposits can be utilized as they can be found near the poles.
Food can also be brought to the Moon on a spaceship, but the main food source consists of the plants grown inside the base.
Electrical energy, necessary to operate the station, is going to be generated by a nuclear power plant. That way we eliminate the need to store huge amounts of energy, which is the main problem of using solar panels, taking into the account that the nights are much longer on the Moon than they are on the Earth. Fuel rods will be transported from the Earth once every few flights, as nuclear reactors are able to operate for a really long time with little fuel.
Oxygen will be generated by the plants. Strong ventilation systems will be used to force air circulation and spread oxygen-rich air around the base.
