I get a lot of time to think at my job. I'm often driving for 2-3 hours a day so there's a lot of conversations that involve only me...

Anyhow, today I was thinking about the moon and Mars, and how we could get a base or something on either. I mostly thought about the moon, and setting up shop there. Seems to me that one of the first hurdles would be finding a way to secure yourself to the surface. At 1/6th Earth gravity, you would have to have something weigh 600 lbs here on Earth to be able to act as a 100 lb weight would for the purposes of exerting force to drill into the ground. That's kind of a big deal really when you think about it. I mean consider a jackhammer. To use a jackhammer, generally you would need to be over 100 lbs. Can you imagine a 10 year old boy trying to use one of those things?

So what are the options? Well, I think that you would probably be best off using a slow, incremental drilling process. (How fast can you go? With no atmosphere, can you effectively dissipate heat?) Once you get down, then maybe you could sink some kind of anchor. Can you use concrete up there? Or maybe just an expanding cement? I was thinking about maybe a hollow anchor that you then put an expansion spike into, sort of like you would use for anchoring a screw into concrete.

Ok, so presuming you could get a drill, a really big weight to hold it down, and a source of power (maybe a big solar collector) then the next problem would be creating a shield to protect our people and equipment from space-borne radiation.

I figure that since there's almost no gravity, you could make a pretty dense wall out of moon dust/dirt fairly easily. Since there's not much weight to hold back, you might even be able to use something like plexiglass or fiberglass to act as a skin. Then you just scoop up a buncha dirt into the shell and maybe compact it?

Lastly, you would need to spray or construct an airtight interior to use. Once all that is done, you could establish a nearly self-sustaining system there.

Just random thoughts.

Yep, I''m making it again. Probably not the last time, knowing me. This new iteration of the page is based on the Joomla content management system. Pretty slick, actually. And free, which is always a good thing in my book.

Anyhow, I plan to use this as sort of a personal repository of knowledge and such, so the articles will pretty much just be written for myself, and if other folks like it, well that''s just fine with me.