How Will We Live on the Moon? Just Ask ‘The Martian’ Author
In his new book, ‘Artemis,’ Andy Weir geeks out on how homes and cities could one day be built on the lunar surface
In his 2011 science fiction novel, The Martian, which became a blockbuster movie starring Matt Damon, Weir geeked out on the possibility of exploring the red planet. His new novel, Artemis, out Nov. 14, centers around a fictional first and only lunar city. The book’s protagonist is a smart-alecky, 20-something porter and smuggler named Jasmine Bashara, or Jazz for short, who grew up in Artemis. Weir’s rapid-fire narrative and dialogue — everyone always seems to be walking and talking — carry the action, which unfolds as a plot-twisting heist thriller.
As he did with the “science the sh** out of this” details in The Martian, Weir went to great lengths to conceive real structures and residences on the moon. In other words, if you were going to live on the moon, this is how you would — or, as Weir says, will — do it. “There’s no fudging,” he says. We caught up with Weir over the phone last week from his home in Mountain View, California (where NASA’s Ames Research Center is located), to talk about how he conceived the memorable future city of Artemis.
Artemis takes place toward the end of the 21st century. By then, Weir imagines, the commercial space industry will have dramatically reduced the cost of traveling to the moon. In this conceived future, tourism is the main attraction. Want to spend a week on a cruise ship in space; then two weeks exploring a lunar city, visiting the site of the Apollo 11 landing and gazing up at Earth; then another week on the return cruise flight? That’s achievable for just $70,000. “People would happily take out a second mortgage on their home to spend a month in space,” Weir says.
The author, who spent 20 years as a software engineer and is a longtime hobbyist of relativistic physics, orbital mechanics and the history of manned spaceflight, did an extensive economic analysis in 2015 to figure out how much it would cost per gram (less than four-hundredths of an ounce) of cargo shipped to the moon: 6 grams for every dollar. That conversion would make the shipment of building materials to the lunar surface unreasonably expensive. But if you could capitalize on a resource already present on the moon, then it would be much more feasible.
And that’s what Weir focused on. Spend about $5 million (in 2015 dollars) to buy and transport two 15-metric-ton nuclear reactors to the moon, and you can have infinite energy to start smelting. That’s right — smelting, a process of extracting metal through heating and melting.
There are pockets on the lunar surface covered in anorthite, a mineral composed of calcium, silicon, aluminum and oxygen. These become most handy on the moon. Refine those elements out, and you have an abundance of aluminum, perfect for building durable structures, which can then be filled with the extracted oxygen.
“You don’t need to dig it up like on Earth,” Weir says. “The ore is just sitting on the surface. You just have to go pick it up.”
What Would You Live In?
In Weir’s novel, the whole fictitious city gets built out of aluminum. With spheres being the most efficient pressure vessel to hold oxygen, geodesic domes called “bubbles” become the structures that make up Artemis, population 2,000. Half of each sphere lies underground to help hold in air while minimizing structural materials.
The bubbles are named after famous astronauts. Armstrong, a bubble that’s 100 meters (328 feet) in diameter, is the first on the moon, at the center of the city. The rest of the bubbles are 200 meters across.
Weir’s domes are double-hulled, with an outer layer of 6 centimeters (2⅓ inches) of aluminum followed by 1 meter (39 inches) of ground-up lunar rock, then another 6 centimeters of aluminum.
The ground-up rock serves several purposes, Weir says. First, if the outer aluminum hull is breached, there’s a buffer of rock and then another hull. So breaching one hull doesn’t spell death for the people inside.
Second, the rock layer provides much-needed insulation. “The outside temperature of the moon during lunar daytime is like over 100 degrees Celsius — over the boiling point of water,” Weir says. “During lunar night, it’s minus 180 degrees Celsius. That’s colder than deep-freezer cold. This is because, unlike Earth, there’s no atmosphere to regulate the temperature. The 1 meter of sand eliminates all of that nonsense.”
Weir goes on to say that he “did the math once,” and it would take thousands of years of constant daylight to move the temperature inside Artemis by 1 degree. Furthermore, the rock layer protects occupants from radiation, which gets blocked here on Earth by our atmosphere and magnetic field.
And finally, the sand barrier protects Artemis from physical trauma — not from meteorites or engineering failures, Weir says, but from people inside making mistakes. “Some guy who accidentally pointed the rivet gun in the wrong direction can’t accidentally kill everyone in the city,” he says. “It’s impossible to breach both hulls in one event. Not even a howitzer or other military armament could get through both hulls in a single shot.”
Inside Weir’s structures, you’ll find floors and other hard surfaces constructed of that abundant aluminum. What’s more, Artemisians can make as much glass as they want. Remember the smelting process and the elements it yields? “Silicon plus oxygen equals glass,” Weir says. So windows and even glass flatware and containers abound.
Silicon chips wouldn’t be practical, he says, because the facilities needed to produce those chips would be huge (real estate is expensive) and because the weight of the chips is such that they’d be inexpensive to import. “Anything light is not worth doing,” Weir says. “An iPhone weighs about 100 grams. So it’d cost you about $18 to ship to the moon. It’s not worth making a manufacturing facility to save on transportation cost.”
Would There Be Architects and Designers on the Moon?
Furniture inside the homes, such as sofas, are aluminum frames covered in cushions and fabric that were imported to the planet. You might be wondering whether architects and interior decorators are available for hire on Artemis. “Of course,” Weir says. “There’s a lot of multibillionaires in Artemis. They’re not going to be putting their own wallpaper up.”
Daily Life
Due to the high cost of real estate on the moon, homes there would be much smaller than what you’d typically find on Earth. “It’s like living in space-efficient apartments in Tokyo,” Weir says. In his novel, most residents don’t have their own bathrooms unless they’re in the middle or upper-middle class. There’s not enough space to put bathrooms everywhere. Instead there are communal bathrooms down the hall.
And most residents certainly don’t have a kitchen. That’s not because of space, but because of strict fire codes. Artemis is made up of pressure vessels, like a submarine, so fires can be disastrous. “On Earth, you can go outside of a burning building,” Weir says. “In Artemis, you’re trapped in a pressure vessel with smoke and flames.”
That’s why residents aren’t allowed to have anything flammable or anything that can get hot enough to start a fire. So, no lighters and absolutely no smoking. “You can have a 500-watt microwave, but you can’t have an oven,” he says. Those who can afford a kitchen must build it in a separate fireproof room, which also drives up the cost.
And it’s important to remember that gravity on the moon is one-sixth that on Earth, so expect a lot of graceful hopping around. (Weir sporadically reminds readers of this fact, but at times it can be jarring, such as when one of the main characters, Trond, goes to fetch tea for guests by vaulting over the back of a couch. “Not as exciting as it sounds,” Weir writes. “Remember the gravity here.”
What Will You Eat?
Considering the economics and shipping costs, importing food to the moon would be pricey. “Humans eat about 500 grams a day,” Weir says. (On the moon, that would be 500 grams of dehydrated food that would get rehydrated there.) “That’s $100 per day just to transport the food, plus the actual price of the food.”
Weir’s hero in The Martian, Mark Watney, memorably grew potatoes using his own body waste in his living room on Mars. Scaling that sort production of locally grown food on the moon wouldn’t work for a community of 2,000 residents. “Crops generally take a lot of area,” Weir says. “You don’t have that.”
What you do have is yummy algae — chlorella algae to be specific. Yes, it’s green. And yes, it’s called “gunk” on Artemis. “But it’s really nutritiously good for humans,” Weir says. “It meets all the requirements. You can do cool stuff with a vat of this stuff. You can adjust the amount of light it gets to produce more protein or more sugar, so you can fine-tune it to be balanced to the human diet. It takes very little time to create a lot of it.”
You can buy imported flavoring extracts to add to your gunk, such as chicken soup flavor or a variety of “invented unique flavors,” Weir says, such as the popular Myrtle Goldstein’s Formulation #3. Weir leaves it to the reader’s imagination as to what the latter might taste like.
This diagram from the book shows a layout of the visitor center near the Apollo 11 moon landing. As Weir points out, you can’t really have a thriving city without tourism. That’s what drives the economy on Artemis. Why else go to the moon? Not for the gunk, obviously.
Weir, shown here, says he had a lot of the math and details of colonizing the moon already present in his mental hard drive space. “I’m a space dork; this is my thing,” he says. “You’re knowledgeable in the things you’re interested in. If you’re a gear head, you know about cars. I’m a space head.”
Weir did have to crunch numbers and research the process of smelting anorthite. But it holds up, he says. He’s quick to point out that he didn’t come up with anything a real scientist wouldn’t have already thought of. “NASA engineers will not look at my book and say, ‘We haven’t thought of this,’” he says.
As for the future, and all the talk about colonizing Mars (pay attention, Elon Musk), Weir says he thinks we will have permanent settlements on the moon long before Mars. “The moon is so much easier to get to.”
Why does Weir love the idea of colonizing the moon and Mars so much? Not why you might think. “There’s no compelling reason to go to the moon or space,” he says. “I often hear arguments that we invent stuff along the way, such as ramen and pacemakers and Velcro and Teflon. That there’s a secondary effect that helps out humanity. But if you took the money that goes into a space mission and put it into product research, you could invent more stuff.
“My argument for space is that the better our space technology gets, the cheaper it’ll get. Once it gets to a point where the middle-class person can get into space and afford it, then you will have a legitimate space industry, like the birth of the airline industry. It will be this new multitrillion-dollar industry that is good for everybody — more jobs and technology and disruptive in a positive way. Like the tech boom, there will be a space boom. But you can’t get there until you develop the technology.”
Tell us: Would you like to take a trip to the moon? How long would you want to stay there?
More
World of Design: A Tokyo Exhibit Experiments With the Future of ‘Home’
So Your Style Is: Sci-Fi Past and Future
Back to the Future of the House
Moon murals for earthly homes
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
Follow Us!