The Problem with the Next Moon Mission

I worked on further developments of the SPIcER system, mainly exploring ways to prevent dielectric breakdown between electrodes at higher voltages, and am very familiar with the materials science aspects of the tech. AMA!

Also, I'm amazed and super happy to see a video on the subject on this great channel, even more so well informed and presented :) Congrats and cheers!

“ I hate dust, its coarse, and rough, and it gets everywhere.” - NASA probably

I love the astronauts instinctively trying to blow dust off the equipment

This is low key a huge reason why a mars mission is also extremely risky. The silica fines on the surface would absolutely destroy the lungs of the explorers, tracked into their habitats via the airlocks, and getting into their lungs making micro-cuts and killing them.

"Yeah I fell down" I love it.

Soldiers in the Iraq War also had problems with dust. Iraq's desert sands are as old as the Earth and are ground extremely fine. The slightest wind kicks them up, it's coarse, and it gets everywhere. Even inside air field control tents, computers were found to overheat as the sand somehow managed to get in. Soldiers said they had to clear rifles everyday regardless if they used them because there would always be sand. It'd get in your shoes, inside your pants, and so on and so forth.

Love the conversations they have lmao “I just tried to blow off the dust”

Carbon must be the most overachieving atom out there

Apollo astronauts would only have seen sunrise & sunset from lunar orbit. Those on the surface were constantly in daylight. A lunar day is about a month - the time it takes for the moon to orbit the Earth, coupled with the fact that the moon rotates at the same rate, thereby always showing (roughly) the same "face" to the Earth (due to tidal locking of its "solid" - but stretchy at that kind of scale - composition). All the surface missions occurred during the moon's 2-week (by Earth standards) daytime. The "days" of these missions were likewise only by Earth standards.

"Engineers said the moon rocks were too volatile to experiment on. Tested on 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed 'em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill." -- Cave Johnson (J.K. Simmons), Portal 2

If you were to have any permanent or long term (more than a few days) presence on the moon, you'd also need "clean rooms" that have no other feature but to ATTRACT dust particles. Think of that room as a pre-airlock when entering from the outside. Keeping dust out of the airlock and the crew areas would be critical. So, yes, (anti) dust chambers would become a definite thing.

Great job on this Engineering project! You have shown true dedication and commitment to your craft. Impressive work!

This reminds me of the time I accidentally stumbled into a Star Trek convention at a hotel I was staying in.

I highly recommend a little-known Arthur C. Clarke novel called "A Fall of Moondust". In it, Clarke postulated that if enough lunar dust (finer than talcum powder and with no moisture to make it clump) accumulated in a very large crater or basin, it could behave like a liquid, and anything solid dropped into it could sink - a fate which befalls the crew and passengers of a vehicle traveling over it just when a rare "moonquake" occurs. Even though the vehicle is designed to traverse this type of dust, it gets buried when the "quake" causes a cavity to form below the surface, and a race against time ensues to rescue to occupants. It's a brilliant "hard" sci-fi story and a suspenseful page-turner which would make an awesome movie, if said movie was faithful to the novel.

I know it's not exactly the same but the dust in southern Afghanistan is similar in consistency to moon dust. It is like a powder. We had a hell of a time keeping the aircraft electronics clean, in our helicopters. We used to do 0 g maneuvers to get the dust out of the lower consol so it could very vacuumed. And the engines got ripped up very quickly.

We were swapping them out every 2 weeks because the hot sections would get platted in glass. And the filters had to be changed out quite a bit too.

The dust repulsion system still leaves 4% behind. Add 1 more “sacrificial” layer in the form of disposable coveralls that go over the rest of the suit. Kind of like Tyvek coveralls. Put your carbon nanotubes in the coveralls. When they degrade too mich from the 4%, swap them out with a fresh set.

This was an excellent video. But one important thing was overlooked. The dust INSIDE the craters at the Moon's south pole have NEVER been exposed to sunlight or, therefore, heat. Therefore the dust in that location should be completely different from other dust on the Moon. And this is where most people want to travel, in order to find water. NASA should land an unmanned probe in one of those craters and bring some of that dust back to Earth.

I remember NASA talking about the Lunar dust being like micro sized razor blades or flint, that it got into everything, but I don't recall them saying it was this damn bad, I don't recall them showing the orbiting cloud of micro razors....no wonder we havn't gone back! As someone who worked in Construction for 4 decades, I know first hand how damaging very fine dust can be to equipment AND your lungs

"We're whalers on the moon, we carry a harpoon! Though there ain't no whales, so we tell tall tales and sing this whaling tune!"

Fantastic! Dust is often overlooked. I would've never given it a second thought, yet it's obviously a large equation of space, or any planet and moon.