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If Nasa makes good on its promise, when astronauts land on the moon again in about 2020 they won't just walk around, they'll camp out for days or even weeks, eventually constructing a permanent moon base.
To do that they'll need a shelter from the hazards of radiation, 315C temperature swings and the occasional pebble flying by at 27,500km/h .
A small United States company recently unveiled an early prototype - a garage-sized inflatable building.
Over the next few days, engineers at ILC Dover will deflate it and ship it to Antarctica, where it will be tested under 160 km/h winds and temperatures of - 51C.
But that's mild compared to the moon. "It's a rather nasty place," said planetary scientist Bruce Betts.
Because the moon is well beyond Earth's protective magnetic field, you get bombarded by deadly particle and light radiation from the sun and from deep space, said Betts, who works for the Planetary Society in California.
Heat is also a danger since a given part of the moon gets about 14 earth days straight of sunlight and then 14 of darkness.
"The sun could really cook you," Betts said.
And of course there's no air, which is not just essential for breathing but also insulates us earthlings by diffusing heat.
But electrical engineer Craig Scheir and his colleagues at ILC Dover, in Delaware, have some experience designing around the hazards of space. The 380-employee company is actually about 16km South of Dover, in the small, unassuming town of Frederica.
The plain front lobby boasts just one exceptional feature - an original Apollo space suit worn by John Young. Scheir, who's worked for the company for 14 years, said ILC Dover made all the space suits from the early moon missions to today.
Scheir also helped design the air bags that wowed the world when they cushioned the landing of the 1996 Mars Pathfinder mission. The company makes gas masks and other military equipment, and blimps.
In considering the problem of shelter on the moon, the ILC Dover engineers decided on a sort of inflatable hut made from urethane. Over the last few months they built a garage-sized prototype for Nasa engineers to inspect.
The upside of a blow-up house on the moon is it's relatively easy to ship and set up. The downside would be the potential for leakage, but Scheir said the cool blue half-cylinder with its cute igloo-style entryway is tougher than it looks.
It boasts two layers of insulation in addition to an inner skin, an outer inflatable layer, an inner inflatable layer and a liner. Sandwiched between are sensors to detect weakness, tears or changes in air pressure.
Once the habitat is set up at Antarctica's McMurdo station, Scheir and other engineers will test it against conditions there.
What they learn should help them make a version of the structure that's spaceworthy, he said, and the National Science Foundation is also eyeing the design for use by Antarctic scientists and explorers down there.
On the moon, stray pebbles and sand grains that create shooting stars when they collide with Earth's atmosphere hit like tiny bullets because the moon has no atmosphere to burn them up.
If Nasa chooses this concept, Scheir said, ILC might eventually include a kind of self-healing capability. They would use what's called bio-mimetics - engineering that imitates the biological world - perhaps with an embedded gel that would automatically coagulate around a cut or puncture and create an artificial scab.
Over the last several days, Nasa engineers Todd Hong and Scott Hafermalz were installing sensors to monitor temperature, pressure and other critical variables. They plan to spend several weeks at McMurdo Station in January and train a crew to monitor it over the next year.
Nasa's Hong said they hadn't specified what the Antarctic crew might use the structure for - it might be a meeting room, he suggested. "We'll be watching them from Houston," said Hong. The important thing was that the Antarctic crew follow instructions for monitoring it.
The structure folds up into two sections that weigh about 180kg each, which is heavy for a backpack but light for space travel. Nasa's plan to build an outpost on the moon represents just a first step toward sending astronauts to Mars, which is yet another factor of 100 times farther.
If these plans keep going forward, the engineers in Frederica will get many chances to design gear that no one has designed before.
