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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 26 2019, @04:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the pizza-ovens dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Moon bricks could keep the lights on and the heat up in Lunar colonies – TechCrunch

There may be no “dark side” of the Moon, but when and where it is dark, it’s dark — and stays that way for two weeks. If we’re going to have colonists up there, they’ll need to stay warm and keep the lights (among other things) on for the long lunar night. Turns out bricks made of Moon dust could be part of the solution.

Of course they will use the readily available solar power during the lunar day, and you might think that they could just charge up some batteries to last them through the night. But batteries are large and heavy — not the kind of thing you want to pack for a trip to the Moon.

How else could lunar colonies store energy? The European Space Agency partnered with Azimut Space to find out whether a sort of improvised geothermal energy solution would be feasible.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday July 26 2019, @10:35AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 26 2019, @10:35AM (#871402) Journal

    You don't want to bring batteries, cause they are to large and heavy, but you are somehow going to be build dwellings and a colony? Priorities?

    Using local material, which the Moon has. It's far easier to build structures that have lots of heat retaining walls and such than it is to build a battery factory. Not that the latter is all that hard, mind you.

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