Civilizing the Moon — brainstorming in Half Moon Bay this weekend

There are various motivations for establishing a human city on the moon. Some envision a lifeboat, lest disaster strike planet Earth. Some envision “charter civilizations” with experiments in better governance, a stepping stone to farther-flung off-world civilizations. For these to work, moon base alpha needs to not only be self-sufficient. It would also have to support human reproduction.

And this is when I learned something new from the NASA representative and ISS astronaut — nobody has tested mammalian reproduction in space or in lunar gravity. People tried to simulate it on Earth, but it is not a good proxy. There was a centrifuge on station but it is not big enough and it causes vibration modes when running.

So, that made me think of a quick and dirty experiment that we might want to run — “Rats in Space.” It can’t be tested on Earth (you can’t make local gravity go away), but it could easily be tested in zero-g. A small sat cylinder could spin in Low Earth Orbit to create a steady lunar-gravity environment, like a rodent-sized Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur Clarke gets the posthumous naming rights). Multi-generational reproductive studies, if wildly successful, could be verified with a simple video feed. And if fetal development and growth was hampered for some reason, it would be good to know early on.

UPDATE: I have been evangelizing the need for this for a few years now. It would be inexpensive to send impregnated guinea pigs (chosen for their longer 60-day gestation period) up with food, water and webcams to record whether a live birth occurs. If all goes well, great, we might be fine. If not, it would motivate proper research. One special need is rapid payload integration and launch to minimize time wasted in 1g while pregant. And ideally, this could be within one of the new reusable tugs, so the samples could be brought back to Earth to analyze what went wrong and to head off PETA protests (they blocked NASA’s last program to study this).