Lunar Living Studied

Preparing to establish a lunar base sometime near 2020, NASA is studying how to establish a long-term human presence.

Lunar dust poses one problem. Apollo astronauts found the dust got in everything; in the low gravity environment, it didn't settle immediately. For a crew living at a lunar base for six months, dust inhaled could be a real health concern. NASA is looking at a few ways to keep dust down, including enclosed lunar surface vehicles and surface suits that never come into the main living space of the base.

Radiation from space poses another danger. The simplest solution to a large part of that problem might be to establish the base underground, using the solid rock above to block the radiation. A variant of that approach would be to establish the base in a giant lunar lava tube. There, huge caverns already exist under rock, waiting to be occupied.